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Environmental Management
Published in: Environmental Management 1/2018

25-10-2017

Paths to Change: Bio-Economic Factors, Geographical Gradients and the Land-Use Structure of Italy

Published in: Environmental Management | Issue 1/2018

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Abstract

This study introduces a bio-economic approach to evaluate the influence of local socioeconomic contexts on complex processes of landscape transformation (urbanization, withdrawal of farming with woodland creation and loss in crop mosaics) in a sustainable development perspective. Land-use and socioeconomic indicators (including shares of agriculture, industry and services in total product, per-worker value added, productivity by economic sector, distance from central cities, latitude and elevation) at the local district scale in Italy have been considered together in an exploratory approach based on multivariate statistics. The combined use of land-use and socioeconomic indicators was preferred to more traditional approaches based on single-variable analysis and allows identifying latent factors of landscape transformation at the local scale. Our approach sheds light in the intimate relationship between regional economic structures and land-use change in districts with varying socio-environmental attributes across Italy. Urban-rural divides, coastal–inland dichotomy and the elevation gradient were relevant factors shaping urbanization-driven landscape transformations at the country scale. Indicators of economic structure (and especially industrial production and per-worker productivity of industry and services) were also documented to influence greatly entity and direction of change in the use of land. Discontinuous and dispersed urbanization has been demonstrated to be spatially-decoupled from consolidated (continuous and compact) urbanization, expanding into undeveloped rural areas progressively far away from central cities and being spatially associated with forest land.
previous article Conventional and New Ways of Governing Forest Threats: A Study of Stakeholder Coherence in Sweden
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Metadata
Title
Paths to Change: Bio-Economic Factors, Geographical Gradients and the Land-Use Structure of Italy
Publication date
25-10-2017
Published in
Environmental Management / Issue 1/2018
Print ISSN: 0364-152X
Electronic ISSN: 1432-1009
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-017-0950-0

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