Climate impact scenarios for agriculture usually consider yield development, landscape water balance, nutrient dynamics or the endangerment of habitats separately.

The paper moves from the necessity of understanding the implications of landscape changes, as it is a very important issue for the sustainable planning of rural areas.

Topography and relief variability play a key role in ecosystem functioning and structuring. However, the most commonly used concept to relate pattern to process in landscape ecology, the so-called patch-corridor-matrix model, perceives the landscape as a planimetric surface.

Field visits to over twenty villages in five different provinces of the Lao PDR have shown that across all ethnic groups, communities use and manage communal lands. Types of lands often found to be under communal management include upland areas, grazing lands and village use and sacred forests.

This report documents the contemporary ecological, social and economic transformations occurring in one village in Lao PDR’s central Khammouane province under multiple sources of development-induced displacement.