Postgraduate research students

Title: Changing land use over the Holoce: Southern Africa.

Changes in land use are recognised as primary drivers of biodiversity loss and climate change, making it crucial to study how land use has evolved. While early discussions on climate change centered on the impacts of industrialisation, there's growing acknowledgement that even earlier changes in land use patterns had considerable impacts on global climate systems. Recent research shows that the expansion of agriculture in prehistoric times, long before the Industrial Revolution, significantly contributed to greenhouse gas emissions and changes in global climate dynamics.

Focusing on the dry lands of southern Africa, the research aims to present a regional synthesis of land use systems between 10000 BCE and 1500 CE. This will be achieved by summarising available knowledge and quantifying land changes from early agriculture in Southern Africa. The study will evaluate the extent to which the HYDE global land use model reflects past land use in southern Africa. The research also seeks to calculate carbon dioxide loss from past land use changes in southern Africa. The research has implications for the AGRI-DRY project goals that aim to understand traditional knowledge on ecosystem management and sustainable futures considering the effects of climate change on earth systems.

• Professor Nicki Whitehouse