Globalization and Land-Use Transitions in Latin America

Abstract

Current socioeconomic drivers of land-use change associated with globalization are producing two contrasting land-use trends in Latin America. Increasing global food demand (particularly in Southeast Asia) accelerates deforestation in areas suitable for modern agriculture (e.g., soybean), severely threatening ecosystems, such as Amazonian rain forests, dry forests, and subtropical grasslands. Additionally, in the coming decades, demand for biofuels may become an emerging threat. In contrast, high yields in modern agricultural systems and rural-urban migration coupled with remittances promote the abandonment of marginal agricultural lands, thus favoring ecosystem recovery on mountains, deserts, and areas of poor soils, while improving human well-being. The potential switch from production in traditional extensive grazing areas to intensive modern agriculture provides opportunities to significantly increase food production while sparing land for nature conservation. This combination of emerging threats and opportunities requires changes in the way the conservation of Latin American ecosystems is approached. Land-use efficiency should be analyzed beyond the local-based paradigm that drives most conservation programs, and focus on large geographic scales involving long-distance fluxes of products, information, and people in order to maximize both agricultural production and the conservation of environmental services.

Exploring the links between forest transition and landscape changes in the Mediterranean. Does forest recovery really lead to better landscape quality?

“…An alternative view instead suggests that they are not necessarily incompatible; humans may even enhance biodiversity through a historical process of land stewardship within integrated socio-ecological systems. The first view has been recently reinvigorated by a series of works on forest transitions (Grau and Aide, 2008). Given the high human social costs of the conservation strategies that stem from this approach (West et al, 2006) it seems worth revisiting it in different biomes of the world and in the light of methods and approaches from different disciplines.…”

Tipping Toward Sustainability: Emerging Pathways of Transformation

“…The private sector interest was immediate, and today, the biofuel industry is poised to become a trillion dollar operation. Little attention is being paid, particularly in the government sectors concerned with technology and the economy to the potential unanticipated consequences including, loss of land now used for subsistence agriculture and the famine associated with its loss and the biodiversity loss associated with mono-crops (Grau and Aide 2008;ETC Group 2010).…”

Reconnecting to the Biosphere

“…Addressing climate change through forest plantations, for example, may replace ecosystems targeted by the U.N. Biodiversity Convention (Lambin and Meyfroidt 2011). Similarly, promotion of biofuels can accelerate deforestation and erode the food security of impoverished nations (Grau and Aide 2008). There is lack of effective institutions at the appropriate levels and of synthetic institutions that address interactions between biogeophysical and socio-economic systems (Walker et al 2009b).…”