In rapidly changing tropical landscapes, large-scale resource exploitation threatens biodiversity, ecosystem services (ES) and human well-being. This study examines land use, ES and ecosystem disservices (EDS) in Savannakhet Province, Laos, focusing on household preferences amid shifting land use patterns. Using a survey of 336 households across 22 villages, we assessed preferences for 63 ES and 16 EDS, along with key land types providing or causing them. Our results highlight the great value attached to collecting wild plants for food, energy, medicine and handicrafts, and of landscape elements with cultural and spiritual meaning. Forests, residential areas and paddy fields are the most valued land types, while tree and agricultural plantations are considered less significant sources of ES. Provisioning ES (such as crop and tree cultivation, livestock keeping and wild plant collection) as well as regulation and maintenance ES (including disaster protection and water quality maintenance) are highly valued across all ecological zones. Among cultural ES, landscapes supporting health, recreation and education are also widely appreciated across all zones, while the transfer of ecological knowledge is particularly valued in subsistence-oriented areas. EDS perceptions vary, with floods, erosion, drought and fire being major concerns. Human-wildlife conflicts and pest outbreaks have intensified in recent years. Challenges in ES provision are attributed mainly to climate change, land access restrictions and resource overharvesting. Our study underscores the need for participatory land use planning that integrates local knowledge and prioritizes multifunctional landscapes to achieve equitable and sustainable land governance in Laos and similar tropical regions.

This contribution seeks to fill knowledge gaps on what kinds of factors are constraining biodiversity impact finance in the Global South, and what could be done to bridge the gap. The unfamiliarity with the product, and shortages of bankable projects as key challenges pertaining to the financial sector. On the investors' side, concerns often revolve around the risk-return ratio, insufficient global biodiversity data, and the lack of an international framework defining biodiversity finance. On the investees' side, there is anxiety over power imbalances from the past finding their way into these new products, which could be detrimental, especially in areas with informal land rights. To move forward, learning platforms and training opportunities on impact finance could be provided to stakeholders, and more resources are needed for de-risking investments through blended financing approaches.

Monitoring the status and evolution of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is typically carried out at the national level. However, significant variation can exist within countries, and this may not be captured by aggregate statistics. Here, we develop a unique dataset representing indicators for three SDGs at a district level for Lao PDR. The indicators comprise prevalence of stunting (SDG 2, Zero hunger), poverty headcount (SDG 1, No Poverty), and share of natural area (SDG 15, Life on land) for two moments in time: 2005 and 2015. In both years, we find considerable variation among district-level outcomes for stunting and poverty. We also find that higher stunting and poverty rates are significantly correlated with higher shares of natural land in both years. This is consistent with the common perception of a trade-off between environmental outcomes and socioeconomic wellbeing. The correlation vanishes, however, when we consider changes in poverty, stunting, and natural area over the ten-year study period. This holds as well when we focus on agricultural land instead of natural areas. We observe that most regions show improvements in both stunting and poverty, albeit not always in a statistically significant sense. This points to synergistic development. Similarly, improvements in both indicators are associated with losses in natural areas in all regions, indicating a trade-off. These results suggest that both trade-offs and synergies between SDGs can arise at the district level, but that context and local conditions likely moderate the strength of these interactions. Our results highlight the importance of quantifying and monitoring sustainable development at the detailed subnational level.

The Southeast Asian rubber boom beginning in the early 20000s shaped a myriad of socioeconomic and environmental consequences, including deforestation, ecosystem impacts, shifts in community livelihoods, and altered local access to land and resources. Although there has been significant research assessing rubber production in this region, there has been less focus on economic inequality and polarization outcomes in rubber producing areas. This analysis explores the extent to which rubber production growth was associated with changes in rural economic inequality and polarization from 2007/08 to 2012/13, using Lao PDR as a case study. We also investigate the implications of these changes for voluntary sustainability programs focused on rubber production. We achieve this through a synthesis of land use change and economic data. First, we estimate rubber plantation extent based on Landsat time series data and supervised classification. We combine this with household expenditures data from the Laos Expenditure and Consumption Survey from 2007/08 to 2012/13, conducting Gini decomposition and Duclos Esteban Ray Index calculations to explore economic inequality and polarization in rubber and non-rubber producing areas. Our results indicate that rubber areas experience greater inequality and polarization compared to non-rubber areas. The Northern, Central, and Southern regions experience different economic inequality and polarization outcomes - inequality-enhancing effects appear to be greatest in the South, where large-scale concessions dominate rubber production. We assess the implications of our findings for voluntary rubber sustainability programs, arguing that these programs should address systemic drivers of inequality and polarization, including dispossession from land and forest resources, insufficient worker protections, livelihood vulnerability, and barriers for smallholders. Overall, our results underscore the importance of strong regulation, multi-stakeholder action, and environmental and social performance criteria in rubber production.& COPY; 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Large-scale land acquisitions repeatedly fall short of their acclaimed socioeconomic benefits and are associated with unintended social, economic, and ecological costs. In Laos, the government has started to question its own "Turning Land into Capital" policy, and reviews land acquisitions or concessions with regard to their socioeconomic impacts. Empirical investigations of environmental impacts of land concessions, however, remain underrepresented. We link the nation-wide concession development between 2001 and 2017 with associated land use changes and quantify related land use change-induced emissions. Results show that land acquisitions for agriculture, forestry, and mining affect mainly forests and land previously used for shifting cultivation and permanent agriculture; e.g., rice paddies. Consequently, land conversions caused by concessions resulted in net carbon emissions of 4.9 Mt CO2e yr-1 on average in 2001–2017, which amounted to 34% of total emissions from land conversions. Even tree plantations that are meant to serve as net carbon sinks caused net emissions, but those data are the least robust. The relatively low carbon emission intensity of shifting cultivation compared to the high carbon emission intensity of concessions challenges the dominant narrative of shifting cultivation as a causal factor for forest degradation. Political means of fostering sustainable development include the reduction of land acquisitions because of their emissions intensity, and minimization of emissions and social conflict induced by granted concessions, for example, by allocating land with low carbon densities and obtaining consent of local land users.

Extensive land-use "regime shifts" have been observed as rapid transitions from natural land cover or subsistence-oriented land use to intensified and/or expanded commodity production. However, it is often unclear whether these land-use changes are part of broader land system regime shifts in which pre-existing production systems and livelihood strategies are fundamentally transformed along with observable land-use changes rather than simply displaced or eliminated. This is a critical social-environment question given that regime shifts are often a desired and intended outcome of national rural development and market-liberalization policies but must also be attentive to environmental conservation and/or climate change mitigation goals. We investigated whether nationally extensive land-use changes implemented through large-scale land deals in Lao People's Democratic Republic resulted in full, partial, or no village-and landscape-level regime shifts in and around land deals. Overall, land deals triggered a wide variety of full, partial, and no regime shift outcomes. Land deals with both domestic and foreign investors produced positive and negative outcomes, although foreign land deals for the production of rubber led to significantly higher rates of indirect land-use change in impacted villages than domestic and/ or non-rubber land deals. Also, financial compensation alone was insufficient to improve community well-being because it could be reinvested to perpetuate previous land uses without the desired transformation in livelihoods and rural development. Land deals that exhibited greater social embeddedness (i.e., provided adequate compensation complemented by job-creation and improved access to infrastructure and/or services) were more likely to lead to positive regime shifts. Our findings demonstrate that any land system regime shift will produce both winners and losers, and thus it becomes necessary to critically analyze the localized distribution of social and environmental costs and benefits within broader-scale land-use regime shifts.

Labor is central to the debates on global land-based investment. Proponents purport that these investments are an avenue for rural transformation from resource- to wage-based livelihoods through the generation of employment and contribution to poverty reduction. Drawing on a recent, unique national dataset on land concessions in Lao PDR, this paper uses an agrarian political economy lens to investigate how land-based investments live up to this expectation. The paper analyzes potential determinants of the degree to which different social groups engage in wage-labor within land-based investments. Results show that while land-based investments create a significant absolute number of jobs, former land users were offered predominantly low-skilled and seasonal jobs. The effects of these investments on rural employment are uneven depending on degrees of land and resource dispossession, the extent of job creation, and the availability of alternative opportunities in the region. In the majority of cases, former land users, especially women were pushed into precarious conditions through three processes: dispossession without proletarianization; limited proletarianization; and adverse proletarianization. We argue that the promotion of land-based investments as an approach for rural development, particularly along the gradient of transforming resource- to wage-labor based livelihoods, is ineffective without concurrent opportunities within and beyond the agricultural sector to absorb the labor reallocated from traditional livelihoods. Enforcing labor regulations, including restrictions on hiring of foreign labor, compliance with minimum wages, and relevant skills transfer are essential to minimize precarization and increase benefits for local people. Further, protecting peasants’ individual and common land-use rights is imperative to minimize the concurrence of precarization and increasing traditional vulnerability.

Land acquisitions are transforming land-use systems globally, and their characteristics and impacts on human well-being have been extensively analysed through local case studies and regional or global inventories. However, national-level analysis that is crucial for national policy on sustainable agricultural investments and land use is still lacking. This paper conducts an archetype analysis of a unique dataset on land concessions in Lao PDR to provide a national-scale assessment of the impacts of land acquisitions on human well-being in 294 affected villages. The results show that land acquisitions influence human well-being through 18 distinct pathways. These pathways describe how some land acquisitions enhance or maintain well-being, while others elicit adverse impacts or trade-offs between well-being dimensions, particularly food security, income, and livelihood resilience. They further reveal five archetypical processes that mediate the effects of land acquisitions on well-being through: (i) shifting access to land and natural resources; (ii) commercialization of agriculture; (iii) availability of development opportunities; (iv) environmental impacts; and (v) employment opportunities within and outside land acquisitions. These processes affect well-being by shaping livelihood portfolios and dependence on natural resources. The majority of land acquisitions trigger trade-offs or adverse impacts on well-being. The small number of villages where well-being increased despite the presence of land acquisitions were mainly shaped by narrow and rigid preconditions. The archetypical processes and the explanatory factors suggest that it is imperative to protect smallholders' land-use rights and to avoid large-scale deals, as their adverse impacts outweigh opportunities and are more severe than the impacts of small-scale acquisitions. Employment opportunities may provide additional cash income but should not be exclusively relied upon.

This paper contributes to debates on the implications of land-based investments on local livelihoods in the Global South. Drawing on a comprehensive national dataset on land concessions in Laos, and 2005 and 2015 village-level poverty rates, we examine the association between land-based investments and poverty at the village level in Lao rural areas. Results outline contexts in which land-based investments have either positive or adverse association with village-level poverty change rates; they also reveal factors that determine village-level poverty reduction in Laos. Our results suggest that poverty rates in villages affected by land-based investments decreased significantly between 2005 and 2015, following the national trend in Laos. However, in cases where land-based investments caused more farmland loss, poverty reduction was low or poverty rates increased over this period. Results further reveal that land-based investments implemented in more remote areas or poorer villages had a stronger association with poverty reduction. However, poverty was not a central consideration for the establishment of land-based investments. Our findings fill an important gap, providing a middle-level analysis from which grounded observations are analyzed alongside national trends.

The multifunctional landscapes of the Lao uplands are characterized both by their diversity of species, land uses and livelihood strategies and, increasingly, the rapid expansion of cash cropping, large-scale land investments and infrastructural developments. Upland communities are faced with unprecedented challenges as they seek to negotiate dynamic processes of change. We present key information on the current status of these changes—examining livelihood transitions and structural dynamics rooted in national policy frameworks—and propose alterative development pathways that build on, rather than replace, traditional systems of knowledge, practice, and the interconnectedness between human communities and their landscapes. In this series of presentations, we focus on: (1) Adding values to upland agriculture, proposing an inclusive vision and roadmap for sustainable upland development; (2) exploration of vulnerabilities and the adaptive capacity of upland communities in the face of change; (3) the elaboration of two sets of alternative futures, focusing on multifunctional approaches as a preferred alternative to mono-functional land systems and (4) present the current state of knowledge on landscape-based approaches for leveraging the development potential of upland agrobiodiversity and multifunctionality.

This study investigates the effects of improved market accessibility on agricultural land use and basic wellbeing, defined by income and rice sufficiency, in Xayaburi province, Lao PDR through a meso-scale and actor-oriented approach with data collection at both district and household level. It also investigates farmers' decision-making as it relates to regional markets. Increasing market accessibility in rural areas facilitates cash crop trade leading to agrarian change from subsistence to commercial agricultural systems. This transformation raises concerns about food security and vulnerability to market uncertainties as farmers are likely to grow cash crops intensively and in place of food crops, leading to lower food production. Meanwhile incomes from cash crop trade are highly vulnerable to market uncertainties. We found that farmers in the south of Xayaburi, where market accessibility is higher than in the north, primarily grow cash crops and do not suffer from rice insufficiency while farmers in the north, where market accessibility is lower, rely more on subsistence agriculture and have a lower level of basic wellbeing. The major factors of better basic wellbeing in the south include: (1) better market accessibility which can mitigate the risks of market uncertainty and create enough income to compensate for and overcome losses in rice production, (2) availability of more arable land due to a larger amount of level terrain which allows farmers to expand cash crop cultivation and continue growing rice at the same time, and (3) farmer strategy to keep a part of their land for growing rice to meet their minimum consumption needs and prevent the risks of rice insufficiency.

A key lever to mitigate global climate change is the reversal of forest carbon emissions trends throughout the Global South. Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD +) initiatives seek to conserve forest carbon stocks primarily through national and sub-national policies and interventions. Dominant drivers of forest change are, however, increasingly international in scope, tied to global commodity markets and investment flows, and are not easily captured or effectively addressed through nation-based carbon accounting. The fragmentary adoption of REDD + across forest nations leaves room for the displacement of deforestation from early-adopters and countries with more rigorous carbon-related regulatory regimes to late-adopters of REDD +. While this displacement is expected to be substantial, our empirical understanding of the causal pathways of transboundary displacement remains weak. Our research addresses this lacuna, focusing on Vietnam, an early adopter of REDD + that has experienced significant reforestation despite exponential growth in exports of key forest-risk commodities, sourced in large part from Lao PDR and Cambodia. We show that over the last decade, the trade of forest-risk commodities was large and accelerating in the Mekong region, concurrent with the rapid expansion of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs), constituting important, inter-related causal pathways for the displacement of deforestation and forest degradation. LSLAs are, however, core of national economic development strategies in the Mekong region, indicating a problematic relationship between REDD +, trade flows and land and forest governance. We explore the problematic intersection between these dynamic processes, their impacts on forests in Lao PDR and Cambodia, and implications for global efforts to manage forest resources and reduce emissions. The inability of REDD + to address transboundary impacts suggests the need for complementary interventions that address supply- and demand-side dynamics.

Precision public health approaches are crucial for targeting health policies to regions most affected by disease. We present the first sub-national and spatially explicit burden of disease study in Africa. We used a cross-sectional study design and assessed data from the Kenya population and housing census of 2009 for calculating YLLs (years of life lost) due to premature mortality at the division level (N = 612). We conducted spatial autocorrelation analysis to identify spatial clusters of YLLs and applied boosted regression trees to find statistical associations between locational risk factors and YLLs. We found statistically significant spatial clusters of high numbers of YLLs at the division level in western, northwestern, and northeastern areas of Kenya. Ethnicity and household crowding were the most important and significant risk factors for YLL. Further positive and significantly associated variables were malaria endemicity, northern geographic location, and higher YLL in neighboring divisions. In contrast, higher rates of married people and more precipitation in a division were significantly associated with less YLL. We provide an evidence base and a transferable approach that can guide health policy and intervention in sub-national regions afflicted by disease burden in Kenya and other areas of comparable settings.

The lowest access to water and sanitation services in the city of Nouakchott leads to several practices and behaviours that create a social-ecological system which increasing risk of waterborne diseases transmission like diarrhoea. Using environmental, socio-economic and epidemiologic indicators from national statistic services, this study aims to assess the impact of Nouakchott’s social-ecological system on diarrhoeal diseases with particular emphasize on vulnerability to environmental health risks according to water and sanitation status. The results showed that respectively 25.6% and 69.8% of households had access to improved water sources and latrines with a large variability according to municipalities. The diarrhoeal morbidity (12.8%) was higher in dense urban areas where the lack of water supply and sanitation facilities affected mainly poor households (20.8% of the population). However, diarrhoeal risk is spatially variable in accordance to environmental sanitation disparities with a rate rising from 9.1% in municipalities with high level of improved water and latrines to 19.1% in communities with a lower level of ecosystem services. The correlation analysis between socio-economic, environmental and epidemiological variables reveals significant associations. Thus, the dynamic of social-ecological system demonstrated that environmental factors linked to unimproved drinking Water sources and sanitation services were the main driver of diarrhoeal diseases transmission in some municipalities. The reality of the linkage between health risks due to diarrhoea and urban environmental conditions addresses the issues of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Health and Wellbeing and Water and Sanitation services in Mauritania context.

BACKGROUND:Substantial progress has been made in reducing childhood mortality worldwide from 1990-2015 (Millennium Development Goal, target 4). Achieving target goals on this however remains a challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa. Kenya's infant mortality rates are higher than the global average and are more pronounced in urban areas as compared to rural areas. Only limited knowledge exists about the differences in individual level risk factors for infant death among rural, non-slum urban, and slum areas in Kenya. Therefore, this paper aims at 1) assess individual and socio-ecological risk factors for infant death in Kenya, and at 2) identify whether living in rural, non-slum urban, or slum areas moderated individual or socio-ecological risk factors for infant death in Kenya.METHODOLOGY:We used a cross-sectional study design based on the most recent Kenya Population and Housing Census of 2009 and extracted the records of all females who had their last child born in 12 months preceding the survey (N = 1,120,960). Multivariable regression analyses were used to identify risk factors that accounted for the risk of dying before the age of one at the individual level in Kenya. Place of residence (rural, non-slum urban, slum) was used as an interaction term to account for moderating effects in individual and socio-ecological risk factors.RESULTS:Individual characteristics of mothers and children (older age, less previously born children that died, better education, girl infants) and household contexts (better structural quality of housing, improved water and sanitation, married household head) were associated with lower risk for infant death in Kenya. Living in non-slum urban areas was associated with significantly lower infant death as compared to living in rural or slum areas, when all predictors were held at their reference levels. Moreover, place of residence was significantly moderating individual level predictors: As compared to rural areas, living in urban areas was a protective factor for mothers who had previous born children who died, and who were better educated. However, living in urban areas also reduced the health promoting effects of better structural quality of housing (i.e. poor or good versus non-durable). Furthermore, durable housing quality in urban areas turned out to be a risk factor for infant death as compared to rural areas. Living in slum areas was also a protective factor for mothers with previous child death, however it also reduced the promoting effects of older ages in mothers.CONCLUSIONS:While urbanization and slum development continues in Kenya, public health interventions should invest in healthy environments that ideally would include improvements to access to safe water and sanitation, better structural quality of housing, and to access to education, health care, and family planning services, especially in urban slums and rural areas. In non-slum urban areas however, health education programs that target healthy diets and promote physical exercise may be an important adjunct to these structural interventions.

Building on a series of ground breaking reviews that first defined and drew attention to emerging infectious diseases (EID), the ‘convergence model’ was proposed to explain the multifactorial causality of disease emergence. The model broadly hypothesizes disease emergence is driven by the co-incidence of genetic, physical environmental, ecological, and social factors. We developed and tested a model of the emergence of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 based on suspected convergence factors that are mainly associated with land-use change. Building on previous geospatial statistical studies that identified natural and human risk factors associated with urbanization, we added new factors to test whether causal mechanisms and pathogenic landscapes could be more specifically identified. Our findings suggest that urbanization spatially combines risk factors to produce particular types of peri-urban landscapes with significantly higher HPAI H5N1 emergence risk. The work highlights that peri-urban areas of Viet Nam have higher levels of chicken densities, duck and geese flock size diversities, and fraction of land under rice or aquaculture than rural and urban areas. We also found that land-use diversity, a surrogate measure for potential mixing of host populations and other factors that likely influence viral transmission, significantly improves the model’s predictability. Similarly, landscapes where intensive and extensive forms of poultry production overlap were found at greater risk. These results support the convergence hypothesis in general and demonstrate the potential to improve EID prevention and control by combing geospatial monitoring of these factors along with pathogen surveillance programs.

This study explores the relationships between forest cover change and the village resettlement and land planning policies implemented in Laos, which have led to the relocation of remote and dispersed populations into clustered villages with easier access to state services and market facilities. We used the Global Forest Cover Change (2000–2012) and the most recent Lao Agricultural Census (2011) datasets to assess forest cover change in resettled and non-resettled villages throughout the country. We also reviewed a set of six case studies and performed an original case study in two villages of Luang Prabang province with 55 households, inquiring about relocation, land losses and intensification options. Our results show that resettled villages have greater baseline forest cover and total forest loss than most villages in Laos but not significant forest loss relative to that baseline. Resettled villages are consistently associated with forested areas, minority groups, and intermediate accessibility. The case studies highlight that resettlement coupled with land use planning does not necessarily lead to the abandonment of shifting cultivation or affect forest loss but lead to a re-spatialization of land use. This includes clustering of forest clearings, which might lead to fallow shortening and land degradation while limited intensification options exist in the resettled villages. This study provides a contribution to studying relationships between migration, forest cover change, livelihood strategies, land governance and agricultural practices in tropical forest environments.