The impacts of land use change on biodiversity and ecosystem services: An empirical investigation from highly fragile countries

Globally, biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES) are rapidly declining due to continuous human intervention. The most important factor behind this rapid decline in BES has been attributed to the different land use changes such as agricultural expansion, urbanization, and deforestation practices. Therefore, the present study intends to understand the impacts of land use changes along with the effects of egalitarian democracy, human capital and globalization on BES taking a sample of 20 countries where ecosystem services and biodiversity are most fragile during 1990-2019 period. The study employs robust econometric models that can tackle the problem of cross-sectional dependence within the data. The finding demonstrates that agricultural expansion and urbanization both negatively and significantly affect the BES whereas forest area is positively associated with BES. The impacts of egalitarian democracy, human capital development as well as that of globalization are found to be decreasing the BES loss. Finally, some policy recommendations are provided to offset the loss of BES which can serve as the benchmark for developing policy interventions across the countries.