The push and pull of land use policy: reconstructing 150 years of development and conservation land acquisition

Environmental protection, climate regulation, and the persistence of sprawl in California

California is widely seen as a climate and environmental policy leader in the U.S. and beyond. However, allowing local land use decisions to proceed as usual represents a major gap in the state's climate policy framework. Climate mitigation rules and formulae are utilized to claim zero net emissions for large-scale land development at the urban fringe. Such developments continue to destroy habitats and radically transform landscapes. Newhall Ranch, a subdevelopment at the edge of urbanized Los Angeles County, has claimed emissions offsets such that the development of 60,000 homes will have less than zero greenhouse gas emissions. Offsets largely rely on using disadvantaged communities, and significant threats to endangered species on site are compensated by payments to the project's environmental opponents. The net result is land development as usual, with a veneer of solarization and investments in GHG mitigation projects with poor quantification and verification. This situation demonstrates the enduring structures of land use development that drive GHG emissions and environmental change, and calls for stronger requirements for local compliance with state emissions-reductions targets.

Effect of governance structure on conservation land acquisition in California over the last 100 years

The process of expanding a network of conservation areas includes identifying valuable areas for conservation, devising policies and implementing conservation actions on the ground. While the first two components are often analyzed in conservation science, the literature seldom focuses on the implementation process, particularly, how the governance structure acts as driver of conservation outcomes. In this paper, we analyze the process of development of the conservation network in California between 1910 and 2010 to test whether governance structure explains the variation in the attribution of land for conservation over time. We find that governance structure does play an important role in the development of the conservation network over the century. We find evidence that polycentric and diverse governance structures result in better conservation outcomes (i.e. more area of land acquired for conservation). Arrangements that included multiple levels of agencies (e.g. Federal, State, and County) better predict the area of conservation land per decade. Location of conservation action per county had an effect on conservation outcomes over the last decades, and we also find a strong negative effect of per capita income in the implementation of conservation actions. These results suggest that it is possible to leverage governance structure to meet future conservation challenges through the maintenance of a diverse and polycentric governance structure.

Complexity in action: Untangling latent relationships between land quality, economic structures and socio-spatial patterns in Italy

Land quality, a key economic capital supporting local development, is affected by biophysical and anthropogenic factors. Taken as a relevant attribute of economic systems, land quality has shaped the territorial organization of any given region influencing localization of agriculture, industry and settlements. In regions with long-established human-landscape interactions, such as the Mediterranean basin, land quality has determined social disparities and polarization in the use of land, reflecting the action of geographical gradients based on elevation and population density. The present study investigates latent relationships within a large set of indicators profiling local communities and land quality on a fine-grained resolution scale in Italy with the aim to assess the potential impact of land quality on the regional socioeconomic structure. The importance of land quality gradients in the socioeconomic configuration of urban and rural regions was verified analyzing the distribution of 149 socioeconomic and environmental indicators organized in 5 themes and 17 research dimensions. Agriculture, income, education and labour market variables discriminate areas with high land quality from areas with low land quality. While differential land quality in peri-urban areas may reflect conflicts between competing actors, moderate (or low) quality of land in rural districts is associated with depopulation, land abandonment, subsidence agriculture, unemployment and low educational levels. We conclude that the socioeconomic profile of local communities has been influenced by land quality in a different way along urban-rural gradients. Policies integrating environmental and socioeconomic measures are required to consider land quality as a pivotal target for sustainable development. Regional planning will benefit from an in-depth understanding of place-specific relationships between local communities and the environment.