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A total of 127 interventions have been identified with a total investment value of 4.58 Billion USD until the year 2050. The full set of interventions is presented in Annex 1 and grouped around the various strategic planning objectives. Interventions have been distinguished in terms of Israeli (ISR), Jordanian (JOR), Palestinian (PAL), or Regional (REG) interventions.

A total of 127 interventions have been identified with a total investment value of 4.58 Billion USD until the year 2050. The full set of interventions is presented in Annex 1 and grouped around the various strategic planning objectives. Interventions have been distinguished in terms of Israeli (ISR), Jordanian (JOR), Palestinian (PAL), or Regional (REG) interventions.

Largely unfettered by disciplinary dogma, Ester Boserup observed human-environment relationships through an expansive analytical lens. Her ideas on agricultural change, gender, and development shook up research and practice in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, and remain cogent one-half century later for the development dimensions of sustainability. In this, the 100th year since her birth, it is worthwhile to take stock of her impact on research and practice and how her ideas continue to shape and be reshaped by current research.

Ester Boserup was famous in the scientific community during the 1970s and 1980s, but less is known about the last decade of her life. This chapter intends to give an idea of her thinking in the 1990s. It is interesting to see how she reconsidered her work and career during that period. Based on a series of personal conversations and on two remarkable publications of her last years, we can try to look at Boserup’s work with her own eyes. It becomes clear that she saw herself in a position apart from the main currents of economics also at the end of her life, when she had received much formal appreciation from the scholarly world. With Boserup, clarification, coherence, and interdisciplinarity were more than academic battle cries. They formed a life experience deeply linked to her way of “finding out”.

This chapter is devoted to the core theoretical propositions unfolded in E. Boserup’s 1981 book Population and Technological Change and represents an attempt to take these ideas further. The 1981 book makes an effort to provide a theoretical explanation for the full course of human history, from hunting and gathering communities through various stages of agricultural societies right into the industrial transformation. First we re-examine her own data, confirming her core thesis about average agricultural output per area risingwith population density at the expense of declining output per labour hour, but demonstrating a strong discontinuity at the industrial end of her technology scale.Clearly, what is measured at this end, the transition to fossil fuel use in agriculture, leads to saving labour. Second, we explain our theory of sociometabolic regime transitions and try to show how much this theory learned from Boserup. This theory, though, supposes that it makes a fundamental difference if societies base practically all of their processes on solar energy, its conversion into plant biomass and, consequently, on agriculture as the key energy supply sector, or if they base their processes on fossil fuel energy sources – this is a qualitative leap beyond what Boserup introduces as gradual distinctions. In a third part, based on our comparative research on resource use, we elaborate on three examples for the lasting validity of Boserup’s arguments: on the non-linearity between population growth and land requirements, on the transferability of this thesis to other resources as well, and finally on the persistent relevance of population density as key factor allowing for lower resource consumption. This chapter confirms Boserup’s role as an eminent theorist and analyst of the development trajectory of agrarian societies, but also points to her weakness in understanding the industrial transformation.

In this article, we will explore a contemporary coupled human-environmental system on a small island in the South West Pacific with the aim of portraying historical changes in the resource management strategies, notably the agricultural land use, in this former subsistence system.

Land use is a pervasive driver of change in the earth system (Steffen et al., Ambio 36:614–621, 2007; Turner et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104:20666–20671, 2007). Today, the majority of the ice-free terrestrial surface has been affected in one way or another by human land use (McCloskey and Spalding, Ambio 18:221–227, 1989; Sanderson et al., BioScience 52:891–904, 2002), and since the beginning of agriculture, more than one third of all pristine terrestrial ecosystems have been converted to human-controlled, permanently managed ecosystems with fundamentally altered ecological characteristics (Erb et al., Journal of Land Use Science 2:191–224, 2007). By using the land, human societies alter structures and processes in ecosystems and thereby substantially affect global land cover, biodiversity, biogeochemical cycles of carbon, water, nitrogen, and many other patterns and processes, with far-reaching consequences for ecosystems and human well-being (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and human well-being: Current state and trends, 2005). Land use, on the one hand, provides the basis of nutrition, an array of resources and many essential ecosystem services to society. On the other hand, land use is increasingly jeopardising ecosystem functioning and thus threatens the biophysical basis of humanity. This fundamental trade-off related to land use leads to the emergence of an interdisciplinary research agenda, land-system science (Global Land Project, Science plan and implementation strategy. IGBP Report No. 53/ IHDP Report No. 19, 2005), which seeks to improve the observation of land changes as well as the understanding of these changes in a systemic context, including the interactions and feedback loops among social and natural systems (Turner et al., Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 67, 384–396, 2007).

The relationship between humans and their environment underwent a radical change during the last 10,000 years: from mobile and small groups of foragers to sedentary extensive cultivators and on to high-density intensive agriculture-based modern society; these transitions fundamentally transformed the formerly predominantly passive human user of the environment into an active component of the Earth system. The most striking impacts of these global transitions have only become visible and measurable during the last 150 years (Crutzen, Nature 415:23, 2002; Crutzen and Stoermer, IGBP Newsletter 41(1):17–18, 2000). Prior to this time frame, the use of forest resources for metal smelting in early Roman times and the extensive medieval agricultural system had already changed the landscape (Barker, Nature 473:163–164, 2011; Kaplan et al., Quaternary Science Reviews 28(27/28):3016–3034, 2009); the global climate effects of these early extensive cultivation and harvesting practices are still under debate (Kaplan et al., The Holocene 21(5):775–791, 2011; Lemmen, Géomorphologie: relief, processus, environnement 2009(4):303–312, 2010; Ruddiman, Climatic Change 61(3):261–293, 2003; Stocker et al., Biogeosciences 8:69–88, 2011).

Soil degradation is one of the consequences of farming activity that has had the greatest impact on the capacity of agro ecosystems to produce food and offer environmental services. This risk is threatening the Mediterranean basin as one of the principal factors of non-sustainability. In recent decades, the expansion of olive growing has exacerbated the problem in the Mediterranean region. Although the natural phenomena responsible for the process of soil degradation seem clear, debate remains regarding its social causes. The primary objective of this chapter, based on the evidence of severe degradation of Mediterranean soils, is to analyse its historic dimension through a case study performed in a mountainous area of southern Spain (Montefrío, Granada), in which to identify the causes and thereby contribute to the on-going debate regarding management approaches and soil degradation on a global scale, where the work of Boserup has been so influential. Our case study, which spans two and a half centuries (1750-present day), examines whether population growth was among the primary factors in the transformation from pre-industrialised to industrialised agriculture, with its consequent environmental impacts. In the light of the transition towards sustainable agriculture, understanding the vital role played by population size and dynamics is crucial, especially if approached on a global scale, given that the population of the planet is constantly growing.

This contribution investigates the role of working time in the course of agricultural development. In so doing, we revisit Ester Boserup’s (1965, 1981) hypothesis of increasing land productivity at the expense of declining labour productivity as a consequence of agricultural intensification in subsistence communities. We introduce a theoretical framework that centres on human time as a ‘limited’ biophysical resource and compare the labour burden across gender and age of four subsistence communities, one each from India, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Laos. While Boserup’s claim applies to early stages of agricultural development, we find the dynamics to change with the introduction of fossil fuel based inputs into agriculture, leading to a rise in labour productivity. Despite these improvements, we still find overall labour needs to increase with agricultural intensification. Since household labour remains largely constant during the development process, the labour burden is primarily borne by women.