UC Berkeley

Developing countries face the challenging and seemingly contradictory task of preserving or expanding their forests and natural ecosystems while lifting their populations out of poverty. Global change, or anthropogenic shifts in climate and ecosystems, is putting increasing strain on human and natural systems and threatens to dramatically undermine these efforts. Smallholder farms, which are the source of most food calories across many developing nations, are especially vulnerable to climate-related events like drought. These impacts can disrupt farmer livelihood strategies and land use arrangements in complex ways. Investigating how disruptors like drought affect land use and livelihoods, and how governments and local contexts mediate these impacts, is crucial to building adaptive capacity in smallholder systems in the face of global change.

In this dissertation, I explore global change dynamics in smallholder-dominated systems, focusing on drought and land use change. I investigate multinational changes in forest and crop cover due to livelihood shocks, the impact of national forestry payment programs, and farmers' relationships with drought in Zacapa Department, Guatemala. My analysis takes a land use systems approach, considering underlying drivers, dynamics, and scales in assessing change in smallholder-dominated regions. The three chapters that comprise the body of this dissertation address global change questions at increasingly smaller scales. Chapter 2 provides a multinational assessment of how livelihood shocks affect land use in the developing world. Chapter 3 examines the impact of Guatemala’s long-running national payment for ecosystem services on forest cover, considering different program contexts. Chapter 4 focuses on Zacapa Department, Guatemala, analyzing how households in this part of the Central American Dry Corridor experience droughts. This research stitches together the interplay of drought, conflict, and forestry on land cover and livelihoods to reveal key dynamics that are shaping these systems. My findings provide critical insights such as i) theoretically-backed links between livelihoods shocks and land use change; ii) improved understanding of how government-backed forestry incentives improve forest cover; and iii) regionally-specific measures of drought exposure and drivers of vulnerability. Using a scaled approach that analyzes data at the multinational, national, and local levels allows for a comprehensive and a more nuanced understanding of global change in smallholder-dominated systems.

My research in Chapter 2 investigates the impact of food insecurity shocks on human land use. Existing literature largely describes the extent, patterns and drivers of food insecurity or land cover change separately, but the interplay between the two remains understudied. I use data from USAID to track food insecurity events and their resulting impacts on land use and population in 25 low- and middle-income countries. To isolate impacts on forest area, cropland, and population dynamics in the wake of food insecurity events, I use matching with difference-in-differences and two-stage least squares to disentangle the impacts of major food insecurity drivers. I find that spikes in regional food insecurity lead to forest recovery and a loss of cropland and population. When I parse the underlying drivers of food insecurity, I show that drought-driven shocks most impact land cover, whereas conflict-driven shocks most impact population, suggesting that changes to land productivity are most predictive of subsequent land use change.

Chapter 3 evaluates the effectiveness of two long-running forestry incentive programs in Guatemala which aim to expand forest cover and improve rural livelihoods. These programs underlie Guatemala’s ambitious forest restoration goals, but have yet to be critically evaluated at a national scale. I use a synthetic control counterfactual to evaluate the impacts of over 16,000 individual Payment for Ecosystem Services projects on forest extent and loss. A program for smallholders resulted in lower rates of forest loss, while a program for industrial timber owners led to greater gains in forest cover. Across policies, I found dramatically higher forest cover increases from restoration projects compared to plantation and agroforestry projects. Overall, my analysis found forest cover increases to be under 10% of total enrolled area, although positive local spillovers suggest this is an underestimate.

In Chapter 4, I combine ethnographic research with remotely sensed data to characterize the climate vulnerability of smallholder farmers in Zacapa, Guatemala. This region of the Central American Dry Corridor has been one of the hardest hit by drought in recent decades, with the World Food Programme estimating that up to 70% of the corn crop was lost in recent years. I investigate the experiences of farmers through historic and recent droughts using ethnographic interviews across two smallholder communities. I further evaluate crop water stress within vegetation groups and agricultural fields using remotely sensed imagery. Integrating these datasets identified a socio-ecologically relevant measure of water stress that allows for better evaluation of drought exposure and also reveals how shifting land tenure may be driving drought vulnerability through limiting farmers’ access to high-elevation forests.

These findings can inform policies aiding smallholder-dominated systems, targeting points of vulnerability and supporting interventions with the best socio-ecological outcomes. They also support future research via the application of findings across scales, to either zoom in on how important global drivers are mediated within local contexts or to apply a flexible but locally-relevant framework to multinational studies. I further suggest that better measurements of change drivers can improve our understanding of the mechanisms and impacts of global change, leading to more applicable and forward-thinking research findings in this field.