Land-use changes across distant places: design of a telecoupled agent-based model

ABSTRACT Land-use changes across distant places are increasingly affected by international agricultural trade, but most of the impacts and feedback remain unknown. The telecoupling framework – an analytical tool for examining socioeconomic and environmental interactions over distances – can be used to conceptualize the impacts of agricultural trade on land-use change and feedbacks across borders of importing and exporting countries and across spatio-temporal scales of land systems. We apply the framework to design an agent-based model (TeleABM) that represents land-use changes in telecoupled systems to investigate how local land-use changes are affected by flows. The Brazil–China telecoupled soybean system is used as a demonstration. With examples of research questions, we explore the possible applications of this model for assessing farm-level income, fertilizer usage, deforestation, and agricultural intensification, as a tool to quantify socio-ecological impacts between distant places and holistically inform sustainable land-practices across system boundaries.