An actor-centered, scalable land system typology for addressing biodiversity loss in the world’s tropical dry woodlands

Pratzer, Marie and Meyfroidt, Patrick and Antongiovanni, Marina and Aragon, Roxana and Baldi, Germán and Czaplicki Cabezas, Stasiek and de la Vega-Leinert, Cristina A. and Dhyani, Shalini and Diepart, Jean-Christophe and Fernandez, Pedro David and Garnett, Stephen T. and Gavier Pizarro, Gregorio I. and Kalam, Tamanna and Koulgi, Pradeep and le Polain de Waroux, Yann and Marinaro, Sofia and Mastrangelo, Matias and Mueller, Daniel and Mueller, Robert and Murali, Ranjini and Nanni, Sofía and Nuñez-Regueiro, Mauricio and Prieto-Torres, David A. and Ratnam, Jayshree and Reddy, Chintala Sudhakar and Ribeiro, Natasha and Röder, Achim and Romero-Muñoz, Alfredo and Roy, Partha Sarathi and Rufin, Philippe and Rufino, Mariana and Sankaran, Mahesh and Torres, Ricardo and Vaidyanathan, Srinivas and Vallejos, Maria and Virah-Sawmy, Malika and Kuemmerle, Tobias (2024) An actor-centered, scalable land system typology for addressing biodiversity loss in the world’s tropical dry woodlands. Global Environmental Change, 86: 102849. ISSN 0959-3780

Abstract

Land use is a key driver of the ongoing biodiversity crisis and therefore also a major opportunity for its mitigation. However, appropriately considering the diversity of land-use actors and activities in conservation assessments and planning is challenging. As a result, top-down conservation policy and planning are often criticized for a lack of contextual nuance widely acknowledged to be required for effective and just conservation action. To address these challenges, we have developed a conceptually consistent, scalable land system typology and demonstrated its usefulness for the world's tropical dry woodlands. Our typology identifies key land-use actors and activities that represent typical threats to biodiversity and opportunities for conservation action. We identified land systems in a hierarchical way, with a global level allowing for broad-scale planning and comparative work. Nested within it, a regionalized level provides social-ecological specificity and context. We showcase this regionalization for five hotspots of land-use change and biodiversity loss in dry woodlands in Argentina, Bolivia, Mozambique, India, and Cambodia. Unlike other approaches to present land use, our typology accounts for the complexity of overlapping land uses. This allows, for example, assessment of how conservation measures conflict with other land uses, understanding of the social-ecological co-benefits and trade-offs of area-based conservation, mapping of threats, or targeting area-based and actor-based conservation measures. Moreover, our framework enables cross-regional learning by revealing both commonalities and social-ecological differences, as we demonstrate here for the world's tropical dry woodlands. By bridging the gap between global, top-down, and regional, bottom-up initiatives, our framework enables more contextually appropriate sustainability planning across scales and more targeted and social-ecologically nuanced interventions.