CNH-L: Land transactions and investments: Impacts on agricultural production, ecosystem services, and food-energy security

在过去的十年里，许多低收入国家有数千万公顷的土地易手，其中英国、中国和美国是最大的土地投资来源国。对土地的控制使投资者能够种植新的商品作物，部署新的农业做法和技术，并将产出出售给新的用途和新的市场--这对粮食--能源安全、人类福祉和生态过程--产生了相关影响。在低收入热带国家，土地所有权和使用权变化的规模和速度迅速增加。该项目将评估埃塞俄比亚土地交易的结果，以确定土地交易何时产生积极或消极结果。埃塞俄比亚见证了数千笔交易，并拥有大量外部投资，包括来自美国的投资。这项研究将特别侧重于农业、生态、粮食和能源安全成果。该项目将产生新的数据，供其他学者和研究人员公开使用，在美国培训科学家，并在国际合作者中建立更大的研究能力，并产生将为政府机构、非政府组织和捐助组织的决策者带来实际利益的结果。其他地区的美国投资者将对土地保有权变化对农场水平的过程、生产者激励和劳动实践的影响提出一般性的命题。该项目将特别侧重于量化社会经济、土地覆盖/变化和生态影响的性质和程度，并模拟土地交易的因果顺序和反馈循环。这项研究将促进对土地保有权和制度变化如何推动耦合农业生态系统中人与自然的相互作用和影响的概念性理解。该项目将汇总和利用现有的社会经济数据集，并从八个交易点收集原始社会和生态数据。这项研究将在三个主要方面有助于更好地了解土地交易的影响以及土地保有权变化的社会和生态影响。它将：(1)通过综合、定量分析和以多层次社会、经济、生态和生物物理数据为基础的基于代理人的建模，发展对土地保有权变化和转移的生计、土地利用和生态影响的新的理论见解；(2)加强现有方法，利用农业和森林地貌的遥感数据，特别是通过开发更好的空间分析技术，了解和检测土地覆盖的变化；(3)改进统计分析和基于计算机模拟的预测，特别是通过开发更好的空间分析技术。总体而言，该项目将展示与土地交易相关的土地过渡路径如何导致生计和土地覆盖变化的不同模式。

Tens of millions of hectares of land has changed hands in the last decade in a large number of lower-income countries, with the UK, China, and the US being among the largest sources of land investments. Control over land enables investors to cultivate new commodity crops, deploy new agricultural practices and technologies, and sell output for new uses and in new markets - with associated impacts on food-energy security, human well-being, and ecological processes. The scale and pace of changes in land ownership and access has increased rapidly in lower-income tropical countries. The project will assess outcomes of land transactions in Ethiopia - a country that has witnessed thousands of transactions and has substantial external investment, including from the United States - to identify when land transactions generate positive versus negative outcomes. This research will focus in particular on agricultural, ecological, and food and energy security outcomes. The project will generate new data that will be available for public use by other scholars and researchers, train scientists in the United States and build greater research capacity among international collaborators, and produce findings that will hold practical interest for decision makers in government agencies, NGOs, and donor organizations. Generalizable propositions about the impacts of land tenure changes on farm level processes, producer incentives, and labor practices will be of interest to US investors in other regions. The project will focus in particular on quantifying the nature and extent of socioeconomic, land cover/change and ecological impacts, and modeling the causal sequences and feedback loops of land transactions. The research will advance the conceptual understanding of how tenure and institutional changes on land drive human-nature interactions and impacts in coupled agro-ecological systems. The project will aggregate and leverage existing socioeconomic datasets, and collect original social and ecological data from eight transaction sites. The research will contribute in three major ways towards an improved understanding of the effects of land transactions and the social and ecological effects of land tenure changes. It will: (1) Develop new theoretical insights into the livelihood, land use, and ecological effects of land tenure changes and displacement through integration, quantitative analyses, and agent based modeling based on multi-level social, economic, ecological, and biophysical data; (2) Enhance existing methods to understand and detect changes in land cover using remote sensing data for both agricultural and forest landscapes, particularly for the drier eastern African region; and (3) Improve statistical analysis and computer simulations-based predictions, in particular by developing better spatial analysis techniques. Overall, the project will show how varying patterns of livelihood and land cover changes result from land transition pathways associated with land transactions.