Global shocks, cascading disruptions, and (re-)connections: viewing the COVID-19 pandemic as concurrent natural experiments to understand land system dynamics.

Context: For nearly three years, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted human well-being and livelihoods, communities, and economies in myriad ways with consequences for social-ecological systems across the planet. The pandemic represents a global shock in multiple dimensions that has already, and is likely to continue to have, far-reaching effects on land systems and on those depending on them for their livelihoods. Objectives: We focus on the observed effects of the pandemic on landscapes and people composing diverse land systems across the globe. Methods: We highlight the interrelated impacts of the pandemic shock on the economic, health, and mobility dimensions of land systems using six vignettes from different land systems on four continents, analyzed through the lens of socio-ecological resilience and the telecoupling framework. We present preliminary comparative insights gathered through interviews, surveys, key informants, and authors' observations and propose new research avenues for land system scientists. Results: The pandemic's effects have been unevenly distributed, context-specific, and dependent on the multiple connections that link land systems across the globe. Conclusions: We argue that the pandemic presents concurrent "natural experiments" that can advance our understanding of the intricate ways in which global shocks produce direct, indirect, and spillover effects on local and regional landscapes and land systems. These propagating shock effects disrupt existing connections, forge new connections, and re-establish former connections between peoples, landscapes, and land systems. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10980-023-01604-2.

How do large-scale agricultural investments affect land use and the environment on the western slopes of Mount Kenya? Empirical evidence based on small-scale farmers' perceptions and remote sensing.

Africa has been heavily targeted by large-scale agricultural investments (LAIs) throughout the last decade, with scarcely known impacts on local social-ecological systems. In Kenya, a large number of LAIs were made in the region northwest of Mount Kenya. These large-scale farms produce vegetables and flowers mainly for European markets. However, land use in the region remains dominated by small-scale crop and livestock farms with less than 1 ha of land each, who produce both for their own subsistence and for the local markets. We interviewed 100 small-scale farmers living near five different LAIs to elicit their perceptions of the impacts that these LAIs have on their land use and the overall environment. Furthermore, we analyzed remotely sensed land cover and land use data to assess land use change in the vicinity of the five LAIs. While land use change did not follow a clear trend, a number of small-scale farmers did adapt their crop management to environmental changes such as a reduced river water flows and increased pests, which they attributed to the presence of LAIs. Despite the high number of open conflicts between small-scale land users and LAIs around the issue of river water abstraction, the main environmental impact, felt by almost half of the interviewed land users, was air pollution with agrochemicals sprayed on the LAIs' land. Even though only a low percentage of local land users and their household members were directly involved with LAIs, a large majority of respondents favored the presence of LAIs nearby, as they are believed to contribute to the region's overall economic development.