Nature is Changing: As Land Abandonment Increases

When people leave their rural lives behind to seek their fortunes in the city or agriculture is no longer profitable, the lands they toiled on are often left unused. A new perspective piece in Science shows that these abandoned lands could be both an opportunity and a threat for biodiversity, and highlights why abandoned lands are critical in the assessment of global restoration and conservation targets.

The past 50 years have seen an increased exodus of populations from rural to urban areas. Today, 55 per cent of the world’s population lives in or around cities and this proportion is expected to expand to up to 68 per cent by 2050. There are of course a multitude of reasons for people to leave their rural lives behind and move to urban areas, including socioeconomic and political change, declining subsistence farming, and environmental factors. One effect of this continuous decrease in rural populations is that the land they leave behind leads to a rise in the number of abandoned fields and pastures, forestry areas, mines, factories, and even entire human settlements.

IIASA researcher Gergana Daskalova and Johannes Kamp, a researcher at the University of Göttingen in Germany, took a closer look at abandoned land— in other words land on which human activities have ceased—to explore how biodiversity is influenced, and what this means for ecology and conservation.

“The factors that drive depopulation and consequently also land abandonment are intensifying due to issues such as climate change and the rapidly changing geopolitical landscape. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, for example, has already created new abandonment hotspots. Abandonment is a globally important process. The scale at which this is happening around the world urged us to put the spotlight on the places people have left behind as a potential source of future solutions for conservation, while also protecting human livelihoods,” Daskalova explains.