Page 9 - UD Magazine Vol. 31 No. 1

The world’s forests continue to disappear.
Since the turn of the century just 23 years ago, the world has experienced a surge of large-scale land acquisitions— collectively larger than South Africa—
in which wealthier foreign entities
have gained thousands of contracts
for agriculture, logging and mining
use in poorer countries, threatening biodiversity in those lands and beyond, new UD research has found.
When used for agriculture, specifically, these transnational agricultural large-scale land acquisitions (TALSLAs), and their associated
forest loss, pose a threat to
biodiversity in the Global South,
broadly defined as nations with
lower levels of economic and
industrial development. Those
include Latin America, Eastern
Europe, Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Geography Prof. Kyle Davis, who also serves as a resident faculty in UD’s Data Science Institute, led an international study on this topic. As part of the study, he and fellow researchers used high- resolution satellite data for annual forest cover to quantify where forests were being removed and whether
rates of forest loss were significantly higher within land investments. They also looked at when forest loss was happening in relation to the contract year for each TALSLA. It is, according to
Davis, the largest global dataset of georeferenced agricultural land investments to date.
In Asia, they found a significant increase after TALSLA contracts
were signed, suggesting that these investments directly led to increased deforestation. In Africa, they noticed enhanced forest loss tended to happen before the contract year, suggesting investments may be capitalizing on places with losses already underway.
For the study, Davis and collaborators relied on data from the Land Matrix Database, a joint international initiative of several research and development
organizations run out of the University of Bern in Switzerland, which
has been collecting data on
transnational and domestic land deals since 2009.
—Adam Thomas
ON THE GREEN
GROWING RESEARCH ON FOREST DECLINE
Suite Blackness: Black Dance in Cinema explored the personal history and styles of Black dancers from the 1920s to the early 2000s. The limited- run performance was directed by Hassan El-Amin, a member of UD’s Resident Ensemble Players theatre troupe, and Prof. Lynnette Young Overby, director of the dance minor program.
DAN DUNLAP
“What better way to celebrate Black history, Black joy and Black excellence than through a performance like this?”
—FATIMAH CONLEY,
UD’s chief diversity officer
Volume 31
Number 1 2023 7