How conflict affects land use: agricultural activity in areas seized by the Islamic State

Eklund, Lina; Degerald, Michael; Brandt, Martin; Prishchepov, Alexander V.; Pilesjö, Petter

doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aa673a

Cited by 91 publications

(74 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…During the First Chechen War, for example, agricultural land that was within 1 km of conflict had the highest agricultural land abandonment probability (predictive margins >40%, Figure 4). This finding is similar to the previous studies in Syria (Eklund et al, 2017) and…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

“…Despite many plausible mechanisms for how armed conflicts may lead to agricultural land-use change, empirical evidence for such links is not conclusive (Baumann and Kuemmerle, 2016). Agricultural land abandonment was prevalent in the conflict areas of Bosnia (Witmer, 2008), Colombia (Sánchez-Cuervo and Aide, 2013), Kosovo (Douarin et al, 2012), Lebanon (Darwish et al, 2009), Nicaragua (Stevens et al, 2011), and Sri Lanka (Suthakar and Bui, 2008), while both agriculture abandonment and expansion occurred in the Caucasus (Baumann et al, 2015), Iraq (Jaafar and Woertz, 2016), Syria (Eklund et al, 2017), Sierra Leone (Gbanie et al, 2018), and Sudan (Alix-Garcia et al, 2013). Similarly, post-conflict agricultural land-use change can be complex.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Agricultural abandonment and re-cultivation during and after the Chechen Wars in the northern Caucasus

Yin

Butsic

Buchner

et al. 2019

Global Environmental Change

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Armed conflicts are globally widespread and can strongly influence societies and the environment. However, where and how armed conflicts affect agricultural land-use is not well-understood. The Caucasus is a multi-ethnic region that experienced several conflicts shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, most notably the two Chechen Wars, raising the question how agricultural lands were changed. Here, we investigated how the distance to conflicts and conflict intensity, measured as the number of conflicts and the number of casualties, affected agricultural land abandonment and subsequent re-cultivation, by combining social, environmental and economic variables with remotely-sensed maps of agricultural change. We applied logistic and panel regression analyses for both the First Chechen War (1994-1996) and the Second Chechen War (1999-2009) and interacted conflict distance with conflict intensity measures. We found that agricultural lands closer to conflicts were more likely to be abandoned and less likely to be re-cultivated, with stronger effects for the First Chechen War. Conflict intensity was positively correlated with agricultural land abandonment, but the effects differed based on distance to conflicts and the intensity measure. We found little re-cultivation after the wars, despite abundant subsidies, indicating the potentially long-lasting effects of armed conflicts on land-use. Overall, we found a clear relationship between the Chechen Wars and agricultural land abandonment and re-cultivation, illustrating the strong effects of armed conflicts on agriculture.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agricultural abandonment and re-cultivation during and after the Chechen Wars in the northern Caucasus

Yin

Butsic

Buchner

et al. 2019

Global Environmental Change

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“…Machine-learning classifiers were found to be particularly useful to overcome the complexity related to the accurate separation of spectrally similar classes, such as abandoned cropland and cultivated cropland in drylands [36], particularly at the early stages of abandonment [7,29,33,37]. Vegetation recovery on abandoned irrigated fields in the drylands of the ASB generally follows a certain pathway.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping Cropland Abandonment in the Aral Sea Basin with MODIS Time Series

Löw¹,

Prishchepov

Waldner

et al. 2018

Remote Sensing

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Abstract:Cropland abandonment is globally widespread and has strong repercussions for regional food security and the environment. Statistics suggest that one of the hotspots of abandoned cropland is located in the drylands of the Aral Sea Basin (ASB), which covers parts of post-Soviet Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iran. To date, the exact spatial and temporal extents of abandoned cropland remain unclear, which hampers land-use planning. Abandoned land is a potentially valuable resource for alternative land uses. Here, we mapped the abandoned cropland in the drylands of the ASB with a time series of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) from [2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008][2009][2010][2011][2012][2013][2014][2015][2016]. To overcome the restricted ability of a single classifier to accurately map land-use classes across large areas and agro-environmental gradients, "stratum-specific" classifiers were calibrated and classification results were fused based on a locally weighted decision fusion approach. Next, the agro-ecological suitability of abandoned cropland areas was evaluated. The stratum-specific classification approach yielded an overall accuracy of 0.879, which was significantly more accurate (p < 0.05) than a "global" classification without stratification, which had an accuracy of 0.811. In 2016, the classification results showed that 13% (1.15 Mha) of the observed irrigated cropland in the ASB was idle (abandoned). Cropland abandonment occurred mostly in the Amudarya and Syrdarya downstream regions and was associated with degraded land and areas prone to water stress. Despite the almost twofold population growth and increasing food demand in the ASB area from 1990 to 2016, abandoned cropland was also located in areas with high suitability for farming. The map of abandoned cropland areas provides a novel basis for assessing the causes leading to abandoned cropland in the ASB. This contributes to assessing the suitability of abandoned cropland for food or bioenergy production, carbon storage, or assessing the environmental trade-offs and social constraints of recultivation.

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“…Yet, modern agriculture is central to food security as much as it is to soil exhaustion. Cultivation, irrigation and agricultural markets are central to any form of rule in the region, in the colonial, the postcolonial, the failed and the 'Islamic' state alike (Eklund, Degerald, Brandt, Prishchepov, & Pilesjö, 2017).…”

Section: From Environmental Orientalism To Environmental Determinismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental determinism as Orientalism: The geo‐political ecology of crisis in the Middle East

Hoffmann¹

2018

J Historical Sociology

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From ‘Resource Curse’ to ‘Climate Conflict’, more and more analyses of the current crisis in the Middle East start their reasoning from geo‐physical or natural conditions as determinants of social life. Paradoxically, despite its resource riches giving rise to conflict, the region's ecology is portrayed as fragile, alien and hostile. This imperial oriental imagination, assumes that a scarce nature is mismanaged by societies and states overall incapable of negotiating modernity. This precarious, crisis driven environment is now pushed to the edge by the effects of climate change with looming desertification and weather extremes and a scramble for shrinking oil reserves threatening to make the region all but inhabitable. This article suggests that this environmental oriental determinism in Middle East can be overcome by entering political ecology into the register of historical sociological analysis. Re‐socialising and historicising nature‐society relations avoids reifying the Cartesian nature/society divide, offering historical sociology a better toolkit to navigate the current crisis. Vice‐versa, it argues that political ecology can benefit from recognising the role of geopolitical relations in the social reproduction nature.

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How conflict affects land use: agricultural activity in areas seized by the Islamic State

Cited by 91 publications

References 40 publications

Agricultural abandonment and re-cultivation during and after the Chechen Wars in the northern Caucasus

Agricultural abandonment and re-cultivation during and after the Chechen Wars in the northern Caucasus

Mapping Cropland Abandonment in the Aral Sea Basin with MODIS Time Series

Environmental determinism as Orientalism: The geo‐political ecology of crisis in the Middle East

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