Abstract
In land systems, equitably managing trade-offs between planetary boundaries and human development needs represents a grand challenge in sustainability oriented initiatives. Informing such initiatives requires knowledge about the nexus between land use, poverty, and environment. This paper presents results from Lao PDR, where we combined nationwide spatial data on land use types and the environmental state of landscapes with village-level poverty indicators. Our analysis reveals two general but contrasting trends. First, landscapes with paddy or permanent agriculture allow a greater number of people to live in less poverty but come at the price of a decrease in natural vegetation cover. Second, people practising extensive swidden agriculture and living in intact environments are often better off than people in degraded paddy or permanent agriculture. As poverty rates within different landscape types vary more than between landscape types, we cannot stipulate a land use–poverty–environment nexus. However, the distinct spatial patterns or configurations of these rates point to other important factors at play. Drawing on ethnicity as a proximate factor for endogenous development potentials and accessibility as a proximate factor for external influences, we further explore these linkages. Ethnicity is strongly related to poverty in all land use types almost independently of accessibility, implying that social distance outweighs geographic or physical distance. In turn, accessibility, almost a precondition for poverty alleviation, is mainly beneficial to ethnic majority groups and people living in paddy or permanent agriculture. These groups are able to translate improved accessibility into poverty alleviation. Our results show that the concurrence of external influences with local—highly contextual—development potentials is key to shaping outcomes of the land use–poverty–environment nexus. By addressing such leverage points, these findings help guide more effective development interventions. At the same time, they point to the need in land change science to better integrate the understanding of place-based land indicators with process-based drivers of land use change.
Highlights
In the debate about future Sustainable Development Goals, natural scientists have outlined environmental planetary boundaries delineating what they refer to as a “safe living space for humanity” [1]
In a second step we explore if the configurations of the nexus between land use, poverty, and environment are more strongly shaped by external driving forces or by local factors
We describe configurations of land use, poverty, and environment for the entire territory of Lao Peoples’ Democratic Republic (Laos), synthesizing four data sets emerging from three previous studies: 1. Landscape mosaics as characterized by land use and environmental status [46]; 2
Summary
In the debate about future Sustainable Development Goals, natural scientists have outlined environmental planetary boundaries delineating what they refer to as a “safe living space for humanity” [1]. Accepting planetary boundaries as an outer boundary for human development but combining it with social foundations as an inner boundary, they proposed a doughnut-shaped area considered to represent an “environmentally safe and socially just space for humanity to thrive in” [2] If this safe and just living space is to guide future development, any policy striving for sustainable development—be it at the local, national or even global level—will essentially need to navigate trade-offs and inherent conflicts between competing interests and claims on future development, between different sectors of the social, economic and environmental realm, and between different subsystems and scales of the earth system [3]. Sustainable development oriented research will need to reveal sustainability trade-offs across scale, time, and space, and winners and losers—and it will have to explore transformations to alternative development pathways [4,5]
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