Julie Gwendolin Zähringer

How national and local contexts shape the impacts of foreign investment in land: a comparative analysis from three African countries

Recent changes in the global agro–food–energy system – driven in part by consumption trends, climate change-mitigation agendas, and general economic forces – have sparked renewed interest in agricultural investment and a rush to acquire land. The broader socio-economic and ecological impacts of these land use changes are not always clear. Many assessments focus mainly on short-term locallevel effects, failing to link changes to the wider agrarian and socio-economic transformations that are underway. Against this backdrop, the objective of the Belmont Forum-supported AFGROLAND project is to analyze how large-scale investments in land and agriculture impact natural resources, rural livelihoods, food security, and public policies in African countries.

A novel approach for assessing shifting cultivation dynamics in a regional conservation hotspot - insights from nort-eastern Madagascar

The north-eastern escarpment of Madagascar has been deemed a global hotspot of biodiversity due to its high levels of endemic speciesbeing heavily threatened by accelerated deforestation rates and landscape changes. The main concern for conservation of the remaining humid primary forests is the shifting cultivation practices of local smallholder farmers for rice production. According to the mainstream narrative, human population growth leads to a shortening of crop-fallow cycles and thus to the accelerated conversion of forests to agricultural land. However, little is currently known about the dynamic changes between forest and shifting cultivation systems at the regional level. Existing land cover change analyses in this area have so far only focused on binary forest to non-forest changes and have therefore failed to account for the dynamic nature of the change processes between forest and different agriculture land use systems. This can be partly explained by the significant challenge to delineate shifting cultivation systems on land cover maps using traditional remote sensing classification approaches. To address this gap we therefore applied a novel GIS approach, that was originally developed for the assessment of shifting cultivation dynamics in Laos and has so far never been applied elsewhere, to map shifting cultivation of different crop-fallow lengths as well as permanent agriculture land use at the regional level. Change analyses of land use maps between 1995 and 2011 allowed us to comprehend the general trends of land use trajectories and their spatial variation. This more detailed understanding of land use change dynamics is key to plan for successful interventions to slow forest loss while at the same time improving local livelihoods. We further believe that this approach holds great potential for conservation monitoring in this resource-rich but povertyprone conservation hotspot.