Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2011 Mar 1;108(9):3465-72.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1100480108. Epub 2011 Feb 14.

Global land use change, economic globalization, and the looming land scarcity

Eric F Lambin  1 , Patrick Meyfroidt
Affiliations

Global land use change, economic globalization, and the looming land scarcity

Eric F Lambin et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

A central challenge for sustainability is how to preserve forest ecosystems and the services that they provide us while enhancing food production. This challenge for developing countries confronts the force of economic globalization, which seeks cropland that is shrinking in availability and triggers deforestation. Four mechanisms-the displacement, rebound, cascade, and remittance effects-that are amplified by economic globalization accelerate land conversion. A few developing countries have managed a land use transition over the recent decades that simultaneously increased their forest cover and agricultural production. These countries have relied on various mixes of agricultural intensification, land use zoning, forest protection, increased reliance on imported food and wood products, the creation of off-farm jobs, foreign capital investments, and remittances. Sound policies and innovations can therefore reconcile forest preservation with food production. Globalization can be harnessed to increase land use efficiency rather than leading to uncontrolled land use expansion. To do so, land systems should be understood and modeled as open systems with large flows of goods, people, and capital that connect local land use with global-scale factors.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Key indicators of land use, population, and production for four recent forest-transition countries. Sources: ref. , excepted forest area: ref. 45. Agricultural production includes crop products and meat.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Turner BL, 2nd, Lambin EF, Reenberg A. The emergence of land change science for global environmental change and sustainability. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2007;104:20666–20671. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Gibbs HK, et al. Tropical forests were the primary sources of new agricultural land in the 1980s and 1990s. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2010;107:16732–16737. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Anderson K. Globalization's effects on world agricultural trade, 1960-2050. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2010;365:3007–3021. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2010) FAOSTAT. Available at http://faostat.fao.org. Accessed November, 2010.
    1. Chisolm M. In: The Earth as Transformed by Human Action. Turner BL 2nd, et al., editors. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press; 1990. pp. 87–101.

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources