04 July 2016
Abstract
Increasingly, scholars are being asked to describe and analyze the feedbacks of social-ecological systems. In this paper, we explore such feedbacks by examining the ’co-evolution’ of countries’ international trade patterns and their associated embodied land use over a ten year time period (2000-2010). By ’embodied land’ we mean the amount of land associated with the production of all products along global supply chains related to exports and imports of countries. Although past research has considered how differences in countries’ embodied land coincide with variances in wealth, none have considered how such differences arise in the context of an evolving network structure. In this paper, we consider trade networks and embodied land as co-evolving phenomena, and study these using a combination of multi-regional input-output (MRIO) analysis with stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOMs). We frame our approach and findings in the context of ’feedback loops’, calling special attention to the between-country environmental inequalities arising from such feedback loops.
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