Springer Science and Business Media LLC

This paper examines the socio-economic drivers of land use and land cover change and assesses the impacts of such changes to rural livelihoods in the Zambezi region of northern Namibia. We carried out a longitudinal analysis of Landsat imagery of land use and land cover. The analysis revealed that the amount of land in the region covered by forest increased significantly in the period from 1991 to 2010 whilst crop/grass land decreased. Focus group meetings, key informant interviews and semi-structured interviews covering 424 households stratified by gender were used. The results show that natural resource uses are vitally important in the rural livelihoods. The drivers of land use and land cover change are agricultural expansion, population increase and illegal logging. Livelihood coping strategies include piecework, food aid, borrowing from relatives and wild food collection. By gender stratification, piecework contributed 37 and 63 % while agriculture contributed 29 and 71 % of the income of male- and female-headed households. Logistic regression analysis showed knowledge of regulations, age group and species availability significantly (p < 0.05) influenced the choice of a household’s livelihood coping strategy. The study concludes that the changes in coping strategies influenced by a variety of factors have led to the diminished use of natural resources. For policy purposes, this suggests that state interventions can play a significant role in promoting more sustainable natural resource usage. This analysis enables effective decision-making to reconcile the efforts of sustainable development and natural resource management.

As climate change threatens livelihoods in Bangladesh, migration to neighboring countries in South Asia may accelerate. We use multiple types of data to predict how changes in the environment affect cross-border migration. Nationally representative migration data are combined with remote-sensing measures of flooding and rainfall and in situ measures of monsoon onset, temperature, radiation, and soil salinity to characterize environmental migration patterns. We further evaluate which groups are more susceptible to cross-border migration to examine how environmental factors shape the demographic composition of the country. We find migration to neighboring countries declines with short-term, adverse weather but increases with soil salinity. The soil salinity effect remains particularly persistent among poorer households. Investments targeting risks faced by the poor and non-poor remain crucial, as retention of the earnings skills, and experience of the latter enhances national resilience.

Exposure to singular or overlapping external shocks, such as rainfall extremes, armed conflict, and COVID-19, may catalyze a shift in gendered power dynamics within affected households as they cope with associated threats to their safety and livelihoods. Despite evidence that women are disproportionately affected by such shocks, little scientific work has assessed the separate and combined impacts of these three external shocks on women’s lives. In this study, we examined the distinct and overlapping associations between extreme events—growing season rainfall anomalies, armed conflict during the growing season, and COVID-19—and women’s daily decision-making power in Burkina Faso. We employed longitudinal survey data from IPUMS Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA), a complex and spatially referenced dataset. These data were collected from a population-representative sample of women of reproductive age (15–49 years) in Burkina Faso across two timepoints: 2019/2020 (December 2019–February 2020) and 2020/2021 (December 2020–March 2021). PMA data from Burkina Faso contain detailed questions on women’s sociodemographic characteristics, health, and household dynamics. We spatially linked these data with (1) external rainfall data, (2) armed conflict event data, and (3) PMA coronavirus-specific follow-up survey data (containing COVID-19 knowledge and prevention behaviors) collected in June and July of 2020. Using log-binomial general estimating equation (GEE) models, we examined the relationship between extreme events—wetter-than-usual growing season, armed conflict (that resulted in at least one death), and COVID-19—and increased daily decision-making power among women. We found strong and significant associations between experiencing a wetter-than-usual growing season (i.e., greater than 1 standard deviation above 10-year mean) and women being less likely to have increased daily decision-making power in the household compared those experiencing usual rainfall during the growing season [prevalence ratio (PR): 0.70, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.56, 0.87]. Similarly, residing in an area that was more affected by the COVID-19 pandemic (i.e., where 80% or more of respondents in the community reported staying home to avoid COVID-19) was also associated with women being less likely to have increased daily decision-making power in the household [PR: 0.75, 95% CI: 0.61, 0.91]. We did not observe any significant association between armed conflict and increased daily decision-making among women [PR: 1.15, 95% CI: 0.84, 1.57]. These trends indicate that women’s decision-making power within partnerships may be negatively impacted by certain household shocks. Centering women (and other marginalized and vulnerable communities) in the leadership, implementation, and as key beneficiaries of crisis response efforts may be an effective strategy to combat some of these constraints on women’s decision-making and even empower them within their households and communities.

Along with decreasing doubling times as a function of increasing rates of population growth over the past several thousand years, the human species has shown striking parallels with a malignant growth. Some cancers also display decreasing doubling times of cell proliferation during the most rapidly growing phase. At 6 billion, the number of doublings reached by the human population as of 1998 is 32.5, with the 33rd doubling (8.59 billion) expected early in the next century. In terms of total animal biomass, including that of domestic animals under human control, the 33rd doubling of human-related biomass has been passed. In terms of energy use, which is a more accurate index of the global ecological impact of humans, the human species has passed its 36th doubling. These calculations are important because, in addition to the number of doublings, the human population is showing several important similarities with a malignant organismic tumor, which results in death of the host organism at between 37 and 40 doublings. At current growth rates, the number of individual humans will reach those levels within 200–400 years from the present, but the ecological impact will be felt much sooner since the number of doublings of energy consumed will pass 37 early in the next century. These observations support the hypothesis that the human species has become a malignant process on the planet that is likely to result in the equivalent, for humans, of ecosystem death, or at least in a radical transformation of the ecosystem, the early phases of which are being observed.