Premium
Land grabbing as a driver of environmental change
Author(s) -
Lazarus Eli D
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
area
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.958
H-Index - 82
eISSN - 1475-4762
pISSN - 0004-0894
DOI - 10.1111/area.12072
Subject(s) - land grabbing , frontier , environmental change , scholarship , land use , scale (ratio) , politics , land use, land use change and forestry , environmental resource management , natural resource , natural (archaeology) , geography , natural resource economics , environmental planning , political science , climate change , economic geography , environmental science , ecology , economics , cartography , civil engineering , engineering , law , archaeology , biology , agriculture
A worldwide increase in large‐scale land acquisitions over the past decade has been described as a global land rush for access to natural resources. ‘Land grabbing’ is a dynamic of land‐use change that can enable especially rapid environmental transformations across vast spatial scales. New scholarship is beginning to address these land deals in terms of their implications for social and political systems, but exploitative land uses also leave legacies of change in physical landscapes. Historical precedents from around the world, including various examples of frontier expansion, reflect the kinds of environmental responses that modern land grabbing could induce. Insights into land grabbing as a mechanism of abrupt, large‐scale transitions in human–environmental systems is a research opportunity and a pressing grand challenge for E arth‐surface science.