Rapid land use change after socio-economic disturbances: the collapse of the Soviet Union versus Chernobyl

By Patrick Hostert, Tobias Kuemmerle, Alexander V. Prishchepov, Anika Sieber, Eric F. Lambin, Volker C. Radeloff. 2011

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Land use change is a principal force and inherent element of global environmental change, threatening biodiversity, natural ecosystems, and their services. However, our ability to anticipate future land use change is severely limited by a lack of understanding of how major socio-economic disturbances (e.g., wars, revolutions, policy changes, and economic crises) affect land use. Here we explored to what extent socio-economic disturbances can shift land use systems onto a different trajectory, and whether this can result in less intensive land use. Our results show that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 caused a major reorganization in land use systems. The effects of this socio-economic disturbance were at least as drastic as those of the nuclear disaster in the Chernobyl region in 1986. While the magnitudes of land abandonment were similar in Ukraine and Belarus in the case of the nuclear disaster (28% and 36% of previously farmed land, respectively), the rates of land abandonment after the collapse of the Soviet Union in Ukraine were twice as high as those in Belarus. This highlights that national policies and institutions play an important role in mediating effects of socio-economic disturbances. The socio-economic disturbance that we studied caused major hardship for local populations, yet also presents opportunities for conservation, as natural ecosystems are recovering on large areas of former farmland. Our results illustrate the potential of socio-economic disturbances to revert land use intensification and the important role institutions and policies play in determining land use systems’ resilience against such socio-economic disturbances.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/03b3696d7e3c6b1c35a5951b283d2a58172eaef7

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Citations in the corpus

Mapping the extent of abandoned farmland in Central and Eastern Europe using MODIS time series satellite data (2013, background): “…and widespread farmland abandonment, including in former breadbaskets of European Russia (Prishchepov et al 2012), Ukraine (Baumann et al 2011, Hostert et al 2011), and Romania (Kuemmerle et al 2009), suggesting that there may be substantial untapped agricultural production potentials there…”
Comparing the determinants of cropland abandonment in Albania and Romania using boosted regression trees (2013, background): “Transboundary studies demonstrated that the diverging pathways of postsocialist cropland abandonment in similar natural settings can be attributed to differences in political and institutional characteristics (Alix-Garcia et al., 2012; Hostert et al., 2011; Kuemmerle et al., 2008; Prishchepov et al.”
Determinants of agricultural land abandonment in post-Soviet European Russia (2011, background): “8 d Use u e c p B M e 2 i t t 2 e p o w a e e s i v fi o fi e a g o p M p i w 2 a a m h a o m p l a 2 e f e a a l c g t 2 a g ( a i o i”
Advances in Remote Sensing of Agriculture: Context Description, Existing Operational Monitoring Systems and Major Information Needs (2013, unknown): “, [35,120–123]).”
Agricultural land change in the Carpathian ecoregion after the breakdown of socialism and expansion of the European Union (2013, background): “A large body of research has been devoted to understanding agricultural expansion in tropical settings, but the patterns and processes of the decrease of agricultural land are less well understood (Kuemmerle et al 2009, Ramankutty et al 2010, Hostert et al 2011).”
Effects of institutional changes on land use: agricultural land abandonment during the transition from state-command to market-driven economies in post-Soviet Eastern Europe (2012, methodology): “Cross-border studies can help distinguish the effects of institutional changes on land use because borders demarcate contrasting macro-environments in areas where the natural conditions are often similar (Hostert et al 2011, Kuemmerle et al 2008).”