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Historically, human uses of land have transformed and fragmented ecosystems 1 , 2 , degraded biodiversity 3 , 4 , disrupted carbon and nitrogen cycles 5 , 6 and added prodigious quantities of greenhouse gases (GHGs) to the atmosphere 7 , 8 . However, in contrast to fossil-fuel carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions, trends and drivers of GHG emissions from land management and land-use change (together referred to as ‘land-use emissions’) have not been as comprehensively and systematically assessed. Here we present country-, process-, GHG- and product-specific inventories of global land-use emissions from 1961 to 2017, we decompose key demographic, economic and technical drivers of emissions and we assess the uncertainties and the sensitivity of results to different accounting assumptions. Despite steady increases in population (+144 per cent) and agricultural production per capita (+58 per cent), as well as smaller increases in emissions per land area used (+8 per cent), decreases in land required per unit of agricultural production (–70 per cent) kept global annual land-use emissions relatively constant at about 11 gigatonnes CO 2 -equivalent until 2001. After 2001, driven by rising emissions per land area, emissions increased by 2.4 gigatonnes CO 2 -equivalent per decade to 14.6 gigatonnes CO 2 -equivalent in 2017 (about 25 per cent of total anthropogenic GHG emissions). Although emissions intensity decreased in all regions, large differences across regions persist over time. The three highest-emitting regions (Latin America, Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa) dominate global emissions growth from 1961 to 2017, driven by rapid and extensive growth of agricultural production and related land-use change. In addition, disproportionate emissions are related to certain products: beef and a few other red meats supply only 1 per cent of calories worldwide, but account for 25 per cent of all land-use emissions. Even where land-use change emissions are negligible or negative, total per capita CO 2 -equivalent land-use emissions remain near 0.5 tonnes per capita, suggesting the current frontier of mitigation efforts. Our results are consistent with existing knowledge—for example, on the role of population and economic growth and dietary choice—but provide additional insight into regional and sectoral trends. Trends in the rate of region- and sector-specific land-use greenhouse gas emissions in 1961–2017 show an acceleration of about 20% per decade after 2001.

In the late 1800s American entrepreneurs became participants in the 400-year history of European economic and ecological hegemony in the tropics. Beginning as buyers in the tropical ports of the Atlantic and Pacific, they evolved into land speculators, controlling and managing the areas where tropical crops were grown for carefully fostered consumer markets at home. As corporate agro-industry emerged, the speculators took direct control of the ecological destinies of many tropical lands. Supported by the U.S. government's diplomatic and military protection, they migrated and built private empires in the Caribbean, Central and South America, the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and West Africa. Yankee investors and plantation managers mobilized engineers, agronomists, and loggers to undertake what they called the \"Conquest of the Tropics,\" claiming to bring civilization to benighted peoples and cultivation to unproductive nature. In competitive cooperation with local landed and political elites, they not only cleared natural forests but also displaced multicrop tribal and peasant lands with monocrop export plantations rooted in private property regimes. This book is a rich history of the transformation of the tropics in modern times, pointing ultimately to the declining biodiversity that has resulted from the domestication of widely varied natural systems. Richard P. Tucker graphically illustrates his study with six major crops, each a virtual empire in itself—sugar, bananas, coffee, rubber, beef, and timber. He concludes that as long as corporate-dominated free trade is ascendant, paying little heed to its long-term ecological consequences, the health of the tropical world is gravely endangered.

What is the relationship between employment and conflict in fragile states? Although this question cannot be definitively answered, a large body of research suggests that in countries emerging from conflict, peace is likelier to endure if growth can be rapidly restored and translated into economic opportunities for large segments of the population. With a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, this report attempts to address the challenge of employment and conflict in fragile states. First, it reviews employment- creation activities in fragile and conflict-affected environments to see which approaches appear most promising. Second, it presents specific recommendations for an employment-generation strategy over the medium term. The report argues that in Sub-Saharan Africa, where almost three-quarters of the labor force still works in agriculture, agricultural value chains may have the greatest potential to diversify rural economies, raise household incomes, and thereby contribute to stability. The core of value chain development involves strengthening relationships a critical task in fragile and post- conflict environments, where trust and social cohesion have been shattered. The argument made by this report is developed as follows: the remainder of this chapter briefly defines fragility and summarizes current thinking about its relationship to economic development. It then concludes with a brief discussion of the historical roots of fragility in Sub-Saharan Africa and the implications of this trajectory for the region's current and future development. The second chapter reviews prevailing approaches to employment in fragile and conflict-affected environments. The third chapter examines current and emerging practice directed at restoring private sector activity. It briefly reviews the World Bank's approach to private sector development in four post- conflict countries and then introduces new arguments for earlier and bolder efforts to restore economies and generate employment. Chapter four concludes with recommendations for building on this emerging practice.

Forests have been at the fault lines of contact between African peasant communities in the Tanzanian coastal hinterland and outsiders for almost two centuries. In recent decades, a global call for biodiversity preservation has been the main challenge to Tanzanians and their forests.Thaddeus Sunseriuses the lens of forest history to explore some of the most profound transformations in Tanzania from the nineteenth century to the present. He explores anticolonial rebellions, the world wars, the depression, the Cold War, oil shocks, and nationalism through their intersections with and impacts on Tanzania's coastal forests and woodlands. InWielding the Ax, forest history becomes a microcosm of the origins, nature, and demise of colonial rule in East Africa and of the first fitful decades of independence.Wielding the Axis a story of changing constellations of power over forests, beginning with African chiefs and forest spirits, both known as \"ax-wielders,\" and ending with international conservation experts who wield scientific knowledge as a means to controlling forest access. The modern international concern over tropical deforestation cannot be understood without an awareness of the long-term history of these forest struggles.

Colonial relations of political administration are being reproduced in the current era of participation and decentralisation. In natural resource management, participation and decentralisation are promoted on the basis that they can increase equity, yield greater efficiency, benefit the environment and contribute to rural development. Reaping these benefits is predicated on (1) the devolution of some real powers over natural resources to local populations, and (2) the existence of locally accountable authorities to whom those powers can be devolved. However, a limited set of highly circumscribed powers are being devolved to locally accountable authorities, and most local authorities to whom powers are being devolved are systematically structured to be upwardly accountable to the central state, rather than downwardly accountable to local populations. Many of the new laws being passed in the name of participation and decentralisation administer rather than enfranchise. The article examines the historical legal underpinnings of the powers and accountability of state-backed rural authorities (chiefs and rural councils), the authorities through which current natural resource management projects in Burkina Faso and in Mali represent local populations, and the decisions being devolved to local bodies in new natural resource management efforts. Without reform local interventions risk reproducing the inequities of their centralised political-administrative context. Rather than pitting the state against society by depicting the state as a negative force and society and non-state institutions as positive—as is done in many decentralisation and participatory efforts—this article suggests that representation through local government can be the basis of general and enduring participation by society in public affairs. Cet article suggère que les rapports coloniaux de l'administration politique sont reproduits dans l'ère actuelle de la participation et de la decentralisation. En matière de gestion des ressources naturelles, on encourage la participation et la décentralisation en partant du principe qu'elles accroissent l'équité rurale, augmentent les rendements, sont favorables à l'environnement et contribuent au développement rural. Les conditions de jouissance de ces bénéfices regroupent (1) le transfert aux populations locales de certains pouvoirs réels sur les ressources naturelles et (2) l'existence d'autorités responsables sur le plan local auxquelles ces pouvoirs peuvent être transférés. Or, seul un ensemble limité de pouvoirs fortement circonscrits sont actuellement transférés à des autorites responsables sur le plan local et la plupart des autorités locales qui bénéficient d'un transfert de pouvoirs sont systématiquement structurées de manière à être responsables devant l'Etat central, et non pas devant les populations locales. Parmi les nouvelles lois passées au nom de la participation et de la décentralisation, nombreuses sont celles qui administrent plutot qu'elles affranchissent. Cet article étudie les fondements juridiques historiques des pouvoirs et la responsabilité des autorités locales soutenues par l'Etat (chefs et comites ruraux), les autorités à travers lesquelles les projets de gestion des ressources naturelles au Burkina Faso et au Mali représented les populations locales ainsi que les décisions déléguées aux organismes locaux dans le cadre de nouveaux projets de gestion des ressources naturelles. Sans une réforme, les interventions locales risquent de reproduire les inégalités de leur contexte politico-administratif centralisé. Au lieu d'opposer l'Etat à la société en décrivant l'Etat comme une force négative et la société et les institutions non étatiques comme positives, comme c'est le cas dans de nombreuses initiatives de décentralisation et de participation, cet article suggère qu'une représentation passant par l'administration locale peut être la base d'une participation générate et durable de la société aux affaires publiques.

The aim of this paper is to explore how social relations influence land use and natural resource management at the local level. Through empirical analysis that tracks changes in land use and environment over 40 years, we present evidence of a process of agrarianization based on commercialization of crops and expansion of cultivated land. With the concept of livelihood strategies as an analytical framework, subcommunity processes are analyzed for their impact on intensification and degradation. Accumulating strategies are linked to expansion, commercial crop production, and selective intensification through high-value inputs, while at the other end of the scale, peasant-labor households endure exhausted or marginal potential land resources combined with lack of flexibility in input consumption. The article shows how degradation and intensification occur simultaneously and how incomes may increase even during processes of land degradation. We argue that a livelihood approach can be useful in uncovering and explaining these processes.

This article takes a historical approach to argue that communal lands in Zimbabwe are a construct inherited from colonial days (prior to 1980) which governments in post-colonial Zimbabwe have found convenient to maintain rather than dismantle. The construct is not only a convenient framework for the delivery of collective consumption goods but in turn it enables the government to subtly use communal lands as a framework for social control, especially in terms of urban management. The continued existence of communal land areas and land rights also sustains processes of social control at the household level. However, these are issues that will not receive attention in land debates as long as the larger problem of redistribution of large-scale commercial farms remains unresolved. Cet article adopte un point de vue historique pour affirmer qu'au Zimbabwe les terres communautaires sont un concept hérité de la période coloniale (avant 1980) que les gouvernements postcoloniaux du Zimbabwe ont jugé plus commode de conserver que de démanteler. Ce concept n'est pas seulement un cadre pratique de distribution de biens de consommation collective, il permet aussi au gouvernement d'utiliser subtilement les terres communautaires comme cadre de controle social, notamment en termes de gestión urbaine. Le maintien des terres communautaires et des droits afférents à ces terres soutient également les processus de controle social au niveau des ménages. Cependant, ces questions ne vont pas retenir l'attention dans les débats consacrés à la terre tant que le problème plus vaste de la redistribution des grandes exploitations agricoles commerciales n'est pas résolu.

The expansion of Nigeria's artisanal fisheries has been a rare economic success story during the 1980s. Without assistance from government agencies the canoe fishermen, many of them Ghanaian migrants, have responded successfully to the opportunities offered by the Lagos market. In recent years declining fish stocks and competition from trawlers have forced shore-based fishermen to adapt their operations to changing circumstances. In describing a number of such responses the article tackles a number of wider themes in economic anthropology and African studies. Contrasting the opposition and co-operation of industrial and artisanal fisheries throws an interesting light on the informal sector debates, while the role played by the marine police and the navy feeds into the discussion on the African state. L'essor de la pêche artisanale au Nigeria fut l'une des rares réussites économiques des années 80. Sans assistance des agences gouvernementales, les pêcheurs en pirogues, migrants ghanéens pour une grande part, ont réagi avec succès aux opportunités offertes par le marché de Lagos. Au cours de ces dernieres années, la diminution des réserves de poissons et la concurrence des chalutiers ont forcé les pêcheurs côtiers à adapter leurs activités à cette nouvelle situation. En décrivant un certain nombre de ces réactions, l'article aborde plusieurs thèmes plus larges d'études économiques anthropologiques et africaines. Faisant ressortir le contraste entre opposition et coopération de la pêche industrielle et de la pêche artisanale, il jette une luniiere intéressante sur les débats qui ont lieu au sein du secteur informel, tandis que le rôle de la police maritime et de la marine alimente le débat sur l'état africain.

This article examines the moral ambiguities of materialism that emerged with the coffee trade in north-west Tanganyika. The White Fathers, who played a prominent (often unintended) role in the growth of coffee markets, and the Haya villagers who became coffee farmers and traders alike understood the threat that commercial activity posed to non-commercial forms of value. The Fathers' attitude to the trade was often at odds with what they perceived as their evangelical mission; equally interesting are the ways this quandary shaped the attitudes and practices of the Haya people in the twentieth century. The article describes the White Fathers' anxieties about ‘civilisation’, then turns to the concerns of Haya farmers and traders as they developed in subsequent decades. The aim is to address the projects through which the moral ambiguities of the forms of materialism the coffee trade ushered in were—and were not—resolved, so as to illuminate the complex entanglement of colonisers and colonised. Cet article examine les ambiguïtés morales du matérialisme qui est apparu avec le commerce du café dans la région nord-ouest du Tanganyika. Les Pères Blancs, qui ont joué un rôle important (souvent involontaire) dans la croissance des marchés du café, et les habitants des villages hayas, devenus producteurs et négociants de café, ont compris que l'activité commerciale était une menace pour les formes de valeurs non-commerciales. L'attitude des Pères à l'égard de ce commerce était souvent en contradiction avec ce qu'ils percevaient comme leur mission évangélique; tout aussi intéressante était la manière dont ce dilemme a façonné les attitudes et les usages des Hayas au vingtième siècle. L'article décrit les fortes inquiétudes des Pères Blancs concernant la “civilisation”, avant de se tourner vers l'évolution des inquiétudes des producteurs et négociants hayas au cours des décennies suivantes. Le but est d'étudier les projets à travers lesquels les ambiguïtés morales des formes de matérialisme engendrées par le commerce du café ont été résolues—et non résolues—, afin d'éclairer l'imbroglio dans lequel se trouvaient les colonisateurs et les colonisés.