Page 72 - FAO-IPCC Expert meeting on climate change

Appendix 01: Speakers’ summary notes
As we see from above examples, the drivers of land use changes usually do not operate in isolation but are combined in context-specific interactions, thus potentially leading to heterogeneous outcomes depending on the context. Lambin et al (2003) indicate that despite such diversity, the drivers of land use change could be classified into some generalizable patterns or typical pathways. The critical challenge is thus to identify dominant pathways and associated causes of land use changes. This is the basis, for example, for the syndrome approach, which describes typical patterns of human-environment interactions.
Implications for food security, economic and resource costs
The impacts of land use changes could be classified into environmental and socio-economic (Briassoulis 2000). Land use changes influence global climatic changes through carbon emissions or through carbon sequestration (Meyer and Turner 1996), alterations of the global water cycles, land degradation, biodiversity and habitat loss and other effects. The food security impacts of land use changes may result from reductions in the area of agricultural land through decreases in available water supplies, land degradation, urbanization, and in general, poor management of land resources. Depending on their scales, land use changes could have local, regional or global environmental and socio- economic impacts. Interconnected nature of global climate and food systems requires careful attention to the global indirect land use changes due to potential displacement of land use changes (Meyfroidt et al. 2013).
LUCCs modify the capacity of land to provide ecosystem services both in terms of the total value of ecosystem services and their composition. Often, LUCCs involve a trade-off between different ecosystem goods and services. For example, deforestation for cropland expansion may reduce the total value of ecosystem services that humans derive, but could significantly increase the provisioning goods and services, in the form of additional food and fodder production. Resulting improved food availability positively contributes to food security, but could also lead to significant carbon releases to the atmosphere thus contributing to global warming. Similarly, urbanization could expand at the expense of prime agricultural land thus potentially reducing agricultural production (d’Ampour et al. 2016); at the same time, urbanization could allow for increasing incomes, thus providing with opportunities for improved food access. Such trade-offs of different land use changes need to be studied through systems-based approaches, such as, for example, Water-Energy-Food Security Nexus (Ringler et al. 2013).
In order to minimize negative impacts of land use changes, there is a need for developing land use policies and planning that will ensure that high-value biomes, such as forests, are protected and continue to provide ecosystem services both to local and global communities. The conversion of forests into grazing lands was found to be the major driver of deforestation in the Amazon region (Nkonya et al. 2016). In Central Asia, conversion of grassland to barren lands and shrublands was found to be the major type of detrimental LUCC (Mirzabaev et al 2016), while in Sub-Saharan Africa, the conversion of grassland to cropland was the leading cause of land degradation due to LUCC (Nkonya et al. 2016). One of the major reasons for the conversion of grassland to cropland in SSA is the low livestock productivity. Strategies for addressing the conversion of grassland to cropland involve increasing livestock productivity, which may be more effective than enforcement of land use policies aimed at preventing LUCC.
Lack of integration of the total value of ecosystem services into economic decision-making frameworks remains, however, the major reason behind LUCCs that lead to the net losses of ecosystem services provided by land in many parts of the world (von Braun et al 2013). Presently, provisioning services of land, such as food, have market values, but many other supporting and regulating ecosystem services do not have market prices. The payment for ecosystem services (PES) mechanisms that saw large investments in carbon markets should be given a new impetus to address the loss of ecosystem services through land use and cover change (LUCC). However, deforestation often occurs in areas without secure tenure regimes, hence a combination of incentive and disincentive-based mechanism might be needed to effectively reduce deforestation (Börner et al. 2014, Lambin et al. 2014). Moreover, empirical evidence also shows that sustainable forest management is likely in forests managed by local communities (Poteete and Ostrom 2004). Similarly, protected areas that involve local communities in the management and who, in return, receive direct benefits have been more successful (Coad et al. 2008).
An improved understanding of the drivers and impacts of land use changes requires more interdisciplinary approaches to studying land use changes. Geography-based studies without economic frameworks integrating human behavior may lead to misleading outcomes (Irwin and Geoghegan 2001). Similarly, economics-based studies need to integrate geographical and natural science frameworks for improved spatial disaggregation and explicit modeling of land use changes (ibid.).
FAO-IPCC Expert meeting on climate change, land use and food security