Integrated Studies of Social and Natural Environmental Transition in Laos

Swidden agriculture used to occur in the temperate zones and currently occurs almost exclusively in the tropics. Academic research on the millennium-long farming system did not occur until the mid-eighteenth century, followed by scattered and sporadic research work before the twentieth century. So far, a thematic review of the history of swidden agriculture research based on the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science, which provides the longest coverage from 1900 to the present, has not yet been reported. The lack of a 20th-century literature review restricts understanding the revival of swidden agriculture research. With the journal publications (including Articles, Review Articles, and Data Papers) indexed by Web of Science and Google Scholar, we divided the history of swidden agriculture research into three developmental stages: descriptive transcription, critical analysis, and comprehensive analysis, with the years of 1957 and 2008 as the watershed years, respectively. Notably, 2008 emerged as a watershed year for the revival of swidden agriculture research in the tropics. Launching and implementing the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries promotes top-down rethink and rediscovery. In contrast, the free Landsat archive provides bottom-up support for consistent historical satellite observations. The synchronic emergence of the UN-REDD Programme and the free Landsat data policy may be coincidental. Yet, their combination and the global economic crisis since 2008 have become a catalyst and impetus for putting the longitudinal and horizontal analyses of swidden agriculture together. After a century of debate, swidden agriculture is gaining the academic attention it deserves.

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Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Charcoal Production in Complex Social-Ecological Systems

González-López

Giampietro

2017

Front. Environ. Sci.

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We propose and illustrate a multi-scale integrated analysis of societal and ecosystem metabolism (MuSIASEM) as a tool to bring nexus thinking into practice. MuSIASEM studies the relations over the structural and functional components of social-ecological systems that determine the entanglement of water, energy, and food flows in a complex metabolic pattern. MuSIASEM simultaneously considers various dimensions and multiple scales of analysis and therefore avoids the predicament of quantitative analysis based on reductionism (one dimension and one scale at the time). The different functional elements of society (the parts) are characterized using the concept of "processor," that is, a profile of expected inputs and outputs associated with the expression of a specific function. The processors of the functional elements of the social-ecological system can be either scaled-up to describe the metabolic pattern of the system as a whole, or scaled-down by considering the characteristics of its lower-level parts-i.e., the different processors associated with the structural elements required to express the specific function. An analysis of functional elements provides insight in the socioeconomic factors that pose internal constraints on the development of the system. An analysis of structural elements makes it possible to study the compatibility of the system with external constraints (availability of natural resources and ecological services) in spatial terms. The usefulness of the approach is illustrated in relation to an example of the use of charcoal in a rural village of Laos.

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Integrated Studies of Social and Natural Environmental Transition in Laos

Cited by 4 publications

References 41 publications

Annual Land Cover Changes (2013–2023) in Vientiane, Lao PDR Using Time-Series Composite Landsat 8 Images

Annual Land Cover Changes (2013–2023) in Vientiane, Lao PDR Using Time-Series Composite Landsat 8 Images

The history and revival of swidden agriculture research in the tropics

Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Charcoal Production in Complex Social-Ecological Systems

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