Simone Gingrich

University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna | boku · Institute of Social Ecology

Achieving a global forest transition, that is, a shift from net deforestation to reforestation, is essential for climate change mitigation. However, both land-based climate change mitigation policy and research on forest transitions neglect key processes that relieve pressure from forests, but cause emissions elsewhere (‘hidden emissions’). Here, w...

Forest recovery is central for addressing major sustainability challenges, such as climate change and biodiversity loss. While positive assessments prevail over the global ecological forest restoration potential, critical research highlights limited potentials and even detrimental local impacts, particularly in the Global South. Here, we argue that...

Achieving a global forest transition, that is a shift from deforestation to reforestation, is important for climate-change mitigation. Forest transitions are enabled by socioecological processes, including land displacement, agricultural intensification and woodfuel substitution for other energy, but their respective contributions remain poorly und...

Forest transitions may significantly contribute to climate change mitigation but also change forest use, affecting the local people benefiting from forests. We analyze forest transitions as contested processes that simplify multifunctional landscapes and alter local livelihoods. Drawing on the Theory of Access, we develop a conceptual framework to...

Land use faces a double challenge: to provide biomass to a growing population while contributing to climate-change mitigation. We here scrutinize this challenge by exploring the domestic option space for meeting the food demand of Austria in 2050 under the condition of no deforestation. To that end, we bring together a quantitative assessment based...

After centuries of deforestation, many, mostly industrialized countries have recently been experiencing net increases in forest area and biomass stocks, a phenomenon described as ‘Forest Transition’. In this article, we analyse the Spanish forest transition over the last 150 years from a socio-metabolic perspective. We provide the first estimation...

Land-use competition between forest conservation and agricultural food production poses major threats to climate change mitigation and food security. Land sparing policies aim at reconciling this conundrum by intensifying agriculture while conserving forests, but scientific debates prevail about their effectiveness. To contribute to this debate, we...

Large-scale land acquisitions repeatedly fall short of their acclaimed socioeconomic benefits and are associated with unintended social, economic, and ecological costs. In Laos, the government has started to question its own “Turning Land into Capital” policy, and reviews land acquisitions or concessions with regard to their socioeconomic impacts....

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...

Forest-based mitigation strategies will play a pivotal role for achieving the rapid and deep net-emission reductions required to prevent catastrophic climate change. However, large disagreement prevails on how to forge forest-based mitigation strategies, in particular in regions where forests are currently growing in area and carbon density. Two op...

Land use and biomass provision are the most critical resources for humanity. In contrast to a widespread view, a biomass-based economy will not provide a silver bullet to the climate change challenge due to intrinsic, systemic trade-offs in the land system and the critical, though often overlooked, time dimension.

Understanding the drivers of forest transitions is relevant to inform effective forest conservation. We investigate pathways of forest transitions in the United States (1920-2010), France (1850-2010), and Austria (1830-2010). By combining evidence from forest inventories with the forest model CRAFT, we first quantify how change in forest area (ΔA),...

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...

Understanding the dynamics behind forest transitions, i.e., shifts from deforestation to forest recovery, is crucial for forest conservation and climate-change mitigation i.e., carbon (C) sequestration. We investigated the drivers of the forest transition in the United States, which was characterized by forest thickening despite surges in industria...

Tree cover (TC) and biomass carbon stocks (CS) are key parameters for characterizing vegetation and are indispensable for assessing the role of terrestrial ecosystems in the global climate system. Land use, through land cover change and land management, affects both parameters. In this study, we quantify the empirical relationship between TC and CS...

Understanding the carbon (C) balance in global forest is key for climate-change mitigation. However, land use and environmental drivers affecting global forest C fluxes remain poorly quantified. Here we show, following a counterfactual modelling approach based on global Forest Resource Assessments, that in 1990-2020 deforestation is the main driver...

Global land systems are increasingly shaped by international trade of agricultural products. An increasing number of studies have quantified the implications of agricultural trade for single different aspects of land system sustainability. Bringing together studies across different sustainability dimensions, this review investigates how global agri...

Land use has greatly transformed Earth’s surface. While spatial reconstructions of how the extent of land cover and land‐use types have changed during the last century are available, much less information exists about changes in land‐use intensity. In particular, global reconstructions that consistently cover land‐use intensity across land‐use type...

Land use/land cover (LULC) changes may alter the risk of landslide occurrence. While LULC has often been considered as a static factor representing present-day LULC, historical LULC dynamics have recently begun to attract more attention. The study objective was to assess the effect of LULC legacies of nearly 200 years on landslide susceptibility mo...

Mountain agroecosystems deliver essential ecosystem services to society but are prone to climate change as well as socio-economic pressures, making multi-functional land systems increasingly central to sustainable mountain land use policy. Agroforestry, the combination of woody vegetation with crops and/or livestock, is expected to simultaneously i...

The dataset contains historical land use/land cover (LULC) pattern for the Austrian municipalities Waidhofen/Ybbs (Lower Austria) and Paldau (Styria). Three time cuts comprising nearly 200 years were digitized using various spatial data sources: 1820: Maps of Franciscan Cadastre 1960: Aerial photographs 2015: Aerial orthophotos combined with IACS...

The industrialization of agriculture, which has occurred asynchronously in different parts of the world, goes hand in hand with a constant agrobiodiversity decline. The loss of a numerous edible crops and animals, as well as of landraces of still produced species, is not only harming the environmental sustainability of farming systems but has also...

After World War II, the evolution of Europe's agro-food system has been marked by intensified use of synthetic fertilizers, territorial specialization, and integration in global food and feed markets. This evolution led to increased nitrogen (N) losses to aquatic environments and the atmosphere, which, despite increasing environmental regulations,...

Biomass production generates land use impacts in the form of emissions from Forestry and Other Land Use (FOLU), i.e. due to changes in ecosystem carbon stocks. Recently, consumption-based accounting (CBA) approaches have emerged as alternatives to conventional production-based accounts, quantifying FOLU emissions associated with biomass consumption...

Die Nutzung und die Umgestaltung von Landschaften haben sich seit Beginn der Industrialisierung stark verändert. Um die Flächenentwicklung zu erfassen und hinsichtlich nachhaltiger Raumentwicklung regelmäßig zu beobachten, braucht es geeignete Mittel. Indikatorensysteme helfen, diesen Anforderungen gerecht zu werden. Es gibt bereits zahlreiche indi...

Land ecosystems can play a crucial role in climate-change mitigation by acting as sinks for carbon. Legacy effects of past land use, including land conversion and changes in land-use intensity, influence the capacity for future ecosystem carbon sequestration. These effects are hard to quantify, however, and the influence of changes in land-use inte...

Understanding the carbon (C) balance in global forest biomass is key for climate change mitigation. However, land-use and environmental drivers affecting forest C fluxes remain poorly isolated and quantified. Following a counterfactual modelling approached based on global Forest Resource Assessments, we show that in the hypothetical absence of chan...

Five Southeast Asian countries (Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Philippines and Malaysia) have experienced forest transitions, that is, a shift from net deforestation to net increases in forest area, since the 1990s. Climate change mitigation policies such as REDD+ actively promote reforestation, especially in the Global South, where they have been accomp...

BOOK REVIEWS / CRÍTICA DE LIBROS / CRÍTICA DE LIVROS Paul Warde: The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny, c. 1500-1870 Simone Gingrich & Juan Infante Amate Jesús Fernández Fernández and Margarita Fernández Mier (Eds.): The Archaeology of Medieval Villages Currently Inhabited in Europe Christopher Dyer Giacomo Bonan: The State in the For...

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) were adopted in 2015, succeeding the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). While the MDGs focused on improving well-being in the developing world, the 17 SDGs address all countries and aim at reconciling economic and social with ecological goals. We adopt a social ecology perspective and critically reflect on...

Management of the non-renewable resource phosphorus (P) is critical to agricultural sustainability. The global P cycle is currently disturbed beyond planetary boundaries, mostly due to large excess P use in the agriculture of industrialized countries, while P is lacking in the Global South. The trajectories of P management and their effects on futu...

The development of appropriate tools to quantify long‐term carbon (C) budgets following forest transitions, i.e., shifts from deforestation to afforestation, and to identify their drivers are key issues for forging sustainable land‐based climate‐change mitigation strategies. Here, we develop a new modelling approach, CRAFT (CaRbon Accumulation in F...

The consistent and robust assessment of ecosystem carbon stocks remains central to developing and monitoring climate change mitigation strategies. Here, we investigate the dynamics of forest ecosystem carbon stocks in the conterminous United States between 1907-2012 at national and regional levels. We build upon timber volume records from historica...

Landslides are recorded especially when economic damage has been caused, which is mostly the case in settled areas, along transportation infrastructure, or on agricultural land. However, recent LiDAR-derived inventories often show a surprisingly high landslide density particularly in forested areas. This apparent contradiction underlines the need t...

Context Place-based transdisciplinary research involves multiple academic disciplines and non-academic actors. Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) platform is one concept with ~ 80 initiatives globally. Objectives As an exercise in learning through evaluation we audited (1) the siting, construction and maintenance of individual LTSER platf...

A R T I C L E I N F O Keywords: Long-term socioecological metabolism Agroecosystem complexity Energy return on investment Low external input strategy Landscape agroecology Sustainable farm systems A B S T R A C T Along the last century there has been an unprecedented growth in both global food production and related socioecological impacts. The obj...

Research in the ongoing ILLAS project (Integrating Land use Legacies in Landslide Risk Assessment to support Spatial Planning), funded by the Austrian Climate Research Program (ACRP), focuses on the possible effect of land-use legacies on landslide occurrences. Landslides are recorded especially when economic damage has been caused, which is mostly...

Analyses of energy efficiency in biomass production offer important insights in the context of sustainable land management and biomass production. However, much of the previous research on the topic has focused on the energy efficiency of either food or energy provision. Only recently, comprehensive analyses at the total agroecosystem level have be...

With an overarching goal of addressing global and regional sustainability challenges, Long TermSocio-Ecological Research Platforms (LTSER) aim to conduct place-based research, to collect and synthesize both environmental and socio-economic data, and to involve a broader stakeholder pool to set the research agenda. To date there have been few studie...

We investigate agroecosystem energy flows in two Upper Austrian regions, the lowland region Sankt Florian and the prealpine region Grünburg, at five time points between 1830 and 2000. Energetic agroecosystem productivity (energy contents of crops, livestock products, and wood per unit area) is compared to different types of energy inputs, i.e., ext...

Energy efficiency in biomass production is a major challenge for a future transition to sustainable food and energy provision. This study uses methodologically consistent data on agroecosystem energy flows and different metrics of energetic efficiency from seven regional case studies in North America (USA and Canada) and Europe (Spain and Austria)...

Carbon stocks in vegetation have a key role in the climate system. However, the magnitude, patterns and uncertainties of carbon stocks and the effect of land use on the stocks remain poorly quantified. Here we show, using state-of-the-art datasets, that vegetation currently stores around 450 petagrams of carbon. In the hypothetical absence of land...

Hypothetic absorption potentials of carbon stock restorations and indicative years until saturation at a current emission level of 9 PgC yr-1. Note that a restoration to 100% of the potential probably entails a cessation of the respective land use, due to the intrinsic relations of harvest and carbon stocks25. *Years until saturation at current C-e...

Comparison of the difference between potential and actual biomass stocks to components of the global carbon balance, including LUC emissions and net terrestrial biosphere sink. Bold figures refer to results of this study, all others represent independent estimates. The difference in biomass stock of 447 PgC (375-525) is well in line with estimates...

Research on seigneurial agriculture and its role for agricultural changes in general has a long tradition within European Agricultural History. Still, much discussion arises on whether to emphasize «peasant paths» or "landlord paths" of agricultural development. This study contributes to the debate by introducing a social ecology perspective. Using...

Energy balances of farm systems have overlooked the role of energy flows that remain within agro-ecosystems. Yet, such internal flows fulfil important socio-ecological functions, including maintenance of farmers themselves and agro-ecosystem structures. Farming can either give rise to complex landscapes that favour associated biodiversity, or the o...

Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) is an inter- and transdisciplinary research field addressing socio-ecological change over time at various spatial and temporal scales. In the Austrian Eisenwurzen region, an LTSER platform was founded in 2004. It has fostered and documented research projects aiming at advancing LTSER scientifically and at...

Global surges in biomass demand driven by an increasing world population, nutrition transitions in the developing world and increasing consumption of bioenergy are pressuring African land-use systems and threatening the sustainability of yet-intact ecosystems. Africa is not exempt from this land rush. In fact, much hope is placed in African lands f...

The concept of forest transitions was introduced by geographers in the 1990s to describe the observation that forests regrow with industrialization in many parts of the world. We use the case of Austria to discuss the forest transition in the context of Social Ecology based on empirical evidence on Austria’s carbon budget in the period 1830–2010. I...

In the 20th century, the human population grew fourfold and the global economy grew 20-fold. This chapter explores how social metabolism has changed with these megatrends. It shows that material and energy use have grown faster than the population but less than the GDP, implying a growth in metabolic rates and some decoupling of resource use from e...

We present an energy analysis of past and present farm systems aimed to contribute to their sustainability assessment. Looking at agroecosystems as a set of energy loops between nature and society, and adopting a farm-operator standpoint at landscape level to set the system boundaries, enthalpy values of energy carriers are accounted for net Final...

Profound changes in land use occurred during the last century in Europe, driven by growing population, changes in affluence, and technological innovation. To capture and understand these changes, we compiled a consistent dataset on the distribution of land-use types and biomass extraction for nine European countries (Albania, Austria, Denmark, Germ...

This article employs the concept of socio-ecological metabolism for historical analyses of agroecosystems. We empirically investigate two case studies in the Austrian Alps of c. 1830 in terms of food and feed provision and soil nitrogen (N) balances. Total biomass extraction and food production were higher in the prealpine Enns valley. However, the...

This article presents the concept of social metabolism and highlights its use for the analysis of the development of agriculture in Czechia. Similar to the general discipline of geography, social metabolism investigates the interactions between people and nature throughout time and space. In this article, we apply social metabolism methods, such as...

Since the World War II, many economies have transitioned from an agrarian, biomass-based to an industrial, minerals-based metabolic regime. Since 1950, world population grew by factor 2.7 and global material consumption by factor 3.7–71 Gigatonnes per year in 2010. The expansion of the resource base required by human societies is associated with gr...