Intensive irrigated agriculture in Castile-La Mancha, Spain
Intensively irrigated agricultural land in Castilla-La Mancha, Spain

 A big truck is being loaded with cabbage that is going to Bangkok
A big truck is being loaded with cabbage before going to Bangkok.

 Emerging residential developments in the outskirt of Mwanza, Tanzania.
Residential houses being built on the outskirts of Mwanza, Tanzania

 Group interviews were carried out with cabbage farmers
Group interviews being carried out with cabbage farmers.

 Harvesting cabbage from an upland field
Harvesting cabbage from an upland field

 Unstainable Road infrastructure in the urban periphery of Accra
Unsustainable road infrastructure in the urban periphery of Accra

 Participatory planning for climate changing in growing towns of Northern Ghana
Participatory planning for climate changes in emerging towns of Northern Ghana

Environment and Society in the Global South

The aim of the research group is to contribute to understanding globalisation processes and human dimensions of global change in the Global South.

The research group explores a broad portfolio of disciplinary entrance points, combined in various ways in our concrete research activities. The empirical research activities are concentrated in Africa (both East, West and South), South-East Asia and the Pacific, or deal with issues at the global scale. A variety of data sources are employed in our research, from interviews to Earth Observation.

 

The research group explores a broad portfolio of disciplinary entrance points, combined in various ways in our concrete research activities. These build on three key research areas:

How people manage and use land is central to addressing major sustainability challenges. This includes climate change, food and nutrition security, biodiversity conservation, sustainable energy, and poverty alleviation. We examine how and where land-cover and land use changes occur, the factors driving changes in land systems, the outcomes of land system changes, and how land systems can be governed to help achieve various sustainability goals (e.g., nature conservation, equity and justice, poverty alleviation, food security). Examples of research and teaching areas include: land acquisitions and their effects on local livelihoods; rural-urban transitions; transformations of farming systems; outcomes of sustainability commitments; forest dynamics and the outcomes for local people’s livelihoods and food and nutrition security; land use and climate change interactions.

Urbanization and rural transformation unfold in the interaction between globalization processes and local development dynamics. Within this global-local nexus, we examine the drivers, dynamics and outcomes of societal transformation processes in rural and urban areas – and how rural and urban spaces can be governed for sustainable and inclusive development. Examples of research and teaching areas include the significance of rural-urban linkages for small town development; the interconnections between world market dynamics and rural livelihood changes; the impact of global agro-industrial value chains on regional development; the interactions of human mobility, migration, urbanization and urban spatial transformations. 

Earth Observation of terrestrial ecosystems and land use with a focus on remote sensing of land functions and properties from local to global scale - and their responses to environmental, socio-economic and climatic changes. Remote sensing applications are anchored in research activities within human and physical geography, and often involves both image analysis and fieldwork. Examples of research and teaching areas include land surface characterization and modeling of spatial and temporal processes such as: monitoring vegetation health and composition; assessing land degradation and ecosystem resilience under climate change; studying land use/land cover change and associated drivers including deforestation/afforestation, urbanization and change in land use intensity.

The empirical research activities are concentrated in Africa (both East, West and South), South-East Asia and the Pacific, or deal with issues at the global scale. All scales from the household to continental, are considered. Great importance is attached to the mutual influence of processes at different scales, and a variety of data sources from interviews to Earth Observation are employed.

The research group continuously emphasizes to capitalize the interdisciplinary potential which lies in developing research approaches that cut across the key research areas described above.

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ongoing Research Projects

The research group is engaged in projects that are funded through national and international grants. Most of the projects are carried out in cooperation with other research institutions in Denmark, Europe, and the Global South.

The list is organized chronologically, with the most recent projects first:

  • Global Wetland Center, Novo Nordisk Fonden (Challenge program), 2024-2029.

  • ALPMEMA - Alpine Mountain Hay Meadows Management: Best practices to maintain their Favorable Conservation Status against underuse under different property right regimes inside and outside protected areas. Biodiversa+ grant 2023-2026.
  • The role of rural-urban linkages for enhanced Climate Resilience in rural Tanzania (RUL4CLI). Danida grant 2022-2027
  • CLISA - Unravelling climate change impacts on savanna vegetation ecosystems. The Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF; FNU), 2022-2026
  • Risk-assessment of Vector-borne Diseases Based on Deep Learning and Remote Sensing. Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF), 2022-2026
  • Draindetect - Mapping drained carbon-rich wetlands. Geocenter fund, 2022-2025.
  • FairFrontiers - Fair for whom? Power, politics and precarity in transformations of tropical forest-agriculture frontiers. Grant from Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), Kyoto, Japan, 2021-2026. 
  • DRYTIP - Drought-induced tipping points in ecosystem functioning: Coupled insights from Earth Observation, Dynamic Vegetation Model and Field Ecology. Villum Young Investigator, 2021-2026
  • RurbanClimate - Climate Resilience Across the Rural-Urban Continuum. Research grant from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2021-2025
  • AridLand – The response and resistance of global tropical drylands to increasing aridity. ESA CCI Research Fellowship, 2021-2023
  • PerformLCA – High performance land change assessment through coupling of AI, high performance computing and Earth Observation. KU Data+ grant, 2021-2024.
  • C-TREES - Tracking Carbon Sequestration at Tree Level. EU EUROSTARS, 2021-2023
  • DeReEco - Combining remote sensing and artificial intelligence to improve current understanding of global change impacts on terrestrial ecosystems. Villum Synergy Grant, 2020-2025
  • TOFDRY - Trees outside forests in global drylands. ERC starting grant 2020-2025
  • Reinterpreting how forests support people's dietary quality in low-income countries. ERC starting grant, 2020-2025
  • Mapping, characterizing and analyzing individual trees and shrubs outside forests in African drylands.DFF Sapere Aude grant, 2020–2024
  • TRACE - Plastics from source to sink: Exploring transport pathways and fate of plastic waste in coastal waters. Geocenter Denmark, 2020-2023
  • CaSSECS – Carbon Sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions in (agro) Sylvopastoral Ecosystems in the Sahelian CILSS States. EU, 2020-2023
  • BSU 3 - Building Stronger Universities.Program with Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), Tanzania.  Danida, 2017-2023


Recently completed Research Project

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We supervise Master's thesis projects and we are pleased to include Master students in the work of the research group. Below is a list of previous Master's thesis titles which can be used for inspiration or for finding a potential supervisor.

 

We would be pleased to include Master students in the work of the research group. Below is a list of previous Master's thesis titles which can be used for inspiration or for finding a potential supervisor.

  • For Efficiency or Empowerment? Unravelling Women's Participation in Humanitarian Assistance (supervised by Jytte Agergaard)
  • Politics of census making: A case study of Kosovo 2011 housing and population census (supervised by Jytte Agergaard)
  • Climate Change relocation as an adaptation strategy: lessons learned from small indigenous communities in Alaska from a governance perspective (supervised by Jytte Agergaard)
  • Between forest destroyers and forest guardians: Local resistance to conservation in Thailand. The case of Sob Lan and the Ob Khan National Park (supervised by Jytte Agergaard)
  • Clashing or complementary? The intertwinement of a new migration-development nexus and the actors of international development (supervised by Jytte Agergaard)
  • Refugees in ‘green’ initiatives – the compatibility of refugee livelihoods and environmental protection (supervised by Jytte Agergaard)
  • Resettlement as climate change adaptation: A case study investigated in rural Zambia (supervised by Jytte Agergaard)
  • Understanding Migration as a Climate Change Adaptation Strategy: Case Study of the Coastal Communities in Bangladesh (supervised by Jytte Agergaard)
  • Precariously Balanced on a Motorbike: A Mixed Methods study of Tootle Partners in Kathmandu, Nepal (supervised by Jytte Agergaard)
  • Neither Rural nor Urban – A Case Study of the Nexus between Land Use Change and Livelihood Diversification form the Guatemalan Highlands (supervised by Jytte Agergaard)
  • Understanding the international governance and development on the climate-migration nexus (supervised by Jytte Agergaard)
  • Livelihoods of rural-urban migrants in Zimbabwe – A gender perspective (supervised by Jytte Agergaard)
  • Farmers’ perception to climate resilient adaptation practices in Myanmar. A case study on planed adaptation interventions in the Central Dry Zone of Myanmar (supervised by Martin Rudbeck Jepsen)
  • Making room for nature: Cellular agriculture as a means for transformative land use change, allowing ecosystem restoration for climate change mitigation and adaptation (supervised by Martin Rudbeck Jepsen)
  • Can bioplastics mitigate climate change? Projecting the impacts of land use change from bioplastic bags in the EU (supervised by Martin Rudbeck Jepsen)
  • Projective species distribution modelling the Lyme disease vector Ixodes ricinus in the UK and Ireland utilizing the new Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) climate trajectories (supervised by Martin Rudbeck Jepsen)
  • Fairtrade certification and coffee farming in Antioquia, Colombia: An evaluation of social, economic, and environmental impacts of certification (supervised by Martin Rudbeck Jepsen)
  • The water footprint of Denmark for different diets (supervised by Martin Rudbeck Jepsen)
  • Determinants of internet usage at public Wi-Fi hotspots in Ghana (supervised by Martin Rudbeck Jepsen)
  • Improving historical versions of the World Database on Protected Areas using a backcasting based approach (supervised by Martin Rudbeck Jepsen)
  • Exploring opportunities and challenges in farm level GHG accounting - a comparison of consumption-based and territorial-based GHG accounting in the case of Danish dairy farms (supervised by Martin Rudbeck Jepsen)
  • Regionalising the EAT-Lancet Diet. An assessment of regional cropland demand with a global food system transformation (supervised by Martin Rudbeck Jepsen)
  • From Paddy to Plate: An analysis of factors influencing rice production in Myanmar and the relationship between climate changes’ impact on rice production, farmers’ perception of climate change and their farm level adaptation strategies: A case study of Sagaing Division (supervised by Ole Mertz)
  • Commercial agriculture as a driver of sustainable livelihood development: A view from the southern uplands of Shan State, Myanmar (supervised by Ole Mertz)
  • The effects of land use changes on rural livelihood strategies in the Luang Namtha Province: A longitudinal study (supervised by Ole Mertz)
  • The Influences of Development and Conservation: A Case Study of Human-Environmental Changes in Northeastern Laos (supervised by Ole Mertz)
  • Fishing under the forecast of change. Assessing the contributions of the provisioning services of smallscale fisheries to the environmental income of ‘floating communities’ in Tonlé Sap’s multi-use waterscapes (supervised by Ole Mertz)
  • Green consumer-citizenship? Investigating the interrelatedness between green consumerism and green citizenship among Climate Change students (supervised by Ole Mertz)
  • Assessing Social Equity in Conservation in the Context of Protected Area Upgrading: Lessons from Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area in Northern Laos and its Upgrade to National Park Status (supervised by Ole Mertz, Joel Persson and Scott Ford)
  • The role of public participation in ESIA: The Kalivaç hydropower project, Albania (supervised by Ole Mertz)
  • Institutional investors guide towards sustainability in the palm oil sector (supervised by Ole Mertz and Thilde Bech Bruun)
  • Impacts of Large-Scale Land Acquisitions on Provisioning and Cultural Ecosystem Services and Rural Livelihoods in Agadi, Blue Nile State, Sudan (supervised by Ole Mertz)
  • Migrant Labour in Supermarket-driven Value Chains – Exploring the governance and working conditions of contemporary vegetable production (supervised by Marianne Nylandsted Larsen)
  • Transdisciplinary Value Chain Assessment: combining Life Cycle Assessment and the Global Value Chain Framework – a case study of a Tyrolean Organic Value chain (supervised by Marianne Nylandsted Larsen)
  • High Peaks, High Quality – Can access to the world specialty market lead to upgrading for Nepalese coffee producers? (supervised by Marianne Nylandsted Larsen)
  • Cooperatives’ role in monitoring sustainability standards in the Colombian coffee sector (supervised by Marianne Nylandsted Larsen)
  • Home Grown School Feeding Program of Zanzibar: a case study of how smallholder participation shapes livelihood strategies and household food security (supervised by Marianne Nylandsted Larsen)
  • Cultivation of fresh fruits and vegetables for development: How farmers in a non-profit organization engage with upgrading opportunities and challenges (supervised by Marianne Nylandsted Larsen) 
  • An Era of Gas in Mozambique: Exploring the Linkages Between Gas Discoveries and Conflict in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique Farm Production Diversity Influence on Household's Dietary Diversity. Differences in nationally representative data from Malawi (supervised by Laura Vang Rasmussen)
  • The importance of forest food availability for food security: a case study from Sangthong District, Vientiane, Laos (supervised by Laura Vang Rasmussen)
  • The influence of forests and forest products on livelihoods in Liberia (supervised by Laura Vang Rasmussen)
  • Rewetting of organic soils - Mitigation potential, along with societal and environmental benefits in Denmark (supervised by Laura Vang Rasmussen)
  • Exploring climate change adaptation: A case study of a wine farmer community in South Africa (supervised by Laura Vang Rasmussen)
  • Down to the last grain: Estimating climate change impact on food supply in Mozambique (supervised by Laura Vang Rasmussen)
  • Unraveling post-conflict land transformation and its drivers in Kosovo (supervised by Alexander Prishchepov)
  • Towards mapping high-nature value agricultural landscapes in Armenia (supervised by Alexander Prishchepov)
  • Revealing the turning points in socio-economic development with nighttime lights data (supervised by Alexander Prishchepov)
  • Understanding the patterns and the drivers of agricultural land abandonment in Sudan (supervised by Alexander Prishchepov)
  • Towards a real-time wildfire risk analysis: a case study in Honduras (supervised by Alexander Prishchepov)
  • Revealing the relationship between fires and landscape transformation in steppe regions of Russia (supervised by Alexander Prishchepov)
  • Testing the effect of label noise and training set size on classification performances for land cover mapping with supervised classification techniques (supervised by Alexander Prishchepov)
  • Assessment of the impact of shifting cultivation on a tropical ecosystem (supervised by Alexander Prishchepov)
  • Analysis of the patterns and determinants of land-cover change in southern Kazakhstan and northern Kyrgyzstan (supervised by Alexander Prishchepov)
  • Study of cropland use change and potentials for crop production increase via cropland expansion and yield improvement in Far East of Northern Eurasia (supervised by Alexander Prishchepov)
  • Understanding the Dynamics and Intensity of Agricultural Land-use in Post-Soviet Temperate Eastern Europe (supervised by Alexander Prishchepov)
  • Urban dynamics in post-socialist Eastern Europe: a comparison of cities using object-based classification and landscape metrics (supervised by Alexander Prishchepov)
  • Drought-induced vegetation water stress and recovery related to 2012-2015 drought in California: evidence from medium resolution satellite imagery (supervised by Stéphanie Horion)
  • Assessing surface trends in wetland dynamics in relation to potential land use and climatic drivers using satellite remote sensing and time series analysis (supervised by Rasmus Fensholt and Stéphanie Horion)
  • Revealing turning points in nighttime lights time series using structural change detection methods (Supervised by Alexander Prishchepov and Stéphanie Horion)

  • Ways to reduce the ecological footprint of copper used in offshore wind farms in order to help mitigate climate change (supervised by Niels Fold)

  • The Danish Transition to a Deforestation-free Soy Import – viewed through the lens of GVC analysis (supervised by Niels Fold)

  • Ecological Infrastructure in Global Value Chains: Private Management & Public Regulation affecting Environmental Interventions of Commercial Growers in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (supervised by Niels Fold)

  • Cruise tourism and Arctic destinations: Challenges and opportunities in promoting sustainable tourism - a case study in Qaqortoq and Kujataa, Southern Greenland (supervised by Niels Fold)

  • Factors influencing the adoption of aquaculture innovations under a changing climate: An ex-ante case study in Caquetá, Colombia (supervised by Niels Fold)

  • The impacts of ecological infrastructure on climate change adaptation: A case study of farmers’ perceptions in the Upper Riviersonderend sub-catchment (supervised by Niels Fold)

  • Labour in the Colombian Cut Flower Industry and the Social Outcomes of Standard Adoption: Do Workers Get the Thorns? (supervised by Niels Fold)

  • Unraveling the threads of empowerment: Ethical Fashion Firms - a new design or another copy?

  • Pursing Sustainability of Technology Transfer: A Case Study of UNIDO ITPO Tokyo's STePP Demonstration Project (supervised by Niels Fold)

  • Can We Have Our Meat and Eat it Too? The Developments of Cultivated Meat as a Sustainable Food Product and its Global Value Chain (supervised by Niels Fold)

  • Climate Change Research and Critical Engagement: A literature review on the Growth paradigm (supervised by Niels Fold)

  • The Agrarian Question in San Julián: social differentiation in the Bolivian soybean value chain (supervised by Niels Fold)

 

 

 

Global Land project
Sustainable Land Use and Natural Resource Management (SLUSE)
Building Stronger Universities

International collaboration

The group attracts many young, international researchers and in connection with the FFU funded activities, the group receives visiting Ph.D. students and guest researchers from the Global South for education and collaborative work.

International collaboration is highly appreciated and ensured through a range of other mechanisms such as:

  • Planned sabbaticals for permanent staff abroad
  • Research capacity projects in the Global South
  • Participation in international field experiments within earth observation and validation
  • Participation in international research networks
  • Advisory services to international organisations (e.g. OECD, WB, UNCTAD, UNFCCC)
  • Participation in centres of excellence at UoC (Waterworlds, CAST)
  • Participation in cross-Faculty thematic centres (Space Science, Earth Systems Science)
  • Contributing to the platforms in ‘Building Stronger Universities' (Danish Universities)
  • Leadership of Ernst Strungman Forum on ‘Global Land Use', etc.

 

Members of the Research Group

Name Title Phone E-mail
Search in Name Search in Title Search in Phone
Cecilie Friis Guest Researcher +4535325843 E-mail
Jytte Agergaard Professor +4535322567 E-mail
Manja Hoppe Andreasen Associate Professor +4535324182 E-mail
Marianne Nylandsted Larsen Associate Professor +4535324167 E-mail
Mercy Obenewaah Owusu Enrolled PhD Student E-mail
Niels Fold Professor +4535322561 E-mail
Ole Mertz Professor +4535322529 E-mail
Sharon-Naomi Alcaide Manthey PhD Fellow +4535323796 E-mail
Sinne Borby Ørtenblad Postdoc +4535332064 E-mail
Torben Birch-Thomsen Associate Professor +4535322570 E-mail
Xaquín S. Pérez-Sindín Guest Researcher +4535328227 E-mail

Head of Research Group

Marianne Nylandsted LarsenMarianne Nylandsted Larsen
Associate Professor
mnl@ign.ku.dk
+45 35 32 41 67

Featured Research

Featured research