Patrick Meyfroidt

Catholic University of Louvain | UCLouvain · Earth and Life Institute

Land‐use change is a major driver of biodiversity loss, affecting tropical forests and savannas at an unprecedented rate. To protect these ecosystems and their biodiversity, national conservation areas and international conservation funding have increased considerably in these regions. Understanding of how conservation funding allocation relates to...

Satellite-based field delineation has entered a quasi-operational stage due to recent advances in machine learning for computer vision. Transfer learning allows for the resource-efficient transfer of pre-trained field delineation models across heterogeneous geographies. However, the scarcity of labeled data for complex and dynamic smallholder lands...

CONTEXT Farm size is a key indicator associated with environmental, economic, and social contexts and outcomes of agriculture. Farm size data is typically obtained from agricultural censuses or household surveys, but both are usually only available in infrequent time intervals and at aggregate spatial scales. In contrast, spatially explicit and det...

Forestry plantations can potentially foster rural development and mitigate environmental threats, but their impacts on neighboring peoples' livelihood strategies are ambiguous. Forestry plantations are particularly important in Mozambique, where a national strategy aims to establish one million hectares of forests by 2030, focusing on Miombo ecoreg...

Land-use expansion is linked to major sustainability concerns including climate change, food security and biodiversity loss. This expansion is largely concentrated in so-called ‘frontiers’, defined here as places experiencing marked transformations owing to rapid resource exploitation. Understanding the mechanisms shaping these frontiers is crucial...

A crop boom is a sudden, nonlinear and intense expansion of a new crop. Despite their large impacts, boom-bust dynamics are not well understood; booms are largely unpredictable and difficult to steer once they unfold. Based on the striking resemblances between land regime shifts and crop booms, we apply complex systems theory, highlighting the pote...

In this study, we produced a spatially explicit diagnosis of the deforestation hotspots and future climate risk (2050) of cocoa producing areas, zooming into the top 8 cocoa exporting countries and the main global cocoa traders. Cocoa-driven deforestation often co-occurs with deforestation driven by other agri-commodities, and thus needs to be tack...

1. CONTEXT Farm size is a key indicator associated with the environmental, economic, and social contexts and outcomes of agriculture. Farm size data is typically obtained from agricultural censuses or household surveys, but both are usually only available in infrequent time intervals and at aggregate spatial scales. In contrast, spatially explicit...

This document describes the data and methods that Trase has used to map the cocoa supply chain in Côte d'Ivoire. The data is freely available to explore and download at https://doi.org/10.48650/E5CN-FH18

Land use is a key driver of the ongoing biodiversity crisis and therefore also a major opportunity for its miti-gation. However, appropriately considering the diversity of land-use actors and activities in conservation assessments and planning is challenging. As a result, top-down conservation policy and planning are often criticized for a lack of...

The increased availability of remote sensing products and new legislative agendas are driving a growing focus on farm‐level traceability and monitoring to tackle commodity‐driven deforestation. Here, we use data on land use change in Brazil (1985–2021) from Mapbiomas to demonstrate how analyses of the drivers of deforestation are sensitive to the s...

Land cover and land use have established effects on hazard and exposure to vector-borne diseases. While our understanding of the proximate and distant causes and consequences of land use decisions has evolved, the focus on the proximate effects of landscape on disease ecology remains dominant. We argue that land use governance, viewed through a lan...

Global agricultural trade is a key driver of socioenvironmental transformations in rural areas, including development dynamics. By creating revenue and wealth opportunities, it influences the economic and social relations in a landscape. However, not all landscapes shaped by a given agricultural sector are the same: one variable is how supply chain...

NOW PUBLISHED, PLEASE USE THIS VERSION: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.240295 Land use expansion is linked to major sustainability concerns including climate change, food security and biodiversity loss. This expansion is largely concentrated in so-called frontiers, defined here as places experiencing marked transformations due...

Satellite-based field delineation has entered a quasi-operational stage due to recent advances in machine learning for computer vision. Transfer learning allows for the resource-efficient transfer of pre-trained field delineation models across heterogeneous geographies. However, the scarcity of labeled data for complex and dynamic smallholder lands...

Vietnam’s forests have undergone major transformations since the 1990s, including a transition from net forest loss to net expansion. Plantation forests and rehabilitated forests have contributed to this transition. Under the growing effects of climate change, it is important to understand the socioeconomic drivers of Vietnam’s rehabilitated forest...

International conservation funding to low-and middle-income countries has increased significantly in recent years. However, understanding of the underlying factors driving the geographic distribution of such funding remains limited. This study aimed to identify the relative importance of five factors (i.e., conservation targets, threat levels, cost...

Agricultural expansion is the driver of more than 90% of deforestation across the tropics, a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. Thankfully, a number of new initiatives are emerging to both tackle deforestation and include it within the greenhouse gas emissions reporting of major importers and food companies. In May 2023, for exam...

Agricultural expansion is the driver of more than 90% of deforestation across the tropics, a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. In response, a number of initiatives are emerging to both tackle deforestation and include it within the greenhouse gas emissions reporting of major importers and food companies. In May 2023, for example...

Agricultural intensification, through increased yields, and raising incomes, through enhanced labor productivity, are two dimensions prioritized for sustainable agricultural development. Prioritizing these two outcomes leaves labor intensity as a hidden adjustment variable. Yet, when agriculture is mainstay and the prospects of labor absorption in...

Tropical and subtropical dry woodlands are rich in biodiversity and carbon. Yet, many of these woodlands are under high deforestation pressure and remain weakly protected. Here, we assessed how deforestation dynamics relate to areas of woodland protection and to conservation priorities across the world's tropical dry woodlands. Specifically, we cha...

Global commodity flows between distally connected social-ecological systems pose important challenges to sustainability governance. These challenges are partly due to difficulties in designing and implementing governance institutions that fit or match the scale of the environmental and social problems generated in such telecoupled systems. We focus...

The production and trade of agricultural commodities, such as cocoa, have important impacts on farmer livelihoods and the environment, prompting a growing number of companies to adopt public commitments to address sustainability issues in their value chains. Though trading companies, who handle the procurement and export of these commodities, are k...

Agricultural intensification, an increase in per-area productivity, may spare forests otherwise lost to agricultural expansion. Yet which conditions enable such sparing or whether intensification amplifies deforestation through rebound effects remains hotly debated. Using a multilevel Bayesian regression framework, we analyse the effects of agricul...

Cocoa production has been identified as a major global driver of deforestation, but its precise contribution to deforestation dynamics in West Africa remains unclear. It is also unknown to what degree companies and international markets are able to trace their cocoa imports, and satisfy their sustainable sourcing commitments. Here, we use publicly-...

The global trade of agricultural commodities has profound social-ecological impacts, from potentially increasing food availability and agricultural efficiency, to displacing local communities, and to incentivizing environmental destruction. Supply chain stickiness, understood as the stability in trading relationships between supply chain actors, mo...

Ecosystem restoration is an important means to address global sustainability challenges. However, scientific and policy discourse often overlooks the social processes that influence the equity and effectiveness of restoration interventions. In the present article, we outline how social processes that are critical to restoration equity and effective...

ABSTRACT Governance of natural resources in the drylands has often been studied from the perspective of failure, using assumptions of degradation, disequilibrium, and marginalization. Yet a growing body of literature engages with the study of outcomes that are considered positive, providing examples and explanations of cases where conflicts related...

Cocoa production has been identified as a major global driver of deforestation, but its precise contribution to deforestation dynamics in West Africa remains unclear. It is also unknown to what degree companies and international markets are able to trace their cocoa imports, and satisfy their sustainable sourcing commitments. Here, we use publicly-...

Tropical deforestation continues at alarming rates with profound impacts on ecosystems, climate, and livelihoods, prompting renewed commitments to halt its continuation. Although it is well established that agriculture is a dominant driver of deforestation, rates and mechanisms remain disputed and often lack a clear evidence base. We synthesize the...

Agricultural expansion into tropical and subtropical forests often leads to major social-ecological trade-offs. Yet, despite ever-more detailed information on where deforestation occurs, how agriculture expands into forests remains unclear, which is hampered by a lackof spatially and temporally detailed reconstruction of agricultural expansion. Her...

Cropland mapping in smallholder landscapes is challenged by complex and fragmented landscapes, labor-intensive and unmechanized land management causing high within-field variability, rapid dynamics in shifting cultivation systems, and substantial proportions of short-term fallows. To overcome these challenges, we here present a large-area mapping f...

Tropical dry woodlands are rapidly being lost to agricultural expansion, but how deforestation dynamics play out in these woodlands remains poorly understood. We have developed an approach to detect and map high-level patterns of deforestation frontiers, that is, the expansion of woodland loss across continents in unprecedented spatio-temporal deta...

Smallholders produce about a third of the global crop production. Supporting these smallholder farms is an important lever for poverty alleviation. Farm and field sizes are key indicators of many smallholder dynamics, including fragmentation, farm consolidation, and interactions between smallholders, medium-scale commercial farming, and large enter...

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an ambitious effort to increase trans-continental connectivity and cooperation mainly through infrastructure investments and trade. On the one hand, this globally unparalleled initiative is expected to foster economic growth, but on the other hand, it can have substantial environmental implications. The BRI...

The trade in agricultural commodities is a backbone of the global economy but is a major cause of negative social and environmental impacts, not least deforestation. Commodity traders are key actors in efforts to eliminate deforestation-they are active in the regions where commodities are produced and represent a "pinch point" in global trade that...

International funding is increasingly important in supporting conservation in mega-biodiverse countries. However, it remains unclear which donors invest in which conservation objectives and where, making it difficult to identify gaps and key actors to influence. Here we identified 1947 foreign-aided conservation projects in South America's major de...

Land-use frontiers are territories with abundant land for agriculture and forestry, availability of natural resources relative to labor or capital and predisposed to rapid land-use change, often driven by large-scale land investments and capitalized actors, producing commodities for distal markets. Strategic spatial planning (SSP) represents a cons...

Interviewees of the study (n = 30), clustered by the primary focus of interview questions. Appendix 1 of the article Oliveira, E., and P. Meyfroidt. 2022. Strategic spatial planning in emerging land-use frontiers: evidence from Mozambique. Ecology and Society 27(2):5. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-13001-270205

Agricultural intensification, through increased yields, and raising incomes, through enhanced labor productivity, are two dimensions prioritized for achieving sustainable agricultural development. Prioritizing these two outcomes leaves a third element of a trade-off space, labor intensity, as a hidden adjustment variable. In contexts where agricult...

Biomass carbon stocks (BCS) play a vital role in the climate system, but benchmarked estimates prior to the late 20th century remain scarce. Here, by making use of an early global forest resource assessment and harmonizing information on land use and carbon densities, we establish a global BCS account for the year 1950. Our best-guess BCS estimate...

Cropland mapping in complex smallholder landscapes is challenged by complex and fragmented landscapes, labor-intensive and unmechanized land management causing high within-field variability, rapid dynamics in shifting cultivation systems, and substantial proportions of short-term fallows. To overcome these challenges, we here present a large-area m...

The literature on land-use frontiers has overwhelmingly focused on active frontiers of expansion. We focus on an emerging frontier. We studied the decisions, narratives, and practices of the actors driving land-use change in Niassa, Mozambique. Based on ethnographic research carried out between early 2017 and late 2018 among investors engaged in co...

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...

Many companies sourcing agricultural commodities with high deforestation risk have committed to zero deforestation, meaning they intend to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains. While previous research has attempted to assess progress against such initiatives, little is known about how the characteristics of sourcing patterns may influen...

The complex nature of sustainability problems and the aim of sustainability science to support emergent processes of transformation require rethinking how we build and make use of theories. We highlight the diversity of ways in which theories, as assemblages of different elements that can serve a variety of purposes, can emerge within inter-discipl...

Agricultural expansion into tropical and subtropical forests often leads to major social-ecological trade-offs. Yet, despite ever-more detailed information on where deforestation occurs, how agriculture expands into forests remains unclear. Here, we developed and mapped a novel set of metrics that quantify agricultural frontier processes at unprece...

Actor-level data on large-scale commercial agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa are scarce. The peculiar choice of transnational investing in African land has, therefore, been subject to conjecture. Addressing this gap, we reconstructed the underlying logics of investment location choices in a Bayesian network, using firm- and actor-level interview an...

International funding is increasingly important in supporting conservation in mega-biodiverse countries. However, it remains unclear which donors invest in which conservation objectives and where, making it difficult to identify gaps and key actors to influence. Here we identified 1947 foreign-aided conservation projects in South America's major de...

Land-use frontiers, such as agriculture expanding into forests, remain a major driver of biodiversity loss, and often lead to conservation responses. To better understand the geographies of conservation, connecting conservation with tools used widely in Land System Science – particularly the frontier concept – allows assessing the patterns, actors,...

Terrestrial biomass carbon stocks (BCS) play a vital role in the climate system, but benchmarked estimates prior to the late twentieth century remain scarce. Here, by making use of an early global forest resource assessment and harmonizing information on land use and carbon densities, we establish a global BCS account for the year 1950. Our best-gu...

Dry forests are among the most threatened ecosystems globally, due to agricultural expansion driven by the increasing demand for food, fibers, and energy in developed and emerging countries. Among these, the forests of the South American Gran Chaco are one of the global deforestation hotspots. The Argentine Dry Chaco has been the focus of several s...

Human-induced activities are threatening the socio-economic and ecological sustainability of land systems globally, including in tropical, low-income regions. In these regions, land-use planning is used to assess, manage, and monitor the physical, social, and economic conditions of territories and thus assist agribusiness, smallholder farmers, and...

Climate change and socio-economic dynamics are driving rapid agricultural expansion in boreal and Arctic regions, referred to as northern agricultural frontiers, and this has large potential environmental and human implications. Conceptualizing northern agricultural frontiers as resource frontiers and building on lessons from the tropics could help...

Tree planting has the potential to address a wide range of environmental and economic challenges. However, planting initiatives can also do more harm than good. Characteristics such as land tenure and land use before conversion to tree plantation are key to assessing the potential risks and benefits of tree planting initiatives. Here, we present a...

The trade in agricultural commodities is a backbone of the global economy but is a major cause of negative social and environmental impacts, not least deforestation. Commodity traders are key actors in efforts to eliminate deforestation - they are active in the regions where commodities are produced and represent a 'pinch-point' in global trade tha...

The effectiveness of incentive-based conservation programs depends on how they influence and interact with multiple motivations of the participants. Here, we studied an incentive-based program for forest conservation in Bolivia – called “Reciprocal Watershared Agreements” – that mixes material compensations with pro-social and pro-environmental mot...

Human-induced activities are threatening the socio-economic and ecological sustainability of land systems globally, including in tropical regions. Authorities in these regions prepare and implement land-use plans to select and organize land uses in a way that will meet the needs of local communities while safeguarding ecosystems services. To this e...

Strategic spatial planning (SSP) represents a consolidated long-term governance practice across developed and developing countries. It articulates sectoral policies, and it involves vision making and an array of stakeholders regarding land use and development issues around urban and rural territories. Land-use frontiers are territories with abundan...

Forest dynamics are changing at a local and global level, with multiple social and environmental implications. The current literature points to different theories and hypotheses to explain these forest dynamics. In this paper, we formalized some of those theories, the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), the forest transition and the ecologically une...

To understand how land-use frontiers emerge, we studied the actors driving investments in Niassa province, Mozambique. Our ethnographic research over 2017-2018 among commercial agriculture and forestry investors shows that successive waves of actors with different backgrounds, motives and business practices, arrived in Niassa to establish farms or...

Significance The trade in agricultural commodities is a mainstay of the globalized economy, though the complex nature of commodity supply chains makes it difficult to identify the origin of and impact embedded in products. We brought together detailed data on trade, agriculture, and logistics to produce a subnational map of the origin of Brazil’s e...

EU action to reduce deforestation and other habitat loss is more likely to be effective and feasible if: 1. Legislation is extended to include not just deforestation and forest degradation, but also the conversion of other ecologically important ecosystems, including savannahs and wetlands. A failure to do this risks large- scale displacement of i...

Forests have re-taken centre stage in global conversations about sustainability, climate and biodiversity. Here, we use a horizon scanning approach to identify five large-scale trends that are likely to have substantial medium- and long-term effects on forests and forest livelihoods: forest megadisturbances; changing rural demographics; the rise of...

Vietnam’s forests have undergone major transformations since the 1990s, including a transition from net forest loss to net expansion, which is attributable to plantation forests and rehabilitated forests. Our study aimed to better understand the patterns and the causes of forest cover rehabilitation in Vietnam to expand tropical forests in other re...

The increasing expansion of cropland is major driver of global carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. However, predicting plausible future global distributions of croplands remains challenging. Here, we show that, in general, existing global data aligned with classical economic theories of expansion explain the current (1992) global extent of crop...