Global Land Use Dynamics (ÜWP) - Detailseite

Due to the situation in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the default status for this course is "taught online". The online-tool to do so is zoom, and you can reach the class through this link. In case the pandemic situation improves and room capabilities allow for teaching in full or partial presence, we will announce this during class.

The overarching goal of this class is to develop a sound understanding of the role of land use in the Earth system as a driver and outcome of global change, as well as the close linkages between land use and current key sustainability challenges, such as food security, land degradation, sustainable supply chains or climate change. During the course of the class, students will get familiar with the theoretical foundation of land systems, and a number of tools to analyze them and their dynamics in an integrated approach. Recorded online-lectures, extensive readings and in-depth class discussions form the basis of the sessions, complemented by classroom-response systems, collaborative whiteboards and breakout sessions. Nearly each week we will teach in a different format, including expert puzzles, flipped classrooms, panel debates, etc. Weekly online quizzes will help the students to recapitulate each session, and monitor their learning progress.

The suggested literature is being constantly updated or amended, depending on (a) potential changes in topics discussed in class, and (b) new publications that directly connect to the course's schedule. The list from last year's course (i.e., winter term 2020/21) is below:

Session 01 - Global Land-Use Change | Session 02 - Environmental Outcomes of land-use change

• Ellis, E.C., Kaplan, J.O., Fuller, D.Q., Vavrus, S., Klein Goldewijk, K., & Verburg, P.H. (2013). Used planet. A global history. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110, 7978–7985
• Winkler, K., Fuchs, R., Rounsevell, M., & Herold, M. (2021). Global land use changes are four times greater than previously estimated. Nature Communications, 12, 2501.

Session 03 - Past and future drivers of land-use change

• Meyfroidt, P. (2016). Approaches and terminology for causal analysis in land systems science. Journal of Land Use Science, 11, 501–522.
• Müller, D., Sun, Z., Vongvisouk, T., Pflugmacher, D., Xu, J., & Mertz, O. (2014). Regime shifts limit the predictability of land-system change. Global Environmental Change, 28, 75–83.
• Ramankutty, N., & Coomes, O.T. (2016). Land-use regime shifts. an analytical framework and agenda for future land-use research. Ecology and Society, 21.

Session 04 - Agricultural expansion

• Foley, J.A., DeFries, R., Asner, G.P., Barford, C., Bonan, G., Carpenter, S.R., Chapin, F.S., Coe, M.T., Daily, G.C., Gibbs, H.K., Helkowski, J.H., Holloway, T., Howard, E.A., Kucharik, C.J., Monfreda, C., Patz, J.A., Prentice, I.C., Ramankutty, N., & Snyder, P.K. (2005). Global consequences of land use. Science, 309, 570–574.
• le Polain de Waroux, Y., Baumann, M., Gasparri, N.I., Gavier-Pizarro, G., Godar, J., Kuemmerle, T., Müller, R., Vázquez, F., Volante, J.N., & Meyfroidt, P. (2018). Rents, Actors, and the Expansion of Commodity Frontiers in the Gran Chaco. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108, 204–225.
• Lambin, E.F., & Meyfroidt, P. (2011). Global land use change, economic globalization, and the looming land scarcity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, 3465–3472.
• Lambin, E.F. (2012). Global land availability: Malthus versus Ricardo. Global Food Security, 1, 83–87.

Session 05 - Agricultural intensification

• Kuemmerle, T., Erb, K., Meyfroidt, P., Muller, D., Verburg, P.H., Estel, S., Haberl, H., Hostert, P., Jepsen, M.R., Kastner, T., Levers, C., Lindner, M., Plutzar, C., Verkerk, P.J., van der Zanden, E. H., & Reenberg, A. (2013). Challenges and opportunities in mapping land use intensity globally. Curr Opin Environ Sustain, 5, 484–493.
• Erb, K.H., Haberl, H., Jepsen, M.R., Kuemmerle, T., Lindner, M., Muller, D., Verburg, P.H., & Reenberg, A. (2013). A conceptual framework for analysing and measuring land-use intensity. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 5, 464–470.
• York, R. (2006). Ecological Paradoxes. William Stanley Jevons and the Paperless Office. Research in Human Ecology, 13, 143–147.

Session 06 - Sustainable intensification

• Garnett, T., Appleby, M.C., Balmford, A., Bateman, I.J., Benton, T.G., Bloomer, P., Burlingame, B., Dawkins, M., Dolan, L., Fraser, D., Herrero, M., Hoffmann, I., Smith, P., Thornton, P.K., Toulmin, C., Vermeulen, S.J., & Godfray, H.C.J. (2013). Agriculture. Sustainable intensification in agriculture: premises and policies. Science (New York, N.Y.), 341, 33–34.
• Loos, J., Abson, D.J., Chappell, M.J., Hanspach, J., Mikulcak, F., Tichit, M., & Fischer, J. (2014). Putting meaning back into “sustainable intensification”. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 12, 356–361.
• Foley, J.A., Ramankutty, N., Brauman, K.A., Cassidy, E.S., Gerber, J.S., Johnston, M., Mueller, N.D., O'Connell, C., Ray, D.K., West, P.C., Balzer, C., Bennett, E.M., Carpenter, S.R., Hill, J., Monfreda, C., Polasky, S., Rockstrom, J., Sheehan, J., Siebert, S., Tilman, D., & Zaks, D.P.M. (2011). Solutions for a cultivated planet. Nature, 478, 337–342.
• Mueller, N.D., Gerber, J.S., Johnston, M., Ray, D.K., Ramankutty, N., & Foley, J.A. (2012). Closing yield gaps through nutrient and water management. Nature, 490, 254–257.

Session 07 - Forest transition

• Lambin, E.F., & Meyfroidt, P. (2010). Land-use transitions. Socio-ecological feedback versus socio-economic change. Land Use Policy, 27, 108–118.
• Meyfroidt, P., & Lambin, E.F. (2011). Global Forest Transition. Prospects for an End to Deforestation. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 36.

Session 08 - Demand-side drivers of global land-use change

• Hertel, T.W., & Baldos, U.L.C. (2016). Global Change and the Challenges of Sustainably Feeding a Growing Planet. Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht, London: Springer.
• Baldos, U.L.C., & Hertel, T.W. (2013). Looking back to move forward on model validation: insights from a global model of agricultural land use. Environmental Research Letters, 8, 34024.

Session 09 - Endogenous responses of global land-use change

• Hertel, T.W., & Baldos, U.L.C. (2016). Global Change and the Challenges of Sustainably Feeding a Growing Planet. Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht, London: Springer.

Session 10 - Livestock

• Eisler, M.C., Lee, M.R.F., Tarlton, J.F., Martin, G.B., Beddington, J., Dungait, J.A.J., Greathead, H., Liu, J., Mathew, S., Miller, H., Misselbrook, T., Murray, P., Vinod, V.K., van Saun, R., & Winter, M. (2014). Agriculture: Steps to sustainable livestock. Nature, 507, 32–34.
• Herrero, M., & Thornton, P.K. (2013). Livestock and global change: emerging issues for sustainable food systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110, 20878–20881.

Session 11 - Globalization and trade

• Online lecture by Eric Lambin, available on youtube

Session 12 - Telecouplings

• Eakin, H., DeFries, R., Kerr, S., Lambin, E.F., Liu, J., Marcotullio, P.J., Messerli, P., Reenberg, A., Rueda, X., Swaffield, S.R., Wicke, B., & Zimmerer, K. (2014). Significance of telecoupling for exploration of land-use change. In Rethinking Global Land Use in an Urban Era (pp. 141–161): MIT Press.
• Friis, C., & Nielsen, J.Ø. (2017). Land-use change in a telecoupled world: the relevance and applicability of the telecoupling framework in the case of banana plantation expansion in Laos. Ecology and Society, 22.
• Liu, J.G., Hull, V., Batistella, M., DeFries, R., Dietz, T., Fu, F., Hertel, T.W., Izaurralde, R.C., Lambin, E.F., Li, S.X., Martinelli, L.A., McConnell, W.J., Moran, E.F., Naylor, R., Ouyang, Z.Y., Polenske, K.R., Reenberg, A., Rocha, G.D., Simmons, C.S., Verburg, P.H., Vitousek, P.M., Zhang, F.S., & Zhu, C.Q. (2013). Framing Sustainability in a Telecoupled World. Ecology and Society, 18.

Session 13 - Food security and nutrition

• Alexander, P., Brown, C., Arneth, A., Finnigan, J., & Rounsevell, M.D.A. (2016). Human appropriation of land for food. The role of diet. Global Environmental Change, 41, 88–98.
• DeFries, R., Fanzo, J., Remans, R., Palm, C., Wood, S., & Anderman, T.L. (2015). Global nutrition. Metrics for land-scarce agriculture. Science (New York, N.Y.), 349, 238–240.
• Godfray, H.C.J., Beddington, J.R., Crute, I.R., Haddad, L., Lawrence, D., Muir, J.F., Pretty, J., Robinson, S., Thomas, S.M., & Toulmin, C. (2010). Food Security. The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People. Science, 327, 812–818.

Session 14 - Wicked problems and normative land system science

• Nielsen, J.Ø., Bremond, A. de, Roy Chowdhury, R., Friis, C., Metternicht, G., Meyfroidt, P., Munroe, D., Pascual, U., & Thomson, A. (2019). Toward a normative land systems science. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 38, 1–6.
• Meyfroidt, P., Roy Chowdhury, R., Bremond, A. de, Ellis, E.C., Erb, K.H., Filatova, T., Garrett, R.D., Grove, J.M., Heinimann, A., Kuemmerle, T., Kull, C.A., Lambin, E.F., Landon, Y., le Polain de Waroux, Y., Messerli, P., Müller, D., Nielsen, J.Ø., Peterson, G.D., Rodriguez García, V., Schlüter, M., Turner, B.L., & Verburg, P.H. (2018). Middle-range theories of land system change. Global Environmental Change, 53, 52–67.
• DeFries, R., & Nagendra, H. (2017). Ecosystem management as a wicked problem. Science (New York, N.Y.), 356, 265–270.
• Hulme, M. (2009). The Performance of Science. In M. Hulme (Ed.), Why We Disagree About Climate Change (pp. 72–108). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Due to the situation in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the default status for this course is "taught online". The online-tool to do so is zoom, and you can reach the class through this link. In case the pandemic situation improves and room capabilities allow for teaching in full or partial presence, we will announce this during class.

MAP (Modulabschlußprüfung): Exam