The research team, led by Glenn Hunt and including collaborators from Myanmar and Europe, set out to document what they call the lived multifunctionality of these upland landscapes. Rather than measuring land-use performance solely through external metrics such as yields per hectare or carbon stocks, the researchers asked the people who inhabit and manage these landscapes how they perceive and value them. This methodological choice matters, because the gap between technocratic assessments and local understandings of sustainability has real consequences. In Myanmar, land that is managed under customary jhum cycles is frequently classified by the state as vacant, fallow, or degraded, a bureaucratic label that opens the door to appropriation, concession allocation, and forced conversion to other uses.

The fieldwork combined three complementary approaches. Participatory mapping sessions allowed villagers to draw and annotate the land-use mosaic of their territories, identifying jhum fields, forests, home gardens, terraced paddy fields, and other elements. Livelihood product inventories then catalogued the enormous range of goods that each land-use type contributes to household economies, from staple crops and wild vegetables to medicinal plants, fibers, fuelwood, and timber. Finally, community-based scoring exercises asked villagers to rate each land-use type against a set of locally defined functions, producing a quantitative picture of perceived multifunctionality that could be compared across villages and land-use categories.

The results were striking in their consistency. Jhum fields, the very land-use type most often maligned in policy discourse, emerged as the most multifunctional of all. They provided the widest range of livelihood products of any land use in the mosaic and contributed reliably to food security, the supply of medicines, the availability of construction materials, and the reproduction of cultural practices. This is not an accident of design but the product of a sophisticated management system. In jhum cultivation, plots are cleared, cultivated for a limited period, and then left to regenerate under fallow, a rotational cycle that maintains a dynamic patchwork of vegetation at different successional stages across the landscape. That patchwork, the study shows, is precisely what generates the breadth of products and services that communities depend upon.

Forests and home gardens play equally important, but complementary, roles. Forests supply wild foods, medicinal plants, and materials that jhum fields alone cannot provide, while home gardens close to the homestead support dietary diversity and generate income through the sale of vegetables, fruits, and small livestock. Terraced paddy fields, where they exist, contribute staple grain but occupy a narrower functional niche. The study emphasizes that none of these land-use types functions in isolation. Together they form an interdependent landscape mosaic in which households deliberately spread their livelihood activities across multiple land uses, reducing risk and buffering against crop failure, price shocks, and seasonal scarcity. This diversification strategy, refined over generations, is a hallmark of resilient upland livelihood systems across Southeast Asia.

The technical core of the study lies in its systematic comparison of perceived multifunctionality across land-use types. By aggregating community scores and product inventories, the researchers could demonstrate that the functional profile of jhum is not merely broad but also consistent: it contributes to nearly every valued function, even where other land uses outperform it on any single measure. Forests, for example, may supply more timber, and paddy fields more rice, but jhum fields deliver a balanced portfolio of contributions that underpins everyday subsistence. The authors argue that this portfolio logic is invisible to conventional land assessments, which typically evaluate each land-use type against a narrow set of agronomic or forestry indicators and therefore systematically undervalue rotational systems.

The policy implications are profound. In Myanmar, as in many other countries with significant upland Indigenous populations, state land classifications determine which areas can be titled, leased, or conserved. When jhum fallows are mapped as vacant or degraded land, the rotational cycle that sustains both livelihoods and regenerating vegetation is broken, and communities can lose access to the very landscapes that feed them. The study documents how this misrecognition is not simply a technical error but a clash between epistemologies: between a governance framework that reads landscapes through static land-cover categories, and an Indigenous understanding that reads them through lived relationships, seasonal cycles, and customary institutions. The authors frame this as a matter of epistemic justice, arguing that sustainability transformations cannot be inclusive if the knowledge systems of the people who manage the land are excluded from the categories used to govern it.

The findings also speak to a broader global debate. Shifting cultivation supports millions of people across the tropical uplands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and it has been the subject of contested narratives for more than a century. Colonial administrators condemned it, development programs have sought to replace it with sedentary agriculture, and some conservation initiatives have blamed it for deforestation. Yet a growing body of research suggests that, at appropriate fallow lengths and population densities, rotational systems can maintain biodiversity, soil fertility, and carbon stocks while sustaining livelihoods without external inputs. The Naga Hills study adds a crucial dimension to this literature by grounding the argument in the detailed perceptions of the communities themselves, showing that what outside observers see as degraded fallow is locally understood as a productive landscape in a necessary phase of renewal.

For the Naga communities of Layshi Township, the stakes are immediate. Their territories lie in a remote border region that has experienced conflict, restricted access, and limited state investment, making self-provisioned livelihoods all the more essential. The interdependence of jhum fields, forests, and gardens means that interventions targeting any single land-use type ripple through the whole system. Converting fallows to plantations, restricting forest access, or pushing paddy expansion onto sloping land each erodes a different strand of the livelihood web. The study’s participatory methods, by making local valuations explicit and comparable, offer a practical template for land-use planning that begins with recognition rather than replacement, and that treats villagers as experts on their own landscapes rather than as obstacles to development.

Ultimately, the research makes a case that extends well beyond the Naga Hills. If sustainability transformations are to succeed in the world’s upland regions, they must be built on an accurate understanding of how multifunctional landscapes actually work and on respect for the people who sustain them. Recognizing customary land-use systems such as jhum, the authors conclude, is critical not only for ecological sustainability but for more equitable development policy. The alternative, continuing to classify living, working landscapes as empty and degraded, risks destroying precisely the diversity and resilience that both local communities and the global community now urgently need to protect.

Subject of Research: Indigenous perceptions of the multifunctionality of shifting cultivation landscapes in the Naga Hills of Myanmar

Article Title: Lived multifunctionality: Indigenous perceptions of shifting cultivation landscapes in the Naga Hills of Myanmar

Article References: Hunt, G., Makury, A., Fogerite, J., von der Mühlen, M., Htet, A. S., Bastide, J., Heinimann, A., & Rueff, H. (2026). Lived multifunctionality: Indigenous perceptions of shifting cultivation landscapes in the Naga Hills of Myanmar. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(10), e0000288. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000288

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000288

Keywords: shifting cultivation, jhum, Naga Hills, Myanmar, indigenous knowledge, multifunctional landscapes, land governance, food security, epistemic justice, sustainability transformation, participatory mapping, upland livelihoods

The origins of the conflict lie in an ambitious housing policy. In 2012, the Ivorian government launched the Presidential Emergency Program, fulfilling a 2010 campaign promise by President Alassane Ouattara to build social and economic housing for low-income households, defined as those earning no more than 400,000 CFA francs per month. The program marked the state’s return to direct housing production after decades of withdrawal; between 1960 and 1980, the state had financed, promoted, and managed more than 90,000 dwellings in Abidjan before stepping back under pressure from international lenders. Annual housing needs around Abidjan were estimated at 22,000 units, roughly 80 percent of them social and economic housing. To secure land for the program’s largest site, the state’s Land Management Agency negotiated directly with the holders of customary rights at Songon-Kassemblé, and in 2013 a contract was signed for the cession of 439 hectares.

The financial architecture of that agreement was precise. Under Decree 2013-224 of March 2013, which regulates the purging of customary land rights for public utility, compensation for the loss of usage rights was set at 2,000 CFA francs per square meter in the Abidjan autonomous district. For the 439.27 hectares in question, the total came to 8.7 billion CFA francs, payable in three installments: 40 percent within two to six months of handing the site to developers, followed by two payments of 30 percent each at three-month intervals, a full settlement within twelve months. Compensation for destroyed crops, including rubber, oil palm, and cassava, added another 1.8 billion CFA francs, calculated by the Ministry of Agriculture under a 1995 scale, bringing the total to more than 10.5 billion CFA francs, roughly 16 million euros.

What followed was a systematic breach of that schedule. Construction began in March 2013 with more than twenty real estate companies, yet between July 2013 and 2015 the landowners received only 20.17 percent of the 8.8 billion CFA francs due, about half of the first installment the state had committed to pay within six months. The state did not settle its accounts in full until October 2020, seven years after signing. As researchers Tonan and Nassa had already observed, the payment schedules established by the state were simply not followed: developers occupied the land while rights-holders waited, sometimes for years, for money owed. The delay ignited a grievance that the Ébrié landowners, drawing on lessons from earlier conflicts in their ethnocultural area, converted into a coordinated strategy of publicization, site blockade, and negotiation.

The protest tactics were direct and disruptive. In May 2015, March 2016, November 2016, and September and November 2019, young villagers whose lineage lands had been sold organized protest marches with chants demanding their money, blocked roads, and occupied the main access route to the construction site, erecting barricades that forced developers to halt work. One young demonstrator explained to fieldworkers in September 2019 that his family had lost about four hectares of cassava and rubber land without being consulted, and that stopping the state’s works was the only way to secure the funds owed. The president of the village youth declared that the site would remain closed until the authorities delivered the second installment, six months overdue, and accused the sub-prefect and officials in Abidjan of making endless empty promises. These were not spontaneous riots but calculated acts of visibility designed to make the landowners audible to the state and to public opinion.

The consequences for the housing program were severe and measurable. The repeated blockages disrupted construction schedules, halted private investment and financing, and pushed delivery dates far beyond the three-year average originally planned. Several real estate companies, unable to absorb the unexpected costs, abandoned the project altogether. The first official handover of homes to subscribers took place only in March 2023, ten years after the program launched. Of an initial target of 60,000 units at the site, only about 15,000 had been built according to the Songon town hall’s technical service, and a February 2024 site visit found scattered clusters of houses interspersed with scrub, unbuilt plots, unfinished structures, and abandoned construction sites. The housing minister himself acknowledged in a 2019 interview that the program had a mixed record, citing the lack of flexibility of customary rights-holders in delaying works and insufficient budgetary resources as two of the major explanations for missing the original 150,000-unit national target.

Beneath the practical disruption, the study identifies a deeper restructuring of power. The negotiation arena at Songon-Kassemblé was dominated by a dyad of the state and the customary landowners, while private developers were sidelined and, remarkably, the village chieftaincy itself was pushed to the margins. The chiefs were excluded from negotiations because the land in question was family property managed by lineage heads under custom, not communal land under chiefly authority, a situation that contrasts sharply with other Ébrié villages such as Anono and Yopougon-Kouté, where chieftaincies signed protocols with the state for major urban projects in 1970 and 1971. The legitimacy of the individual lineage rights-holders gave them a preponderant role, redefining center-periphery relations: decisions were no longer dictated from the capital outward, but renegotiated from the periphery toward the center.

The study frames this reversal through the concept of autochthony capital. The Ébrié, officially recognized as the indigenous people of the Abidjan metropolitan area, have mobilized their identity since the 1970s to defend land rights against urban expansion, and at Songon-Kassemblé that immaterial resource proved decisive, reinforcing their legitimacy in negotiations and their influence over planning decisions. The parallel with Accra is instructive: there, customary actors remain central to land governance, with 80 percent of land held under customary tenure. As the scholar Kobo observed decades ago, the purging of customary rights is far from a mere formality; it is an essential phase of urbanization and one of the focal points of social struggle over land in Côte d’Ivoire and across Africa. At Songon-Kassemblé, the state’s repeated failures over decades of compensation payments placed it in a position of weakness, producing an inversion of roles in which landowners dictated terms through protest.

The resolution of the crisis came through institutionalized bargaining. To contain repeated public disorder, a multiparty working group was created comprising the chieftaincy, landowners, planters, the Ministry of Construction, and the real estate structures, tasked with monitoring both the construction site and outstanding compensation commitments. Community mobilization ultimately secured individual indemnification of the landowners, but without any collective counterpart for the village as a whole, a mechanism that unsettled the internal functioning of the Ébrié community. The monetization of customary land rights, the study concludes, has enabled peripheral actors to assert and price their power in land transactions, even against state authority, transforming a seemingly routine state-landowner dispute into a case study of how urbanization in the Global South can redistribute governance from the center to the fringe.

For scholars of urban land governance, Songon-Kassemblé offers a technically detailed demonstration that peri-urban land production is not a top-down process but a contested arena where customary legitimacy, protest capacity, and state fiscal weakness interact. The case shows that when compensation schedules are breached, the resulting conflict can permanently alter the geography of power, elevating lineage-based landholders into central negotiators and forcing the state to accommodate norms it once sought to supersede. As Abidjan’s expansion continues to absorb villages across the Songon sub-prefecture, whose 627 square kilometers of land capital made it a privileged reservoir for the 1998 Greater Abidjan master plan, the lessons of this decade-long conflict will shape every future negotiation over who pays for the city, and on whose terms.

Subject of Research: Conflict between the Ivorian state and customary landowners over compensation for a peri-urban social housing site in Songon-Kassemblé near Abidjan

Article Title: Logements sociaux et économiques à Songon-Kassemblé: Conflit et recomposition des rapports de pouvoir entre l'État et les propriétaires de droits fonciers coutumiers

Article References: Koffi-Didia, A. M. (2026). Logements sociaux et économiques à Songon-Kassemblé: Conflit et recomposition des rapports de pouvoir entre l'État et les propriétaires de droits fonciers coutumiers. Geographica Helvetica, 81(3), 453-462. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-453-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-453-2026

Keywords: customary land rights, Côte d'Ivoire, Abidjan, peri-urbanization, social housing, land governance, Ébrié, land conflict, urbanization, compensation, autochthony, Songon

The study’s first headline finding is deceptively simple: 55 percent of respondents expressed overall satisfaction with the expropriation process, while 45 percent reported dissatisfaction. In other words, the affected population is split almost down the middle, a near-even divide that immediately signals the process is not uniformly failing or succeeding. That split matters because farmland expropriation is one of the most consequential and least reversible events in a rural household’s economic life. Once land is transferred for urban development, the primary productive asset of the family disappears, and everything that follows — income, food security, social standing, and even the daily rhythm of work — must be rebuilt from the compensation payment and whatever skills the household can redeploy. A satisfaction rate hovering at barely more than half suggests that the machinery of compensation in East Gojjam is delivering acceptable outcomes for many, but leaving a very large minority behind.

The structural transformation the researchers documented after expropriation is dramatic. Before losing their land, 81.46 percent of surveyed households relied on subsistence farming as their main livelihood. After expropriation, that figure collapsed to just 17.92 percent. The displaced farmers did not simply become urban professionals or successful small traders; instead, the largest single post-expropriation category was daily wage labor, absorbing 26.25 percent of households, while 11.25 percent fell into chronic unemployment. These numbers describe a classic livelihood transition in the development economics literature: households pushed off the land and into the informal urban labor market, where income is volatile, bargaining power is weak, and there is no harvest cycle to structure the year. Daily wage work in fast-growing Ethiopian towns typically means construction labor, loading, and other physically demanding jobs with no security, no benefits, and no protection against the shocks that a plot of fertile land once buffered.

Yet the picture is not uniformly bleak, and this is where the study becomes genuinely nuanced. Urban expansion significantly improved household access to three fundamental services: electricity, safe piped water, and road networks. Families who once lived in the service shadows of town boundaries found themselves connected to the grid, to clean water infrastructure, and to transport links that open access to markets, schools, and clinics. This dual character — improved public services alongside deteriorating livelihood security — is precisely the tension that makes peri-urban expropriation so difficult to govern. The physical infrastructure of development arrives, but the economic foundation of the displaced households does not automatically follow. A household can gain a lightbulb and a tap while losing the means to pay for anything beyond subsistence.

To move beyond description, the researchers employed an ordered logistic regression model, a statistical technique well suited to satisfaction data that falls on an ordered scale rather than a simple yes-no split. The model identified a set of socioeconomic determinants that push satisfaction up or down, and the strongest positive drivers were exactly what one would hope a well-designed compensation system would provide. The amount of compensation had a positive and highly significant effect on satisfaction, as did diversified modes of compensation — meaning payments or benefits delivered in more than one form — and the prompt timing of payments. Each of these findings is actionable. Farmers who received more money were more satisfied; farmers who received compensation in varied forms were more satisfied; and farmers who were paid quickly, rather than left waiting through bureaucratic delays, were more satisfied. Timing, in particular, is a policy lever that costs nothing in monetary terms and yet shows up as highly significant in the model.

On the negative side of the ledger, the regression revealed that residential displacement, larger family sizes, greater areas of expropriated land, and higher fertility of the lost plots all significantly reduced satisfaction levels. Each of these variables tells a coherent economic story. Families who lost not just their fields but their homes faced a double displacement, forced to rebuild both livelihood and shelter simultaneously. Larger families spread any fixed compensation payment across more mouths, diluting its purchasing power. Larger landholdings represented a bigger income stream that a one-time payment struggled to replace, especially if the household lacked the skills to invest the money productively. And the fertility of the lost plot is perhaps the most telling variable of all: the better the land, the higher the baseline income it generated, and the harder it is for any standardized compensation formula to make the household whole. Fertile land produces returns year after year, while a cash payment is spent once.

One of the most counterintuitive findings in the study concerns agricultural risk. Exposure to agricultural risks — drought, crop failure, price swings, and the other hazards of rain-fed highland farming — was positively associated with satisfaction with compensation. The explanation the authors offer is rooted in how people evaluate losses: farmers who had been struggling with unreliable harvests had lower baseline income expectations from their land, so the compensation they received compared favorably against an income stream that had become uncertain and disappointing. For these households, a guaranteed cash payment, even a modest one, represented an improvement in expected welfare. This finding is a reminder that satisfaction is a relative judgment, not an absolute one, and that compensation policy must account for what farmers think they are losing, not only what the land produces in a good year.

The methodological design of the study strengthens the credibility of these conclusions. The researchers used a multi-stage sampling design and a cross-sectional field survey, randomly selecting 480 households across the peri-urban areas of the four towns, which reduces the risk that the sample reflects only the most accessible or most aggrieved farmers. The combination of descriptive statistics, livelihood transition analysis, and ordered logistic regression allows the study to do three distinct jobs at once: quantify the satisfaction split, map the structural shift in how people earn a living, and isolate the causal correlates of satisfaction with statistical controls in place. The research received no external funding, and the authors, Haymanot Bassie Mognhod and Belete Animaw Beyene of the Department of Economics at Debre Markos University, declare no competing interests — a clean provenance for work that touches on one of the most politically charged processes in rural development.

The policy implications the authors draw are direct: fair property valuations, standardized rehabilitation guidance, and sustainable livelihood restoration frameworks. Each addresses a specific failure mode identified in the data. Fair valuation responds to the finding that compensation amount drives satisfaction and that fertile, productive land is systematically hard to replace with a flat payment. Standardized rehabilitation guidance responds to the vulnerability of households that received cash but had no roadmap for converting it into a durable urban livelihood, ending up in daily wage labor or unemployment. Livelihood restoration frameworks respond to the deepest structural finding of all — the collapse of subsistence farming from over 81 percent of households to under 18 percent — by treating compensation not as an endpoint but as the starting capital for a deliberate transition into stable urban employment or enterprise. As African cities continue to expand at some of the fastest rates in the world, the East Gojjam evidence makes a compelling case that the question is no longer whether farmland will be expropriated, but whether the people who worked it will be equipped to survive the transition. The 55 percent who are satisfied show it can be done; the 45 percent who are not show how easily it is not.

Subject of Research: Socioeconomic impacts of farmland expropriation and compensation satisfaction among peri-urban farming households in Northwest Ethiopia

Article Title: Farmers’ satisfaction and livelihood transitions following farmland expropriation in East Gojjam Zone, Northwest Ethiopia

Article References: Mognhod, H. B., & Beyene, B. A. (2026). Farmers’ satisfaction and livelihood transitions following farmland expropriation in East Gojjam Zone, Northwest Ethiopia. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04937-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04937-5

Keywords: farmland expropriation, peri-urban expansion, livelihood transition, compensation satisfaction, ordered logistic regression, Ethiopia, East Gojjam, subsistence farming, daily wage labor, urban development, land governance, rural livelihoods

The research team built their assessment on the Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach, or CASA model, a process-based framework that estimates Net Primary Productivity, the net carbon an ecosystem gains after plants respire away their own energy. Monthly productivity was calculated as the product of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation and a light-use efficiency term, the latter dynamically downregulated by temperature and water stress scalars. To avoid signal saturation in dense vegetation and soil noise in degraded patches, the team averaged the fraction of absorbed radiation derived from two spectral indices, NDVI and the Simple Ratio. Because only two eddy covariance flux towers have ever operated in the Caatinga, and their footprints and overlap were far too limited for a biome-wide, two-decade analysis, the researchers cross-validated their estimates against the MOD17A3HGF global product, achieving a correlation of R-squared equals 0.79. They are candid that this constitutes a model-to-model comparison reflecting internal consistency rather than absolute accuracy, and they point to independent carbon-accounting datasets as future benchmarks.

Water Use Efficiency, the ratio of carbon assimilated to water lost through evapotranspiration, served as the study’s second headline metric. It captures the physiological trade-off every dryland plant faces: how much biomass can be manufactured per unit of scarce water. The team paired their productivity estimates with evapotranspiration data from the MOD16A2GF product and then subjected both time series to a battery of statistical tests. Theil-Sen slope estimation, chosen for its robustness to outliers, quantified the magnitude of change pixel by pixel, while the Mann-Kendall test assessed statistical significance. Standardized anomaly scores, or Z-scores, isolated the years when climate deviated most sharply from the historical mean, allowing the researchers to trace how extreme droughts ripple through the carbon and water cycles of the biome.

The temporal results are striking in their nuance. Neither NPP nor WUE showed a statistically significant long-term trend over the two decades, with p-values of 0.803 and 0.405 respectively, indicating that the balance between carbon fixation and water loss has remained resilient. Yet beneath that apparent calm lies extraordinary interannual volatility. The detrended anomalies revealed a strong, statistically significant inverse coupling between productivity and water-use efficiency, with a correlation coefficient of minus 0.741 and a p-value below 0.001. In wet years the Caatinga behaves as a highly efficient carbon sink, while in drought years productivity plunges and efficiency spikes in compensation. Precipitation itself remained statistically stable across the period, but mean annual temperature showed a significant and continuous warming trend, with a p-value of 0.014, underscoring the thermal pressure building on the system.

Perhaps the most consequential discovery concerns which environmental variable actually governs the biome’s behavior. Conventional wisdom holds that dryland productivity tracks annual rainfall almost linearly. The Caatinga does not obey that rule. Using a Random Forest ensemble of 500 decision trees, the researchers ranked the predictive power of five drivers: precipitation, temperature, the Land Surface Water Index (LSWI), the Temperature-Vegetation Dryness Index (TVDI), and land governance regime. LSWI, a spectral proxy for water held in vegetation and soil, dominated by a wide margin, accounting for roughly 0.85 of the relative importance for NPP trends and 0.70 for WUE trends. Precipitation, considered alone, explained far less. In other words, how much water the landscape retains matters more than how much water falls from the sky, a distinction with profound implications for how restoration and drought policy should be designed.

The mechanism makes ecological sense. In the semiarid Northeast, rainfall arrives in a handful of intense bursts concentrated into three to four months, and much of it runs off the surface before it can recharge the soil root zone. Preserved, structurally complex vegetation canopies dissipate the kinetic energy of raindrops, slow surface flow, and enhance infiltration, effectively banking moisture that sustains photosynthesis deep into the eight-month dry season. Deforested and degraded land does the opposite, reflecting more solar radiation, pumping more sensible heat into the atmosphere, and altering the local microclimate. This also distinguishes the Caatinga from Brazil’s Cerrado savanna, where deep-rooted trees tap groundwater and can sustain carbon exchange through prolonged droughts regardless of surface moisture. The Caatinga’s shrubby vegetation and shallow, rocky soils leave it far more dependent on what happens in the top layers of the earth.

While climate dictates the year-to-year rhythm, the study found that land governance shapes the long-term geography of degradation and recovery. Conservation Units, which cover only about 4.4 million hectares or 5.09 percent of the biome, emerged as its principal ecological refugia, concentrating the highest relative proportions of areas classified as early and late restoration. A buffer analysis probing distances of 0 to 2, 2 to 5, and 5 to 10 kilometers from territorial boundaries revealed that these units achieve peak stability within the first 2 kilometers inside their edges, a protective halo that progressively dissipates toward the unprotected exterior matrix. Indigenous Lands and Quilombola Territories, though much smaller at roughly 0.46 and 0.50 percent of the biome respectively, displayed a different and equally remarkable signature: nearly constant restoration levels from edge to core, suggesting that the traditional land-use practices of these communities buffer external degradation across their entire extent.

Not every governance story is a success. Indigenous Lands showed the highest internal proportion of degraded areas, and Quilombola Territories exhibited a stark spatial dichotomy, simultaneously ranking among the biome’s greatest conservation triumphs and its most severe degradation hotspots. The authors interpret this polarization through the lens of land tenure security. Where Afro-descendant communities hold formally recognized collective rights, customary institutions appear to promote restoration effectively, consistent with recent evidence that secure Indigenous and Quilombola lands in South America conserve irrecoverable carbon out of proportion to their area. Where title remains unresolved, the absence of enforceable collective property rights leaves territories exposed to chronic disturbances, continuous firewood extraction, uncontrolled fire, and overgrazing, that quietly erode biomass and biodiversity even without outright clear-cutting.

These findings arrive against a backdrop of rapid transformation. Between 1985 and 2019, forest and savanna formations within the Caatinga declined by approximately 8 and 11 percent respectively, while pastureland expanded by 62 percent and agricultural land by a staggering 284 percent. Climate projections point toward further aridification and warming through the end of the century, and global drylands are known to undergo abrupt regime shifts once critical aridity thresholds are breached. The current stability of the Caatinga’s carbon balance should therefore be read not as invulnerability but as evidence that the system is still operating within its adaptive capacity, a capacity that simplified, degraded landscapes lose first. National greenhouse gas inventories add weight to the stakes: in certain recent years, carbon removals in the Caatinga represented nearly half of Brazil’s total, and eddy covariance studies have found the biome’s carbon use efficiency exceeds that of other dry forests worldwide.

The policy prescriptions that flow from the study are as clear as they are demanding. Because formally protected areas cover only about 5 percent of the biome, regional resilience depends critically on the vast private matrix, and the authors argue that reactive emergency drought subsidies must give way to proactive landscape management that enhances soil water retention at scale. They call for robust financial mechanisms such as Payments for Ecosystem Services to reward private landowners who conserve native vegetation, urgent land tenure regularization for vulnerable traditional territories, and genuine inclusion of Indigenous Peoples and Afro-descendant communities in environmental decision-making. Continuous satellite monitoring of LSWI, they add, offers managers a real-time early-warning indicator capable of separating natural climate variability from human-induced degradation before vulnerable hotspots cross irreversible desertification thresholds. In the world’s most populous semiarid region, the fate of millions may hinge on whether that shift happens in time.

Subject of Research: Remote sensing assessment of ecosystem productivity, water-use efficiency, and land-use governance in the Caatinga tropical dry forest

Article Title: Ecosystem Resilience and Land-Use Governance: Remote Sensing Insights for Environmental Management in a Tropical Dry Forest

Article References: Ecosystem Resilience and Land-Use Governance: Remote Sensing Insights for Environmental Management in a Tropical Dry Forest. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-026-02629-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00267-026-02629-4

Keywords: Caatinga, tropical dry forest, Net Primary Productivity, Water Use Efficiency, remote sensing, LSWI, ecosystem resilience, land governance, Conservation Units, Indigenous Lands, Quilombola Territories, desertification