Commentary: Policy challenges for global land use

Some environmental and development policies of the 1980s and 1990s were based on simplistic views on the causes and dynamics of land-use changes (Lambin et al., 2001). For example, the assumption that tropical deforestation was mainly linked to local population growth, poverty, and shifting cultivation led to a failure to address commodity-driven deforestation, which later became a dominant cause of forest conversion. The assumptions that rangelands have a fixed carrying capacity and that pastoralists overstock their rangelands, causing dryland degradation, were used to justify strategies to control and modify traditional patterns of pastoralism in sub-Saharan Africa, with negative consequences on land access and livelihoods. Since our identification, twenty years ago, of empirically-supported pathways of land-use change (Lambin et al., 2001), land system science has made major advances in its understanding of land use as coupled human-environment systems (Turner et al., 2021). This richer understanding proves essential to address current policy challenges related to land use and sustainability solutions. We briefly discuss four examples below.