Experiences of Climate Change at the Third Pole

Abstract/Description

Abstract
The land sparing/sharing debate of the 2000s-2010s has transitioned into an exploration of different perspectives on the utility of multifunctional landscapes (MFL). This research trend was the result of two empirical observations: 1) Biodiversity loss has accelerated in many parts of Europe over several decades, during which historical patterns of land-sharing have gradually morphed, under commercial pressures, into patterns more oriented toward land-sparing. 2) The concept of Environmental Services (ES) has offered a broad-based argument for landscape multifunctionality as a provider of multiple critical services besides food production.
There is also an emergent literature on design and planning of MFL. These discussions do not always acknowledge that opportunities to design or plan MFL are, in a practical sense, vanishingly few at the global scale. Much more common (particularly in tropical and less-developed regions) are MFL that are outcomes of historical contingency – often involving combinations of population growth, contested land-use rights, and subsistence production ongoing until recently. Many of today’s most characteristic MFL are also found in mountainous regions where large-scale, mechanized agriculture remains impractical, farming by hand and using domestic animals remains the norm, and farm plots are small or commercially marginal. Such landscapes are difficult to “redesign,” even where greater potential efficiencies are easy to envision.
Here we examine an example of such a multifunctional landscape in the mid-hills of Indian Eastern Himalaya. We characterize the landscape from geographical, ecological and social-economic perspectives. Based on panel data from a decade of work in Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts, we show that the multifunctionality of these landscapes is undergoing a relatively rapid transformation under pressures of
• commercial agricultural marketization,
• ongoing subdivision of family land,
• growth of land markets and transportation networks, and
• chronic / acute loss of crops to wild herbivores.
Over 10 years, the trends are away from generalist smallholder agriculture and toward:
• land abandonment or disuse
• greater agricultural specialization
• village community absorption into the hinterlands of larger towns and cities
• greater economic emphasis on ecosystem services, especially nature tourism.