Does the intensification of agriculture reduce cultivated areas and, in so doing, spare some lands by concentrating production on other lands? Such sparing is important for many reasons, among them the enhanced abilities of released lands to sequester carbon and provide other environmental services. Difficulties measuring the extent of spared land make it impossible to investigate fully the hypothesized causal chain from agricultural intensification to declines in cultivated areas and then to increases in spared land. We analyze the historical circumstances in which rising yields have been accompanied by declines in cultivated areas, thereby leading to land-sparing. We use national-level United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization data on trends in cropland from 1970–2005, with particular emphasis on the 1990–2005 period, for 10 major crop types. Cropland has increased more slowly than population during this period, but paired increases in yields and declines in cropland occurred infrequently, both globally and nationally. Agricultural intensification was not generally accompanied by decline or stasis in cropland area at a national scale during this time period, except in countries with grain imports and conservation set-aside programs. Future projections of cropland abandonment and ensuing environmental services cannot be assumed without explicit policy intervention.

For decades, the dynamics of tropical deforestation in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have defied easy explanation. The rates of deforestation have been lower than elsewhere in the tropics, and the driving forces evident in other places, government new land settlement schemes and industrialized agriculture, have largely been absent in SSA. The context and causes for African deforestation become clearer through an analysis of new, national-level data on forest cover change for SSA countries for the 2000–2005 period. The recent dynamic in SSA varies from dry to wet biomes. Deforestation occurred at faster rates in nations with predominantly dry forests. The wetter Congo basin countries had lower rates of deforestation, in part because tax receipts from oil and mineral industries in this region spurred rural to urban migration, declines in agriculture and increased imports of cereals from abroad. In this respect, the Congo basin countries may be experiencing an oil and mineral fuelled forest transition. Small farmers play a more important role in African deforestation than they do in southeast Asia and Latin America, in part because small-scale agriculture remains one of the few livelihoods open to rural peoples.

Effective policies to halt deforestation depend critically on the forest context. This article uses a forest transition framework to discuss three forest contexts: remote (core) forest areas, frontier forests, and forest-agriculture mosaics. Just as the drivers and capabilities differ across these three contexts or stages, so too do the appropriate government policies. The first stage represents forests that are protected passively by their remote location, where the challenge is to maintain low deforestation rates. Thus high priority should be given to avoiding or redesigning infrastructure developments, resettlements, and other large-scale projects that can accelerate deforestation. Clarifying tenure and local forest rights and creating protected areas can also be helpful. In frontier forests, well-defined property rights, if present, provide a basis for using direct incentive and compensation schemes such as payments for environmental services. Avoiding perverse government policies, such as subsidized credit for deforesting activities, would also reduce the high deforestation rates that characterize this second stage. In largely settled forest-agriculture mosaics, government policies can augment emerging market-based incentives to plant trees. Improved agricultural technologies, which at early stages tend to stimulate agricultural land expansion, can also be important at later stages by increasing food production on existing agricultural land. (JEL: O13, Q28, Q54)

Global and regional economic and environmental changes are increasingly influencing local land-use, livelihoods, and ecosystems. At the same time, cumulative local land changes are driving global and regional changes in biodiversity and the environment. To understand the causes and consequences of these changes, land change science (LCS) draws on a wide array synthetic and meta-study techniques to generate global and regional knowledge from local case studies of land change. Here, we review the characteristics and applications of synthesis methods in LCS and assess the current state of synthetic research based on a meta-analysis of synthesis studies from 1995 to 2012. Publication of synthesis research is accelerating, with a clear trend toward increasingly sophisticated and quantitative methods, including meta-analysis. Detailed trends in synthesis objectives, methods, and land change phenomena and world regions most commonly studied are presented. Significant challenges to successful synthesis research in LCS are also identified, including issues of interpretability and comparability across case-studies and the limits of and biases in the geographic coverage of case studies. Nevertheless, synthesis methods based on local case studies will remain essential for generating systematic global and regional understanding of local land change for the foreseeable future, and multiple opportunities exist to accelerate and enhance the reliability of synthetic LCS research in the future. Demand for global and regional knowledge generation will continue to grow to support adaptation and mitigation policies consistent with both the local realities and regional and global environmental and economic contexts of land change.

During the second half of the twentieth century, southern Brazil underwent rapid industrialization and urbanization. In earlier historical periods in Europe and North America, these trends have contributed to a forest transition in which deforestation gives way to forestation. In a developing country, like Brazil, with a more skewed income distribution and a larger rural underclass, industrialization and urbanization may not give rise to a forest transition. These competing theoretical expectations were tested with data on forest cover change from the Brazilian censuses of 1970 through 1995/1996 for the state of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil. The analyses show forestation replacing deforestation between 1975 and 1980. An increase in the extent of planted forests close to urban areas explains the turnaround in forest cover trends. Because the planted forests contain relatively few native plant species, the expansion of these forests does not ease the biodiversity crisis. The re-emerging second Atlantic forest represents a smaller, less diverse and degraded version of the first Atlantic forest.