Indicators of sustainable land use: Concepts for the analysis of society-nature interrelations and implications for sustainable development

Session: Environmental Management, Sustainability and Development Sustainable development aims at shaping the socio-economic behavior towards nature in ways that guarantee the preservation of the life-supporting natural systems for future generations. Moreover, it seeks to achieve some kind of ?global justice" with respect to the distribution of natural resources. Steps towards sustainability require fundamental changes in the prevailing production and consumption patterns and lifestyles in the industrial centers of the world. These changes will be influenced by framework conditions set by economic and environmental policy. Indicators may help to understand and describe developments too complex to be grasped as a whole. They make phenomena or trends visible and may be seen as "empirical models of reality". Indicators can support economic and environmental policy by contributing to a simplification and quantification of complex environmental problems. The proposed contribution will analyze the "empirical models" indicator systems put forward recently, e.g. by the World Resources Institute and Eurostat and the "ecological footprint / sustainable process index" concept of Wackernagel, Rees and Narodoslawsky. It will then propose a model which relies on two concepts for the interaction of societies with their natural environment: 1 / Socio-economic metabolism, i.e. the material and energy flows between socio-economic systems and their natural environment. 2 / The colonization of nature, i.e. the conundrum of deliberate interventions into natural systems aimed at their "improvement" with respect to socio-economic goals. These concepts are used to develop "pressure indicators", i.e. indicators which describe socio-economic processes which are highly likely to have environmentally detrimental consequences. These pressure indicators may be used to analyze if current socio-economic trends are directed towards sustainable development. These environmental indicators can be linked to economic actors (economic sectors or activities) as well as to economic indicators, such as the system of national accounts (SNA). They may thus support economic and environmental policy making. Together with "state indicators" which describe socio-economic as well as natural "stocks" (e.g. biodiversity, environmental quality, material infrastructure etc.) and so-called "response indicators" which trace policy measures aimed at alleviating environmental problems, pressure indicators can be used to develop comprehensive systems of sustainability indicators. The proposed contribution will focus on the regional / spatial aspects of such indicator systems. It will draw from the on-going research project "Colonizing Landscapes - Indicators of Sustainable Land Use" in the framework of the Austrian research program "Sustainable Development of Cultural Landscapes". Keywords: Indicators, land use, sustainability, pressures on the environment, economic activities, physical economy, colonization of nature, socio-economic metabolism

Competition for land: A sociometabolic perspective

AbstractPossible negative effects of increased competition for land include pressures on biodiversity, rising food prices and GHG emissions. However, neoclassical economists often highlight positive aspects of competition, e.g. increased efficiency and innovation. Competition for land occurs when several agents demand the same good or service produced from a limited area. It implies that when one agent acquires scarce resources from land, less resource is available for competing agents. The resource competed for is often not land but rather its function for biomass production, which may be supplanted by other inputs that raise yields. Increased competition may stimulate efficiency but negative environmental effects are likely in the absence of appropriate regulations. Competition between affluent countries with poor people in subsistence economies likely results in adverse social and development outcomes if not mitigated through effective policies. The socioecological metabolism approach is a framework to analyze land-related limits and functions in particular with respect to production and consumption of biomass and carbon sequestration. It can generate databases that consistently link land used with biomass flows which are useful in understanding interlinkages between different products and services and thereby help to analyze systemic feedbacks in the global land system

Sozial-ökologische Konzepte, Modelle und Indikatoren nachhaltiger Entwicklung. Trends im Ressourcenverbrauch in Österreich

Schon jetzt verbraucht die Menschheit in einem Jahr etwa so viele Ressourcen, wie die Biosphäre in 1,2 Jahren produzieren kann. Mit anderen Worten: Die Menschheit verbraucht etwa 20 % mehr Ressourcen, als global nachhaltig wäre. Für die nächsten Jahrzehnte wird aber weltweit ein erhebliches Bevölkerungswachstum auf 9-11 Milliarden Menschen im Jahr 2050 vorausgesagt. Zudem lebt ein erheblicher Teil der Menschheit in Armut, Hunger und Elend – sozial und ökonomisch unhaltbare Zustände, deren Beseitigung jedenfalls neben beträchtlichen finanziellen Mitteln auch erhebliche Mengen an natürlichen Ressourcen verschlingen wird. Der Beitrag geht einerseits auf die Konzepte „gesellschaftlicher Stoffwechsel“ und „Kolonisierung“ ein und zeigt andererseits Trends im Ressourcenverbrauch Österreichs vor allem im Hinblick auf den Inlandskonsum von Materialien und Energie sowie auf die dafür nötige Flächeninanspruchnahme auf.Nachhaltigkeit, Interaktionsmodell, Ressourcenverbrauch, Entkopplung, Landnutzung

Integrating knowledge from social and natural sciences for biodiversity management: The asymmetric information trap

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Rapid growth in agricultural trade: effects on global area efficiency and the role of management

Cropland is crucial for supplying humans with biomass products, above all, food. Globalization has led to soaring volumes of international trade, resulting in strongly increasing distances between the locations where land use takes place and where the products are consumed. Based on a dataset that allows tracing the flows of almost 450 crop and livestock products and consistently allocating them to cropland areas in over 200 nations, we analyze this rapidly growing spatial disconnect between production and consumption for the period from 1986 to 2009. At the global level, land for export production grew rapidly (by about 100 Mha), while land supplying crops for direct domestic use remained virtually unchanged. We show that international trade on average flows from high-yield to low-yield regions: compared to a hypothetical no-trade counterfactual that assumes equal consumption and yield levels, trade lowered global cropland demand by almost 90 Mha in 2008 (3-year mean). An analysis using yield gap data (which quantify the distance of prevailing yields to those attainable through the best currently available production techniques) revealed that differences in land management and in natural endowments contribute almost equally to the yield differences between exporting and importing nations. A comparison of the effect of yield differences between exporting and importing regions with the potential of closing yield gaps suggests that increasing yields holds greater potentials for reducing future cropland demand than increasing and adjusting trade volumes based on differences in current land productivity.Peer Reviewe

Household time use, carbon footprints, and urban form : a review of the potential contributions of everyday living to the 1.5 degrees C climate target

The 1.5 °C mitigation challenge for urban areas goes far beyond decarbonizing the cities’ energy supply and needs to enable and incentivize carbon-free everyday living. Reviewing recent literature, we find that dense and mixed urban form enables lower direct emissions from mobility and housing, while income is the major driver of total household carbon footprints; importantly, these effects are not linear. The available urban infrastructure, services and societal arrangements, for example on work, all influence how households use their time, which goods and services they consume in everyday life and their subsequent carbon footprints and potential rebound effects. We conclude that changes in household consumption, time use and urban form are crucial for a 1.5 °C future. We further identify a range of issues for which a time use perspective could open up new avenues for research and policy.Peer reviewe

Exploring the biophysical option space for feeding the world without deforestation

Safeguarding the world’s remaining forests is a high priority goal. We assess the biophysical option space for feeding the world in 2050 in a hypothetical zero deforestation world. We systematically combine realistic assumptions on future yields, agricultural areas, livestock feed and human diets. For each scenario, we determine whether the supply of crop products meets the demand and whether the grazing intensity stays within plausible limits. We find that many options exist to meet the global food supply in 2050 without deforestation, even at low crop-yield levels. Within the option space, individual scenarios differ greatly in terms of biomass harvest, cropland demand and grazing intensity, depending primarily on the quantitative and qualitative aspects of human diets. Grazing constraints strongly limit the option space. Without the option to encroach into natural or semi-natural land, trade volumes will rise in scenarios with globally converging diets, thereby decreasing the food self-sufficiency of many developing regions

Beyond technology : demand-side solutions for climate change mitigation

The assessment literature on climate change solutions to date has emphasized technologies and options based on cost-effectiveness analysis. However, many solutions to climate change mitigation misalign with such analytical frameworks. Here, we examine demand-side solutions, a crucial class of mitigation options that go beyond technological specification and costbenefit analysis. To do so, we synthesize demand-side mitigation options in the urban, building, transport, and agricultural sectors. We also highlight the specific nature of demand-side solutions in the context of development. We then discuss key analytical considerations to integrate demand-side options into overarching assessments on mitigation. Such a framework would include infrastructure solutions that interact with endogenous preference formation. Both hard infrastructures, such as the built environment, and soft infrastructures, such as habits and norms, shape behavior and as a consequence offer significant potential for reducing overall energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions. We conclude that systemic infrastructural and behavioral change will likely be a necessary component of a transition to a low-carbon society

Bioenergy: how much can we expect for 2050?

Estimates of global primary bioenergy potentials in the literature span almost three orders of magnitude. We narrow that range by discussing biophysical constraints on bioenergy potentials resulting from plant growth (NPP) and its current human use. In the last 30 years, terrestrial NPP was almost constant near 54 PgC yr−1, despite massive efforts to increase yields in agriculture and forestry. The global human appropriation of terrestrial plant production has doubled in the last century. We estimate the maximum physical potential of the world\u27s total land area outside croplands, infrastructure, wilderness and denser forests to deliver bioenergy at approximately 190 EJ yr−1. These pasture lands, sparser woodlands, savannas and tundras are already used heavily for grazing and store abundant carbon; they would have to be entirely converted to bioenergy and intensive forage production to provide that amount of energy. Such a high level of bioenergy supply would roughly double the global human biomass harvest, with far-reaching effects on biodiversity, ecosystems and food supply. Identifying sustainable levels of bioenergy and finding ways to integrate bioenergy with food supply and ecological conservation goals remains a huge and pressing scientific challenge

High-resolution mapping of 33 years of material stock and population growth in Germany using Earth Observation data

Global societal material stock in buildings and infrastructure have accumulated rapidly within the last decades, along with population growth. Recently, an approach for nation-wide mapping of material stock at 10 m spatial resolution, using freely available and globally consistent Earth Observation (EO) imagery, has been introduced as an alternative to cost-intensive cadastral data or broad-scale but thematically limited nighttime light-based mapping. This study assessed the potential of EO data archives to create spatially explicit time series data of material stock dynamics and their relation to population in Germany, at a spatial resolution of 30 m. We used Landsat imagery with a change-aftereffect-trend analysis to derive yearly masks of land surface change from 1985 onward. Those served as an input to an annual reverse calculation of six material stock types and building volume-based annual gridded population, based on maps for 2018. Material stocks and population in Germany grew by 13% and 4%, respectively, showing highly variable spatial patterns. We found a minimum building stock of ca. 180 t/cap across all municipalities and growth processes characterized by sprawl. A rapid growth of stocks per capita occurred in East Germany after the reunification in 1990, with increased building activity but population decline. Possible over- or underestimations of stock growth cannot be ruled out due to methodological assumptions, requiring further research.Peer Reviewe