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Food insecurity is a perennial problem in much of the developing world, with gains against hunger backsliding in recent years and climate change predicted to accelerate this trend. Food insecurity is highly disruptive to rural livelihoods and can lead to dramatic shifts in food production strategies and resultant land use. However, studies to date have yet to outline the overarching patterns of land use change that can result from food insecurity. We elucidate the impact of food insecurity events between 2013 and 2020 in 25 low- and middle-income countries on resulting land use change and demographics. Using propensity score matching, we create a counterfactual and assess changes in forest cover, crop cover, population and nighttime luminosity between regions that experience food insecurity and comparable food-secure regions. Land use change theory, specifically the classical trajectories of agricultural intensification, land rent theory, and regime shifts help to explain observed land use trajectories. We find that food insecurity events lead to around a 4 % decline in population and a 3 % decline in cropped areas, alongside a 4 % increase in forest cover compared to control regions. Additionally, we show that drought-driven food insecurity drives impacts on land use and conflict-driven food insecurity shows greater impacts on population and nighttime luminosity. Food insecurity shocks result in an increase in population and crop cover in urban areas despite losses in adjoining rural land, suggesting that food insecurity drives local rural to urban migration. Furthermore, by assessing the impacts of discrete food insecurity events in three countries, we find that regional contexts mediate impacts by producing variable land use change trajectories. 

Abstract International environmental initiatives, such as the Bonn Challenge and the UN Decade on Restoration, have prompted countries to put the management and restoration of forest landscapes at the center of their land use and climate policies. To support these goals, many governments are promoting forest landscape restoration and management through financial forestry incentives, a form of payment for ecosystem services. Since 1996, Guatemala has implemented a series of forestry incentives that promote active forest landscape restoration and management on private and communal lands. These programs have been widely hailed as a success with nearly 600 000 ha enrolled since 1998. However, there has been no systematic assessment of the effectiveness of these programs on preserving and restoring Guatemalan forests. This study evaluates the impacts of over 16 000 individual PES projects funded through two incentive programs using a synthetic control counterfactual. Overall, a program for smallholders resulted in lower rates of forest loss, while a program for industrial timber owners led to greater gains in forest cover. Across policies, we found dramatically higher forest cover increases from restoration projects (15% forest cover increase) compared to plantation and agroforestry projects (3%–6% increase in forest cover). Projects that protected natural forest also showed a 6% reduction in forest loss. We found forest cover increases to be under 10% of total enrolled area, although positive local spillovers suggest this is an underestimate. Restoration projects show the most promise at promoting forest landscape restoration, but these benefits need to be weighed against priorities like resilience and rural development, which may be better served by other projects.