Jonas Ø Nielsen

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | HU Berlin · Department of Geography

The agricultural use and conversion of tropical peatlands is considered a major source of land-based greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, the protection and restoration of tropical peatlands has recently turned into an important strategy to mitigate global climate change. Little research exists that has investigated the impacts and dynamics that such cl...

Emerging research points to large greenhouse gas mitigation opportunities for activities that are focused on the preservation and maintenance of ecosystems, also known as natural climate solutions (NCS). Despite large quantifications of the potential biophysical and carbon benefits of these activities, these estimates hold large uncertainties and f...

Land use is central to addressing sustainability issues, including biodiversity conservation, climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, and sustainable energy. In this paper, we synthesize knowledge accumulated in land system science, the integrated study of terrestrial social-ecological systems, into 10 hard truths that have strong, gene...

Droughts are often suspected to increase the risk of violent conflict through agricultural production shocks, and existing studies often explore these links through meteorological proxies. In Syria, an alleged agricultural collapse caused by drought is assumed to have contributed to increased migration and the conflict outbreak in 2011. Here we use...

In land system science (LSS), the globalisation of land use is often understood via trade flows. Fewer studies have explored the power asymmetries and local resistance that shape global connections. Consequently, calls for a deeper engagement with power and agency have been made within LSS. To accommodate this, we engage the ethnographic literature...

Rural entrepreneurship has been seen by the central government of China as a key means to rural vitalization. However, research focus on the long-term developmental status of rural en-trepreneurship at local scale has been limited. According to industry types of differentiation, this research describes rural enterprises registered in the administra...

In land system science (LSS), the globalisation of land use is often understood via trade flows. Fewer studies have explored the power asymmetries and local resistance that shape global connections. Consequently, calls for a deeper engagement with power and agency have been made within LSS. To accommodate this, we engage the ethnographic literature...

The multiple environmentalities framework has been used to disentangle the diverse rationalities of governance that underpin contemporary environmental governance programmes. Often missing from such analyses is a networked and scalar dimension that can provide a basis for understanding the structural dimensions of environmental governance and the c...

In the last decades, natural fire regimes have experienced significant alterations in terms of intensity, frequency and severity in fire prone regions of the world. Modelling forest fire susceptibility has been essential in identifying areas of high risk to minimize threats to natural resources, biodiversity and life. There have been significant im...

Wildfires are serious threats to Belize’s protected areas and ecosystems. In Belize the spatial variability of wildfire susceptibility and influencing factors at a national scale are poorly understood which hinders wildfire management interventions. Hence, in this research we conducted a joint application and performance comparison of AHP (Analytic...

In the Global South, including the Sub-Saharan African city-regions, the possible future urban expansion patterns may pose a challenge towards improving environmental sustainability. Land use planning strategies and instruments for regulating urban expansion are faced with challenges, including insufficient data availability to offer insights into...

Increasing evidence—synthesized in this paper—shows that economic growth contributes to biodiversity loss via greater resource consumption and higher emissions. Nonetheless, a review of international biodiversity and sustainability policies shows that the majority advocate economic growth. Since improvements in resource use efficiency have so far n...

In the resource curse literature, resource abundance is portrayed as a threat to peace rather than an opportunity for socio-economic development. Moving away from natural resource competition and conflict, concepts like environmental peacebuilding as well as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) focus on win–win cooperation around social and enviro...

The term “sustainability” is flexible as it needs to function in many different contexts and across many issues. At the same time, this flexibility makes it difficult to assess and easy to misuse. Over the last three decades, numerous sustainability assessment tools have been developed to better define the term. In this paper, we critically address...

The term “sustainability” is flexible as it needs to function in many different contexts and across many issues. At the same time, this flexibility makes it difficult to assess and easy to misuse. Over the last three decades, numerous sustainability assessment tools have been developed to better define the term. In this paper, we critically address...

Despite the popularity of integrated conservation and development approaches to protected area management, adjacent communities increasingly face livelihood dilemmas. Yet understanding of how market processes and conservation enforcement interact to influence livelihood responses remains limited. Targeting eight villages in Nam Et-Phou Louey (NEPL)...

This paper examines the newly established mineral markets in Tanzania. These markets aim to ensure tax revenue collection and enhance the transparency of mineral trade within the artisanal and small-scale mining sector. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Geita Region, we show that the enhanced transparency facilitated by these new markets has...

In the Global South, including the Sub-Saharan African city-regions, the possible future urban expansion patterns may pose a challenge towards improving environmental sustainability. Land use planning strategies and instruments for regulating urban expansion are faced with challenges, including insufficient data availability to offer insights into...

Land use planning as strategic instruments to guide urban dynamics faces particular challenges in the Global South, including Sub-Saharan Africa, where urgent interventions are required to improve urban and environmental sustainability. This study investigated and identified key challenges of land use planning and its environmental assessments to i...

Centralized state governance systems have been criticized for being ineffective and inefficient in tackling complex climate change challenges. Consequently, governance models that integrate collaboration among diverse stakeholders are seen as crucial in increasing adaptation efforts around the world. However, at present, there is little insight int...

Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) is a vital livelihood practice around the world, especially in the Global South. In Tanzania, millions of people depend on artisanal and small-scale gold mining and many of these people are in Geita, the main gold mining region of Tanzania. Based on qualitative research conducted in this region, this paper eng...

In Jambi province, Sumatra, Indonesia, flooding is a recurrent rainy season phenomenon. Historically considered manageable, recent political economic developments have changed this situation. Today, flooding is an environmental hazard and a threat to people's livelihoods and health. Based on qualitative research and literature that has developed re...

In the Global South, including the Sub-Saharan African city-regions, the possible future urban expansion patterns may pose a challenge towards improving environmental sustainability. Land use planning strategies and instruments for regulating urban expansion are faced with challenges, including insufficient data availability to offer insights into...

This article examines the factors shaping the perception of climate change and the relationship between climate change perception and migration. Drawing on a 691-case survey of climate perceptions in Cambodia, it explores three dimensions of climate change perception. The first is the relationship of climate change perceptions to space, geography,...

Since the 1970s the government of Burkina Faso together with international donor organizations has pushed for increasing national rice production to cope with the country’s food import dependency. This paper traces this development and illustrates that rice production in Burkina Faso is the outcome of interrelated global and local processes. Drawin...

Largely dependent on rain-fed agriculture, the West African populations could be severely impacted by climate change and variability. In this paper, we performed a literature review relating to perceptions of climate change and variability in West Africa, followed by an in-depth comparison between perceptions by rural dwellers of Burkina Faso and t...

Increasing evidence—synthesized in this paper—shows that economic growth contributes to biodiversity loss via greater resource consumption and higher emissions. Nonetheless, a review of international biodiversity and sustainability policies shows that the majority advocate economic growth. Since improvements in resource use efficiency have so far n...

Since the 1970s the government of Burkina Faso together with international donor organizations has pushed for increasing national rice production to cope with the country's food import dependency. This paper traces this development and illustrates that rice production in Burkina Faso is the outcome of interrelated global and local processes. Drawin...

The literature on barriers to climate change adaptation has largely focused on non-climatic barriers and has provided less insight into climate-induced barriers. Responding to this lacuna, this paper examines the connections between climate change and agricultural adaptation strategies of smallholder farmers in northern Ghana. Results from the qual...

The ‘Anthropocene’, simply put, is characterized by the recognition that ‘natural’ processes are inextricably entwined with human influence. Against this backdrop, managing ‘natural’ resources needs to be fundamentally rethought as balancing human-nature entanglements continues to challenges policy makers and conservation managers obligated toward...

Part of a Special Feature on Managing local and global fisheries in the Anthropocene The PubCast of this paper - an abridged, annotated audio narration of the text by the author - can be heard here: https://soundcloud.com/user-76762384/disputingnature

The increasing global interconnectivity influencing land system change brings with it new challenges for land-system science. We evaluate whether recent land-system science (LSS) research into telecoupling provides a basis to set normative goals or priorities for addressing sustainability in coupled human-natural systems. We summarize the challenge...

Brazil, home to one of the planet’s last great forests, is currently in trade negotiations with its second largest trading partner, the European Union (EU). We urge the EU to seize this critical opportunity to ensure that Brazil protects human rights and the environment. Brazil’s forests, wetlands, and savannas are crucial to a great diversity of I...

Increasing attention is being paid to the role of social networks in climate change research and new studies show that they form an essential source of resilience. However, the role of social networks remains underexplored as there is only limited empirical evidence of their benefits, particularly for research on adaptation to climate change in dev...

Science should provide solutions for societal transformations toward sustainability in the face of global environmental change. Land system science, as a systemic science focused on complex socio-ecological interactions around land use and associated trade-offs and synergies, is well placed to contribute to this agenda. This goal requires a stronge...

Understanding land-use change requires attention to local contexts and global processes. In this chapter, zooming techniques and multi-sited research are presented as two qualitative approaches that can capture both aspects of change within the same research project. This chapter describes how zooming techniques and multi-sited research enable the...

Interdisciplinarity is needed in order to address and solve the sustainability challenges of the twenty-first century. Telecoupling research is a clear response to this need. This chapter explores how, by being aware of the different modes and logics of interdisciplinary collaboration, telecoupling research can emerge as a flexible rather than a me...

This book presents a comprehensive exploration of the emerging concept and framework of telecoupling and how it can help create a better understanding of land-use change in a globalised world. Land-use change is increasingly characterised by a spatial disconnect between its main environmental, socioeconomic and political drivers and the main impact...

Global land-use change is increasingly characterised by a spatial disconnect between the main environmental, socioeconomic and political drivers of land change and the main impacts and outcomes of those changes. This presents substantial challenges for research and the governance of land systems towards sustainability. This chapter describes how th...

Rapid urban expansion is a significant contributor to land cover change and poses a challenge to environmental sustainability, particularly in less developed countries. Insufficient data about urban expansion hinders effective land use planning. Therefore, a high need to collect, process, and disseminate land cover data exists. This study focuses o...

Environmental peacebuilding represents a paradigm shift from a nexus of environmental scarcity to one of environmental peace. It rests on the assumption that the biophysical environment’s inherent characteristics can act as incentives for cooperation and peace, rather than violence and competition. Based on this, environmental peacebuilding present...

Participatory planning networks made of government agencies, stakeholders, citizens and scientists are receiving attention as a potential pathway to build resilient landscapes in the face of increased wildfire impacts due to suppression policies and land-use and climate changes. A key challenge for these networks lies in incorporating local knowled...

Timeline of the participatory process. (DOCX)

This article explores the implication of urban expansion on shared natural resources and livelihoods in peri-urban areas of Wa municipality of Northwestern Ghana using mainly qualitative research methods. The study shows that rapid urban expansion is the main driver of the depletion of shea trees and livelihood transformation of the people living i...

This article explores the implication of urban expansion on shared natural resources and livelihoods in peri-urban areas of Wa municipality of Northwestern Ghana using mainly qualitative research methods. The study shows that rapid urban expansion is the main driver of the depletion of shea trees and livelihood transformation of the people living i...

Rapid urban population growth in Sub-Saharan Western Africa has important environmental, infrastructural and social impacts. Due to the low availability of reliable urbanization data, remote sensing techniques become increasingly popular for monitoring land use change processes in that region. This study aims to quantify land cover for the Ouagadou...

Hope is much discussed as a future-oriented affect emerging from uncertain living conditions. While this conceptualisation illuminates the role that hope plays in shaping life trajectories, hope itself remains largely unaddressed. In this paper, we approach hope ethnographically as practice through the lens of material-semiotics. We draw on fieldwo...

Hope is much discussed as a future-oriented affect emerging from uncertain living conditions. While this conceptualisation illuminates the role that hope plays in shaping life trajectories, hope itself remains largely unaddressed. In this paper, we approach hope ethnographically as practice through the lens of material-semiotics. We draw on fieldwo...

Land-use change is increasingly influenced by complex socioeconomic and environmental interactions that transcend spatial, institutional, and temporal scales. These interactions challenge classical place-based land system analysis and require new analytical approaches equipped for tackling processes, flows, and feedbacks over distance. The recently...

The challenge of sustainability is not about producing more or better managerial knowledge. It is in fact a transformation of the systems and structures that perpetuate environmental problems that is emerging as the key sustainability goal. In this paper we show the relevance of this argument, by using wildfires as symptoms of the challenges posed...

Land-based production provides societies with indispensable goods such as food, feed, fibre, and energy. Yet, with economic globalisation and global population growth, the environmental and social trade-offs of their production are ever more complex. This is particularly so since land use changes are increasingly embedded in networks of long-distan...

This book comprises 13 chapters divided into four sections. The first section explores the cross-sectorial aspects of climate change governance, with a focus on the disconnect between the central and subnational levels of governance and on how climate change has become a contested policy arena. Section 2 explores three different empirical experienc...

This chapter introduces competition as a heuristic concept to analyse how specific land use practices establish themselves against possible alternatives. We briefly outline the global importance of land use practices as the material and symbolic basis for people’s livelihoods, particularly the provision of food security and well-being. We chart the...

This introductory chapter explores the notion of ‘distal drivers’ in land use competition. Research has moved beyond proximate causes of land cover and land use change to focus on the underlying drivers of these dynamics. We discuss the framework of telecoupling within human–environment systems as a first step to come to terms with the increasingly...

The scholarly debate around ‘global land grabbing’ is advancing theoretically, methodologically and empirically. This study contributes to these ongoing efforts by investigating a set of ‘small-scale land acquisitions’ in the context of a recent boom in banana plantation investments in Luang Namtha Province, Laos. In relation to the actors, scales...

The scholarly debate around ‘global land grabbing’ is advancing theoretically, methodologically andempirically. This study contributes to these ongoing efforts by investigating a set of ‘small-scale landacquisitions’ in the context of a recent boom in banana plantation investments in Luang Namtha Province,Laos. In relation to the actors, scales and...

Over the past decades, an increasing number of research studies have explored the linkages between the biophysical environment, environmental scarcity and violent conflicts. Contrary to the viewpoints concerning those linkages, environmental change and cooperation have emerged over the last decade as a potential pathway for conflict resolution. Thi...

http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-33628-2

Land use change is influenced by a complexity of drivers that transcend spatial, institutional and temporal scales. The analytical framework of telecoupling has recently been proposed in land system science to address this complexity, particularly the increasing importance of distal connections, flows and feedbacks characterising change in land sys...

This introductory chapter explores the notion of ‘distal drivers’ in land use competition. Research has moved beyond proximate causes of land cover and land use change to focus on the underlying drivers of these dynamics. We discuss the framework of telecoupling within human–environment systems as a first step to come to terms with the increasingly...

This chapter introduces competition as a heuristic concept to analyse how specific land use practices establish themselves against possible alternatives. We briefly outline the global importance of land use practices as the material and symbolic basis for people’s livelihoods, particularly the provision of food security and well-being. We chart the...