How do differences in land use affect sustainable development both nationally and internationally? This was the question when Formas allocated funds for some strong research environments last autumn. In step with global climate change and the growth in population, competition for land is on the increase. There are intense discussions on how agricultural products for fuels impact on food supplies. There is now a demand for ideas which will illustrate both the opportunities and conflicts of multifunctional agriculture. What is of particular interest to study is how the production of food and bioenergy can be integrated in a balanced manner. Some of the researchers who had received grants are writing in this issue on problems and visions.
Linné wished for “timber, tar and pitch”. About a hundred years later the American natural philosopher Thoreau thought that every community should be able to indulge in a forest where not one branch should be broken. We cannot all have everything. But how should forest land best satisfy both spiritual and material welfare? This is an interesting question. Others are: How do we achieve a multifunctional agriculture for food, biodiversity and ecosystem services? At the same time as we are cost effective? Should organic farming be concentrated in areas where there is little difference between organic and conventional harvests? Or in more intensively farmed landscapes where there is an almost total absence of natural biotopes?
The world’s forests are under pressure. Climate change is already affecting the world’s forests, resulting in more forest fires and greater loss of biodiversity. This was recently stated at the World Forestry Congress in Buenos Aires where it was claimed that today’s countermeasures will not be enough. What is needed is a system shift where the limits of nature will ultimately determine. Access to land and its use have in all human societies, throughout the ages, constituted the basis for power relationships. In the Formas-funded project “Power, land and materiality”, some ten Swedish researchers are working across disciplinary boundaries on developing new insights into what we call historico-political ecology. A study is made of how management of land and land-based resources are used as strategies by certain sectors of society to dominate and exploit others.
The production of biofuel is in explosive conflict on resources. When the global land use changes, this can have unimagined consequences. Biofuel is sometimes produced at the expense of farming for food. This can, in turn, necessitate the development of other land to produce food. And this may be land that has perhaps protected the world from climate changes.
The volatile hydrocarbons of the future are uncertain climatic factors. Ground level ozone is formed by vehicle exhausts and other human innovations. But volatile hydrocarbons directly from nature are also an important source of ozone. Will ozone increase or decrease as a result of future emissions of volatile hydrocarbons from forests and crops?