Towards a Spatial Understanding of Trade-Offs in Sustainable Development: A Meso-Scale Analysis of the Nexus between Land Use, Poverty, and Environment in the XXXX PDR.

@entity1 @entity4602 @entity12767
UNASSIGNED: In land systems, equitably managing trade-offs between planetary boundaries and @entity1 development needs represents a grand challenge in sustainability oriented initiatives. Informing such initiatives requires knowledge about the nexus between land use, poverty, and environment. This paper presents results from @entity4602 PDR, where we combined nationwide spatial data on land use types and the environmental state of landscapes with village-level poverty indicators. Our analysis reveals two general but contrasting trends. First, landscapes with paddy or permanent @entity12767 allow a greater number of @entity1 to live in less poverty but come at the price of a decrease in natural vegetation cover. Second, @entity1 practising extensive @entity12767 and living in intact environments are often better off than @entity1 in degraded paddy or permanent @entity12767 . As poverty rates within different landscape types vary more than between landscape types, we cannot stipulate a land use-poverty-environment nexus. However, the distinct spatial patterns or configurations of these rates point to other important factors at play. Drawing on ethnicity as a proximate factor for endogenous development potentials and accessibility as a proximate factor for external influences, we further explore these linkages. Ethnicity is strongly related to poverty in all land use types almost independently of accessibility, implying that social distance outweighs geographic or physical distance. In turn, accessibility, almost a precondition for poverty alleviation, is mainly beneficial to ethnic majority groups and @entity1 living in paddy or permanent @entity12767 . These groups are able to translate improved accessibility into poverty alleviation. Our results show that the concurrence of external influences with local-highly contextual-development potentials is key to shaping outcomes of the land use-poverty-environment nexus. By addressing such leverage points, these findings help guide more effective development interventions. At the same time, they point to the need in land change science to better integrate the understanding of place-based land indicators with process-based drivers of land use change.
