Redaction and image: IICG-URJC
Today, April 22nd, is Earth Day, and we thought it a good opportunity to highlight the research on the ecology of rural depopulation being conducted by two researchers from the Global Change Research Institute at Rey Juan Carlos University (IICG-URJC), Adrián Escudero and Fernando Valladares.
Changes in land use are one of the most persistent and impactful drivers of global change. In this context, rural depopulation in Spain has become one of the most profound and enduring territorial processes of the last century, as demonstrated by studies from CREAF and IICG-URJC (Lloret et al., 2024; Lloret & Escudero, 2026). At the beginning of the 20th century, the country presented a diverse mosaic of crops, pastures, and small settlements distributed throughout the territory, capable of sustaining enormous biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, between 1960 and 2021, rural areas lost more than five million inhabitants, radically transforming the landscape and creating vast depopulated areas. This phenomenon, usually interpreted through political or socioeconomic lenses, also has a highly relevant ecological dimension, especially in the context of biodiversity crisis and global change. A key question is how to reconcile nature conservation with the revitalization of rural territories.
Researchers from the IICG-URJC, in collaboration with CREAF, are working along these lines, employing a novel approach based on a systematic review of the available scientific literature to assess how different land-use models simultaneously affect ecosystems and demographic dynamics. The researchers analyze five scenarios representative of current policies and trends: maintaining the status quo, implementing strictly conservationist measures, promoting agricultural or livestock intensification, preserving historical landscapes, and finally, encouraging extensive land use. Each of these scenarios is evaluated in relation to five ecological indicators—biodiversity, carbon storage, pollution, water availability, and soil conservation—along with rural population trends.
The results show that there is no single solution to address depopulation that can maximize all indicators simultaneously. However, the scenario based on maintaining extensive land use emerges as the most balanced. Activities such as extensive livestock farming, silvopastoral systems, agroecology, regenerative agriculture, and agritourism can generate local employment, encourage population retention, and at the same time contribute to maintaining mosaic landscapes, reducing the risk of fires, improving soil quality, and decreasing pollution.
In contrast, the intensification of agriculture or livestock farming yields the worst environmental results: it increases pollution, reduces biodiversity, and simplifies ecosystems without offering a stable solution to depopulation. Strict conservation, while beneficial for certain ecological indicators, tends to limit human activity and, therefore, does not contribute to retaining population. Meanwhile, the idea of maintaining landscapes as they were in the past is unrealistic and very expensive, since ecosystems are dynamic and respond to environmental and socioeconomic conditions that have changed profoundly since the beginning of the 20th century.
This ecological perspective on depopulation connects directly with the reflections that two of the study’s authors, Francisco Lloret and Adrián Escudero, have recently developed in a special issue of the journal Ecosistemas on the topic. Both emphasize that rural abandonment is not only a social phenomenon but also an ecological process that reconfigures landscapes, alters disturbance regimes—such as fires—and modifies the availability of resources and habitats. They insist that policies aimed at reversing depopulation should not rely on the intensification of land use, as this strategy tends to exacerbate environmental problems and does not guarantee population recovery. Instead, they emphasize the importance of reviving sustainable traditional practices, diversifying economic activities, and recognizing the ecological value of cultural landscapes that have historically emerged from the interaction between rural communities and their environment.
The fundamental message is that revitalizing rural areas and conserving biodiversity are not incompatible goals, provided that approaches are adopted that integrate the ecological dimension of the territory and promote extensive, diversified models adapted to the characteristics of each region. This integrated vision offers a solid foundation for rethinking rural policies in a context of global change and abandonment, where land management must balance the needs of human communities with the preservation of the ecological processes that sustain life and the resilience of landscapes.
We rarely lack reasons to reflect on events like Earth Day or to propose solutions to the problems unleashed by global change, but these days we have even more reason to celebrate, because the article “An ecological perspective for analysing rural depopulation and abandonment”, published in the British Ecological Society’s journal People and Nature, is among the top 10 most cited articles for 2025 among those published in that journal in 2024. Below you will find the references to this article and another more recent, closely related one:
Lloret, F., Escudero, A., Lloret, J., & Valladares, F. (2024). An ecological perspective for analysing rural depopulation and abandonment. People and Nature, 6, 490–506. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10606
Lloret, F., & Escudero, A. (2026). Ecología del despoblamiento rural. Ecosistemas, 35(1): 3201. https://doi.org/10.7818/ECOS.3201