Land Use Change, Spillovers, and Transitions: Global Trends, Prospects, and Emerging Drivers

Patrick Meyfroidt , Cecile Renier, Erasmus Klaus Helge Justus zu Ermgassen 

In this review, we first compile data on global trends and rates of major land use changes over the recent decades, and summarize the main insights revealed by these data. We then review recent research and quantitative estimates on key land use spillover processes, i.e., leakage, indirect land use change, rebound effect and land sparing, and agglomeration economies. We then turn to the prospective, by highlighting a few recent processes that may have an increasingly important influence on land use dynamics, and synthesizing recent quantitative projections of global land use dynamics until 2050, discussing business as usual (BAU) trends as well as more transformative scenarios. Extracting high-level lessons from previous research on land use transitions, we bring these different lines of evidence together to synthesize general conclusions about global land use dynamics and how to enhance sustainability through land use.