Characterisation and visualisation of telecouplings in Large Scale Land Acquisitions in Southeast Asia

In a globalized world, flows, feedbacks and spill-overs of material, goods and services, and respective drivers and impacts between local and distant land systems are the norm and not the exception. In some domains, such as trade-flows and supply chains, some aspects of interconnectivity of places can already be captured and visualized (e.g. www.trase.earth). The enormous increase of Large Scale Land Acquisitions (LSLA) in the last decade, mainly targeted at export oriented commodities (e.g. Oil Palm, rubber) lead to large changes in land system especially in the global South. While there is an increasing understanding of local impacts of such LSLA, there is a lack of approaches to capture, characterize and especially visualizing spill-overs and feedbacks with neighbouring or distant places and systems (e.g. land use displacement effects of LSLAs to neighbouring or distant places).

On this backdrop this PhD research aims at developing a system to capture, characterize and visualize feedbacks and spill-overs using LSLA cases in mainland Southeast Asia, likely Myanmar and/or Laos. The research will largely be based on various already available large data sets from different sources, but some fieldwork is envisaged. This research will lead to: