Contextualizing local landscape initiatives in global change: a scenario study for the high forest zone, Ghana

Sarah Wolff,Peter H Verburg,Johan Meijer,Catharina J E Schulp

doi:10.1007/s10113-020-01701-x

Abstract

Integrated landscape management (ILM) has received increased interest to reconcile multiple conflicting demands on a landscape scale. ILM aims at addressing major interconnected global challenges, such as poverty, food security, deforestation, and climate change. A principal element of ILM is the consideration of multiple scales, harmonizing local-level needs and ambitions with those that derive from outside the landscape. ILM initiatives are most often initiated by local actors focusing on local priorities, thereby insufficiently realizing that the landscape is embedded in a wider macroeconomic and societal context. We contextualize a landscape initiative located in the high forest zone of southern Ghana, focusing on global socioeconomic and political developments that are expected to have an influence on the region. We built two “sustainability” scenarios for the period between 2015 and 2030, reflecting the demands and ambitions of local stakeholders (bottom-up) and of global environmental policy (top-down) for the region. We find that global climate and cocoa production priorities could induce synergies between food production, biodiversity conservation, and climate change mitigation at the scale of the case study region but could come at the cost of mixed forest systems that play an important role in livelihoods on the landscape scale. Land change scenarios can play a critical role in assessing and visualizing such interactions and provide a platform for discussion and negotiation on how to integrate different objectives in the design of landscape initiatives.

Highlights

Land use change (LUC) is driven by demands that operate at multiple spatial scales
Land system changes in square kilometers between 2015 and 2030 in the Integrated landscape management (ILM) and global sustainability scenario (GS) scenario can be seen in Fig. 9 of the Appendix
The comparison between scenarios suggests that global conservation priorities and local land use ambitions, even though they both aim at a sustainable future, can result in different local land system architectures with consequences for food production, forest biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, and urbanization

Summary

Introduction

Land use change (LUC) is driven by demands that operate at multiple spatial scales. In an increasingly interconnected world, decisions on one spatial scale can have effects on other spatial scales (Meyfroidt et al 2013), leading to feedbacks on land use decisions and trade-offs for the well-being of different societal groups. While the demand for these ES is spread all over the globe (Serna-Chavez et al 2014; Eitelberg et al 2016; Fuchs et al 2017), the supply is concentrated in regions that host sufficient ES to meet these global demands. As a consequence, those regions experience an expansion of agriculture, as well as large-scale land acquisitions by foreign governments, companies, or individuals (Nolte et al 2016)

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