Contextualizing local landscape initiatives in global change: a scenario study for the high forest zone, Ghana
- PDF / 2,405,833 Bytes
- 17 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 107 Downloads / 193 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Contextualizing local landscape initiatives in global change: a scenario study for the high forest zone, Ghana Sarah Wolff 1 & Johan Meijer 2 & Catharina J. E. Schulp 1
&
Peter H. Verburg 1,3
Received: 12 December 2019 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
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 (topdown) 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. Keywords Land use competition . West Africa . Scenarios . Cross-scale interactions . Integrated landscape initiatives . Land systems
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. Understanding the interlinkages between local and global processes and the effects of such interlinkages is thus important. Globally, the growing demand for food,
Communicated by Chinwe Ifejika Speranza Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-020-01701-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Catharina J. E. Schulp [email protected] Sarah Wolff [email protected]
1
Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1111, Amsterdam 1081 HV, The Netherlands
2
PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Bezuidenhoutseweg 30, 2594 AV The Hague, The Netherlan
Data Loading...
