The wildland–urban interface (WUI) refers to zones where buildings intersect with undeveloped wildland vegetation, and identifying its ecological effects is crucial for understanding human–environment conflicts in relation to landscapes. Current WUI assessments have focused primarily on areas with high-density human activity in developed countries, with limited evidence of vegetation degradation in ecologically vulnerable regions with rapid increases in human activity, e.g., the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP). We mapped the WUI at a 100-m resolution from 2000 to 2020 on the QTP and quantified vegetation greenness degradation within WUI expansion areas based on the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), leaf area index (LAI) and solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF), using propensity score matching (PSM) to control for environmental covariate bias and a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach to eliminate background temporal trends, thereby quantifying the net suppressive effect of WUI expansion on vegetation.The results revealed that the WUI area expanded by 48% over the 20-year period, and the expansion was concentrated mainly at the western, southern, southeastern, and eastern margins of the QTP. Urban expansion had a mean total contribution of 89.6% to WUI expansion, approximately 9 times that of wildland. LAI degradation was 11.57%, NDVI degradation was 2.48%, and SIF degradation was 2.06%; all three indicators exhibited consistent degradation directions, confirming that the impact of WUI expansion on vegetation is dominated by leaf area loss and canopy structural simplification. Direct land conversion is the primary driver of LAI degradation, which proceeds through multiple pathways including direct clearing, landscape reorganisation with fragmentation amplification, and the concentration of grazing pressure.
Land degradation and native vegetation loss in Brazil have persisted despite a comprehensive land use regulatory framework. This study examines how Brazilian federal land use policies changed between 2000 and 2025 and how these changes relate to institutional government change. Drawing on historical institutionalism, qualitative policy analysis, and process tracing, the research analyzes 239 laws and decrees across eight environmental and agricultural policies over eight administrations. The findings show that policy goals persisted across governments, while rules, instruments, budgets, and institutional capacities shifted. Two critical junctures, Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment in 2015 and the start of Bolsonaro’s presidency in 2019, coincided with environmental policy replacement, institutional dismantling, and weakened enforcement. However, prior layering and conversion of environmental policies created resilience, enabling institutional recovery under Lula’s third administration beginning in 2023. Agricultural policies exhibited greater stability, reflecting entrenched economic and political coalitions. Linking policy change processes to vegetation loss data shows that periods of weakened implementation were associated with increased vegetation loss, whereas restored institutional coordination was associated with reduced deforestation. Targeted strategies, especially the Action Plans for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation, were highly effective when supported by institutional capacity. This study calls for greater integration between agricultural and environmental policies, using cross-compliant financial and technical instruments to combat land use change driving vegetation loss, matched with continued whole-territory monitoring and targeted actions across biomes. The findings underscore the critical role of stable interministerial coordination and long-term institutional foundations in sustaining conservation policy amid political volatility.
Despite rapid expansion of farmland transfer in rural China, the quality of contractual governance often fails to keep pace, raising the question of whether spatial consolidation arrangements can promote more complete contract terms. This study examines how coordinated land transfer promotes the standardization of farmland rental contracts within China’s three-rights separation framework. Drawing on primary household survey data from 1101 farming households across four counties in Guizhou Province, this study documents a robust positive relationship between the degree of spatial contiguity in transfer arrangements and the level of contract standardization. Mediation analysis applying the KHB decomposition method reveals that this effect is transmitted primarily through two operational channels: economies of scale and technology adaptation through mechanization adoption. Heterogeneity analysis further reveals that the standardization effect concentrates among operators with greater financial capacity, in regions with stronger market connectivity and irrigation infrastructure, and in villages where collective governance is comparatively weak.
Urban sprawl is a major spatial transformation process characterized by the unplanned expansion of urban areas into surrounding rural and natural landscapes. As a result, rural areas at the urban fringe are increasingly exposed to pressures driven by population growth, housing demand, and expanding transportation infrastructure, giving rise to hybrid “rurban” landscapes. Managing these areas requires not only monitoring land use change but also identifying zones at risk of transformation before irreversible change occurs.Since the 1980s, Antalya has experienced rapid population growth, tourism-driven economic expansion, and largely uncoordinated development, leading to significant changes in surrounding agricultural and rural landscapes. This study develops a Geographic Information System (GIS) and remote sensing–based spatial analysis framework to systematically identify rural areas under urban sprawl pressure. The approach integrates the direction and intensity of urban expansion with existing rural land use patterns to examine their spatial interactions.Using multi-temporal satellite imagery within a GIS environment, the spatio-temporal dynamics of urban growth were analyzed and rural areas with high susceptibility to urban encroachment were delineated. The results show that the impacts of urban sprawl extend beyond existing built-up areas and are increasingly concentrated in transitional rural zones that remain unurbanized yet are critical for planning.The identified spatial patterns provide a basis for an early warning framework to support the protection of agricultural land and the development of preventive land use policies. Although tested in Antalya, the proposed framework is transferable to regions experiencing similar urbanization dynamics.
Salinity intrusion is an emerging threat in low‑lying regions as climate‑driven fluvial/tidal flooding intensifies. Yet its impacts remain poorly characterised due to focus on biophysical processes and limited understanding of how it affects agricultural productivity, profitability, and risk exposure. The study sought to quantify the impact of flood‑induced salinisation on crop productivity and profitability, assess how it alters risk-return relationships, and evaluate how this affects crop competitiveness and optimal land‑use portfolios. The study focused on Greater Lincolnshire, United Kingdom as a case, and used spatially explicit crop, land‑grade, and flood‑risk datasets integrated with enterprise‑level gross‑margin modelling, Monte‑Carlo simulation, and cross‑crop competitiveness analysis. Without flood-induced salinisation, profitability varies across crops, with margins from £ 1114/ha for beet and £ 825/ha for winter wheat to £ 255/ha for potatoes. Under the salinity scenario, all crops incur substantial losses from simulated yield declines. Potatoes show the greatest drop (–£1382/ha), followed by beet (–£442/ha) and cereals such as winter wheat (–£339/ha), spring wheat (–£273/ha), and spring barley (–£304/ha). Risk-return analysis reveals that salinity systematically collapses the profitability hierarchy across crops, compressing them into a uniformly low‑return, moderate‑risk zone and thereby eliminating the high‑value production opportunities that currently underpin regional agricultural competitiveness. Competitiveness shifts markedly, with potatoes most disadvantaged and barley relatively resilient, while portfolio optimisation indicates strong reallocation toward winter wheat. Overall, the scenario suggests that flood‑induced salinisation could become a transformative constraint without flood defences, underscoring the need for proactive mitigation policies, adaptive planning, and investment in salt‑tolerant crop options.
Deforestation in Brazil’s Legal Amazon increased sharply after 2018, renewing concerns about environmental governance and frontier expansion. Yet it remains unclear whether this surge reflected only higher forest loss or a deeper reconfiguration of land-use drivers. The study examines whether the relationships linking municipal deforestation to governance, climate, and agricultural expansion changed after 2018. Using a municipality-year panel covering 634 municipalities for 2010–2021, the study combines satellite-based deforestation data, municipal economic accounts, gridded climate indicators, and environmental enforcement records in panel interaction and event-study models, complemented by an aggregate break-date assessment and spatial comparisons between the arc of deforestation and the interior Amazon. The results are consistent with a post-2018 reconfiguration of deforestation dynamics rather than only an increase in forest-loss levels. After 2018, the already positive enforcement–deforestation association strengthened substantially, indicating a change in magnitude rather than a sign reversal. This pattern is consistent with enforcement actions becoming increasingly concentrated in municipalities under greater deforestation pressure. Baseline estimates suggest that precipitation becomes more positively associated with deforestation while temperature loses explanatory relevance. These climatic shifts are sensitive to specifications that absorb time-varying spatial shocks, while the agricultural channel strengthens mainly outside the consolidated frontier. The baseline estimates are also spatially uneven: precipitation is positively associated with deforestation in the arc but negatively associated in the interior. These findings point to a qualitative restructuring of land-use pressures and support policy responses that combine restored enforcement with spatially differentiated governance strategies.
Global climate change and extreme precipitation events pose increasing threats to agricultural systems worldwide. However, existing studies often fail to integrate the synergistic effects of precipitation, neglect the role of transportation infrastructure, and rely on data with coarse spatial resolution. To address these gaps, this study develops a “climate–cropland–transportation” framework. By integrating high-resolution hourly precipitation data (0.1˚) and 30 m cropland distribution data, we quantified the thresholds, frequency, and intensity of extreme precipitation to construct a Cropland Extreme Precipitation Exposure (CEPE) index using the entropy weighting method. Four transportation accessibility scenarios—considering the presence or absence of expressways connecting prefecture- and county-level cities—were simulated to examine their spatial coupling with the CEPE. The results reveal pronounced spatial heterogeneity in CEPE across the study area. Rural population density and industrial structure exert nonlinear regulatory effects on cropland exposure to extreme precipitation. Extreme precipitation intensity peaks at moderate population levels, while areas where the primary industry accounts for 30–40% of the economy constitute a critical buffering zone. Geographically, croplands in southwest China remain highly threatened by extreme precipitation, whereas the exposure fluctuates considerably across the Huang–Huai–Hai Plain and the Northeast China Plain. Uneven transportation accessibility further amplifies these exposures, creating vulnerability traps in regions with high exposure but low accessibility, such as the Northeast China Plain. These findings offer valuable insights for developing targeted agricultural and infrastructure strategies to strengthen agricultural resilience under climate extremes.
Urban green spaces (UGSs) in rapidly urbanizing African cities are increasingly threatened by weak governance systems and institutional inefficiencies. This study investigates how formal and informal institutional arrangements shape governance responsibilities, interagency coordination, and UGS management in the Greater Tamale Metropolitan Area, Ghana. Using an institutional theory framework, the research adopted a qualitative case study approach, involving 54 semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and field observations across selected communities: Sagnarigu, Nyohini, Gumbeheni, Taha, and Kukuo. The findings reveal that UGS governance in Tamale operates through a hybrid institutional system in which statutory planning frameworks coexist with customary land tenure systems. Traditional authorities, particularly chiefs, play a significant role in land allocation and initiating planning processes, while state institutions primarily provide regulatory oversight. Although this arrangement creates opportunities for legitimacy and local participation, it also generates ambiguities in authority, weak accountability, and poor coordination among stakeholders. Collaboration tends to be stronger within institutional groupings than between local actors and formal spatial planning institutions. The study further identifies critical institutional constraints, including overlapping mandates, limited public participation, and severe staffing shortages in planning and environmental agencies. Specifically, only one of the required five physical planning officers and one of the four required development control officers were available during the study period. These institutional weaknesses, compounded by rapid urbanization and increasing land-use pressures, contribute significantly to the decline of UGS. The study concludes that strengthening coordination, accountability, participation, and institutional capacity is essential for sustainable and inclusive UGS governance.
The spatiotemporal patterns of land consolidation in China have undergone profound reshaping, exerting significant impacts on socioeconomic development. Based on land use data from 2000 to 2024, this study analyzes the multi-scale spatiotemporal evolution and multidimensional effects of Chin’s land consolidation from the two dimensions of quantity and quality, specifically through cultivated land conversion area and cultivated land fragmentation. Significant spatial heterogeneity is identified. Four governance modes emerge: a "high-quantity-high-quality" synergistic improvement in the Northeast Plain; a coexistence of "high-quantity-low-quality" in the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau; a "low-quantity-high-quality" optimization in the Huang-Huai-Hai Plain; and a "low-quantity-low-quality" lag in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Markov-chain forecasts indicate that cultivated land conversion is mobile under policy intervention and spatial spillovers, whereas cultivated land fragmentation remains rigid and stable due to natural constraints and spatial lock-in. Using the High-Standard Farmland Construction Policy as a quasi-natural experiment, land consolidation is found to have significantly increased grain production capacity and agricultural net carbon sequestration, while its effects on land transfer exhibit marked regional heterogeneity. Stronger policy responses in yield improvement and carbon-sink gains are observed in central western regions and major grain-producing areas, whereas land-transfer markets in eastern China are more sensitive to policy shocks. The study provides systematic empirical evidence for improving territorial-spatial governance and offers China’s experience to global sustainable land management.
Housing inequalities have long been a pressing global issue, particularly in the context of rapidly transforming urban housing markets. However, intra-urban spatiotemporal disparities in housing price dynamics remain insufficiently understood. By developing an infrastructural approach operationalized through interpretable machine-learning methods that explicitly incorporate spatiotemporal heterogeneity, this study examines the complex capitalization of key infrastructures into housing prices, drawing on 288,570 second-hand housing transactions and multi-source geographic data from 2010 to 2023 in Shenzhen, one of the largest and most dynamic urban housing markets in China. The results reveal increasingly intensified housing price disparities, which are particularly pronounced within school catchment areas and 15-minute infrastructure-accessible neighborhoods. Compared with physical infrastructures, as well as structural and locational attributes, social infrastructures—especially public schools—are more decisively and consistently associated with housing prices. Their spatiotemporally heterogenous capitalization and increasingly salient threshold effects highlight the agency of social infrastructures in leveraging urban development and (re)shaping social inequalities, thereby advancing the understanding of housing price disparities. Finally, this study provides dynamic, fine-grained evidence to support locally calibrated and stage-sensitive urban planning and housing policies.
With booming global trade and deepened connectivity, China, a central player in global oilseed trade networks, has not only eased domestic supply shortages but also fundamentally reshaped global resource allocation. However, the specific impacts of this trade on the quantity and quality of cultivated land protection remain under-explored. Using complex network analysis under the metacoupling framework, this study examines the evolution of major oilseed trade patterns from 2010 to 2023 and their metacoupling impacts. During 2010–2023, the global oilseed trade network exhibited escalating structural tightness and localized clustering, evidenced by a 27.2% and 24.6% increase in network density for the S1 and S2 networks, respectively, alongside a notable transition from regional fragmentation to transcontinental integration. Crucially, China’s oilseed imports activate a "Dual-track Land Sparing Mechanism": quantitatively expanding global land savings from 116.4 to 193.1 M ha, while qualitatively buffering the domestic agricultural system by trade-driven shifts in cultivation patterns, thereby stabilizing China’s domestic cultivated land pressure index at a low safety margin (0.13–0.16). This study highlights the pivotal role of trade in balancing national food security with global sustainable land management. Future policies should focus on diversifying import sources to sustain these quantity-quality benefits against supply concentration risks.
Conservation covenants are an innovative legal mechanism that modify private property rights to promote biodiversity benefits. Their use is increasing as governments encourage private land conservation to help meet national and global biodiversity goals, such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. However, existing use of covenants from a variety of countries, including Australia, New Zealand and the United States, highlights some limitations. There is limited explicit accommodation of changing circumstances such as climate impacts; insufficient support to landowners and a need for increased environmental monitoring and compliance oversight. Several actions could be taken to ameliorate these and other law-related impediments, including improved reciprocity between parties to covenants, designing covenants with greater flexibility, and improving integrity mechanisms.
Urban greening has become a widely adopted policy strategy for improving environmental quality and urban livability. However, the effectiveness of large-scale government-led greening programs and their ecological outcomes remain insufficiently evaluated, particularly in rapidly urbanizing countries. China’s National Garden City Program (NGCP), implemented nationwide for more than three decades, represents one of the world’s most extensive urban greening policy initiatives. Yet its actual impacts and underlying mechanisms across different regions and city types remain unclear. Using panel data from 293 prefecture-level cities between 2000 and 2022, this study applies a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) model to estimate the causal effects of the NGCP on urban greening. Results show that the NGCP significantly increases urban green coverage rates, but does not produce significant improvements in NDVI. Policy impacts vary spatially, with significant improvements in northern and southern cities and sub-provincial cities, while remaining insignificant in northwestern and Qinghai–Tibet regions. Mediation analysis indicates that industrial structure adjustment contributes to improvements in built-up-area NDVI, whereas fiscal investment is not a significant pathway. These findings demonstrate that government-led greening policies can effectively expand urban greenspace quantity but may not necessarily improve greenspace quality. The study highlights the importance of multidimensional evaluation frameworks and context-sensitive governance strategies for enhancing the ecological effectiveness of urban greening programs. The findings also provide evidence to support policymakers in refining the implementation and evaluation of urban greening policies, thereby improving the ecological effectiveness of future greening initiatives.
This article examines unequal access to coastal land in Mahajanga, Madagascar, under legal pluralism and growing tourism pressure. It analyses the gap between state land law, customary tenure practices and effective control over coastal space. The study uses a mixed-methods single-case design. Primary data come from 300 participants: 180 completed structured questionnaires and 120 took part in semi-structured interviews. Additional primary evidence includes observations across 16 sites, georeferenced records, field photographs and 100 locally collected taratasy, or informal land deeds. Secondary data include 47 land registration files, legal texts, cadastral records, census data and satellite imagery. Formal tenure security rarely matches widespread customary occupation. Among the 200 local household and resident participants, 72.0% relied mainly on customary arrangements, while only 15.0% held a registered land title. Coastal sectors with greater tourism development also show higher land values, a stronger concentration of formal transactions near the shoreline and more conflicts over access, enclosure and territorial control. Formal registration remains easier for actors with greater financial resources and stronger administrative networks. Within the Amborovy coastal sector, particularly in Marohala, Petite Plage and Grand Pavois, fences and tourism facilities restrict public access to the shore and reduce spaces used by fishing households. Existing land management tools therefore give limited protection to long-established occupants during rapid market change. The findings support closer coordination between land administration, local land uses and public coastal access. The case extends debates on legal pluralism and tourism-led land restructuring to secondary coastal cities in the Global South.
Customary land governance is widely studied in Northern Ghana for its failures, yet its contributions to social cohesion, community development, and resource management are underexplored. This study bridges that gap using a qualitative case of the Bole Traditional Area in the Savannah Region of Ghana, where customary land governance remains active and legitimate despite pressures from land commercialisation, small-scale mining and urbanisation. Drawing on twenty key informant interviews (KII) with land custodians (tindanas), chiefs, and community members, with eight focus group discussions, two each across the four communities (Kalba, Gbeniyiri, Soma, and Datompilayiri). The study employed thematic data analysis to examine how traditional values shape land governance, conflict resolution, environmental stewardship, and access equity. This study builds on Ostrom’s Common Pool Resource Theory, expanding it by showing how spiritual legitimacy is central and not periphery to effective customary governance, a dimension historically neglected by the framework. The study reveals that, land spiritual framing makes conflict resolution a moral process that sustains compliance beyond coercion, it also revealed that, indigenous conservation practices function as adaptive resource management strategies underrecognised by statutory frameworks, also gendered and generational hierarchies persistently constrain women and youth land access, with reforms failing to dismantle underlying inequalities. The study suggests a hybrid governance framework that honours indigenous strategies while addressing exclusion.
Urban expansion is strongly determined by changes in urban population and the density in which new residents settle. Consequently, assessments of future changes in urban area depend on population and density projections. While the former are well-established, the latter have received much less research attention. To fill this void, we set up a time series representing most countries around the globe describing urban population density and several explanatory variables. Using a panel regression approach with country-fixed effects we explain the variation in density levels over time. The results indicate that urban density increases with growing total urban population and decreases with increasing levels of urbanisation. The latter effect diminishes, however, when the urban population fraction increases even further. These results indicate a sequence of increasing, decreasing and stabilising urban densities with increasing urban population shares. This succession can be linked to subsequent development stages of urbanisation, suburbanisation and eventually reurbanisation. The latter stage remains rare in our time series, however, as only a few countries reach the corresponding high urbanisation rates. Furthermore, we find that urban densities decrease with growing national income per capita. This may indicate that higher incomes enable suburbanisation to more dispersed urban areas with larger residences but can also be associated with the advent of smaller households and the growth of non-residential sectors such as industry and commerce. Conversely, urban density increases with higher agricultural land values that we proxy with a novel primary production intensity variable. We use our explanatory results to determine country-specific future urban areas following a commonly applied socio-economic scenario (SSP2) and suggest the total global urban area may triple from 2015 to 2100.
Indigenous Peoples' Lands (IPLs) play a key role in biodiversity conservation, yet IPLs are vulnerable to land grabbing for agricultural development. To understand the potential habitat exposure and main commodities overlapping with land grabs on IPLs, we combined the spatial distribution of land grabs intended for agricultural crops, plantations, and logging on IPLs with biodiversity metrics for mammal and bird species. Globally, 9.4 Mha of land grabs were on IPLs, with Russia (4.5 Mha), Myanmar (0.7 Mha), and Indonesia (0.7 Mha) having the highest areas. Land grabs were mainly for logging in Russia, biofuels in Myanmar, and a mixture of non-food, food, and biofuel crops in Indonesia. Oil palm (39 kha) and rice (37 kha) were the food crops and oil palm (42 kha) the biofuel crop associated with the highest deforestation areas on grabbed IPLs, while it was rubber (6 kha) for non-food crops. Deforestation on grabbed IPLs overlapped with 3213 species ranges with the highest potential habitat exposure in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam, on land grabs intended for oil palm, rubber crops, and timber plantations. Our results show that there are substantial land grabs on IPLs with a considerable potential habitat exposure, hence more effort is needed to protect IPL rights, ensuring indigenous stewardship of their land and biodiversity conservation.
This study examines how accessibility to employment and everyday services and exposure to environmental and health burdens are associated with the geographic presence and concentration of federally subsidized housing in the Washington metropolitan area. Affordable housing programs allocate units through distinct institutional mechanisms that shape residential location patterns. Little is known about how these allocation structures correspond jointly with accessibility and environmental exposure. The analysis contrasts the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program with the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program. The LIHTC program supports place-based developments selected by private developers through project-level allocation processes. The HCV program provides tenant-based subsidies that enable households to lease units in the private rental market, where affordability constraints and landlord participation shape residential options across a broader set of locations. This institutional contrast enables the examination of whether accessibility and environmental exposure are associated differently under project-based versus tenant-based housing assistance. Census tract–level measures of accessibility and environmental exposure are incorporated into two-step models that estimate both the likelihood of program presence and the concentration of program units. Three findings emerge. First, employment accessibility aligns more strongly with HCV than with LIHTC. Employment access increases both the likelihood of HCV presence and the share of HCV units, whereas its association with LIHTC remains confined to the probability of presence and does not extend to the project scale. Second, environmental and health burdens correspond differently across programs. LIHTC developments are more strongly associated with census tracts characterized by traffic exposure, lower life expectancy, and chronic health conditions, while HCV households exhibit a broader but more heterogeneous exposure profile. Third, accessibility and environmental exposure are not independently distributed across affordable housing programs. Higher employment accessibility in LIHTC tracts corresponds with elevated environmental exposure, whereas the employment accessibility gradient for HCV weakens as environmental exposure increases. These conditional patterns demonstrate that accessibility and environmental exposure correspond in distinct program-specific configurations across neighborhoods.
This editorial introduces the Special Issue, Sustainability Dialogue: Land Management Practices and Climate Change Resilience Efforts, developed from a Summer School and journal call involving scholars and practitioners across the global sustainability community. Its articles provide multidisciplinary teaching and reference material linking land governance, ecological processes, climate risk, technology, and human behaviour across rural, urban, forest, agricultural, and river-basin settings. Governance studies show that resilience requires coordinated institutions, secure land access, and incentives for long-term stewardship. At the same time, social research explains how local knowledge, livelihoods, adoption, public services, and environmental justice shape intervention outcomes. Ecological studies examine biodiversity, wetlands, forests, soils, ecosystem services, carbon storage, and fragmentation, identifying practical pathways such as agroforestry, conservation agriculture, green infrastructure, nature-based solutions, urban forestry, and restoration, alongside trade-offs involving production, urbanisation, energy, property values, and carbon sequestration. Remote sensing, GIS, modelling, artificial intelligence, and scenario tools support hazard mapping, attribution, forecasting, and intervention planning. Evidence from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas links diagnosis, prediction, governance, finance, and implementation, advancing place-based, socially accountable, climate-resilient land management.
Forest carbon gross emissions from deforestation and degradation arise from interconnected socio-economic and ecological processes, including demographic pressure, urban expansion, and land-use transformation. In Ethiopia, these drivers exhibit strong spatial interdependence and temporal persistence, generating heterogeneous emission patterns that conventional econometric approaches may not sufficiently capture, especially the dynamic spatial characteristics of forest carbon emissions. This study examines the drivers of forest carbon gross emissions (FCGE) across time, space, and emission intensities using an integrated spatiotemporal framework that combines dynamic panel GMM estimation with spatial econometric models and the dynamic spatial Durbin model (DSDM)—alongside quantile regression analysis. Dynamic panel results show that population growth significantly increases FCGE, while the significant lagged FCGE term indicates strong persistence in forest carbon emissions over time. DSDM estimates indicate significant temporal persistence and spatial spillover effects, confirming that FCGE are driven by processes that are simultaneously dynamic and spatial, with stronger influences arising from boundary adjacency than from road network connectivity and distance decay. A 10% relative increase in urbanization is associated with an approximate 32% rise in emissions. Quantile regression results indicate strong asymmetries, with demographic, market, and land-use pressures exerting larger effects in high-emission regions. Overall, the findings underscore the need for coordinated, region-specific policies to mitigate FCGE, including early interventions to prevent persistent forest disturbances, targeted protection of vulnerable forest frontiers, stronger regulation of urban expansion, and locally tailored forest restoration strategies. The study provides robust, systems-based evidence to enhance REDD + implementation and climate-resilient environmental governance in Ethiopia and beyond.
