Land use competition: Local to global trade-offs - by Patrick Meyfroidt - 19.05.2016

Original title: Land use competition for food, climate and environment: Local to global trade-offs

Land is a nexus for crucial societal and environmental challenges including food security, access to clean water and air, land degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change. These multiple stakes create increasing competition for uses of the land. Developing and implementing solutions to achieve sustainable land uses is central for human well-being, and requires in-depth understanding of complex trade-offs and synergies associated with different trajectories of land systems change.

Patrick Meyfroidt will discuss some of the major trade-offs in contemporary land systems and their inter-relations. First, how to cope with contradictory discourses about the need to increase global food production versus targeted ways to improve food security for the most food-insecure? Building on that, what are the trade-offs between expansion and intensification as ways to meet the demand for land-based agricultural and forestry products? Third, what prospects and questions do labor-intensive, agro-ecological agriculture aimed at reducing land use expansion and fossil fuel use raise about rural livelihoods and societal complexity? The conclusion will reflect on the need to navigate between local and global scales to balance these trade-offs.

Patrick Meyfroidt is a researcher at Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium. He holds a PhD in geography (2009) and a degree in sociology from UCL.

https://www.iri-thesys.org/events/lec...