| This dissertation investigates, models, and tests hypotheses on how the current surge in large-scale land acquisition might affect rural livelihood in developing countries. The focus is on southern Ethiopia, specifically the South Omo zone, where ongoing large-scale land acquisition transactions, climate-stressed rural communities, and biodiversity provide a valuable research opportunity to better understand these complex dynamics. The study presents a computational model, OMOLAND, which is a spatial agent-based model that explicitly represents the main components of the rural system (households, enterprises, institutions, climate, and biophysical environment), their interactions, and dynamics. The main findings are:;• Although the rural communities in the South Omo zone manage to persist with the current climate condition, the occurrence of successive episodes of extreme events (drought) affects their adaptive capacity and forces them to migrate out of the system in greater magnitude.;• Although, the introduction of commercial enterprises in rural system minimize rural households' vulnerability to climate variability through opening up off-farm opportunity, increasing the magnitude of expansion of large-scale land acquisition aggravate dispossession and increase migration of rural households as the system transit to new phases.;• The intervention of institution through capacity building and relief support in the time of extreme events minimizes the number of people migrating from the system.;The study contributes to broaden current scientific understanding of complex coupled human and natural systems through explicitly modeling the dynamics of heterogeneous actors, institutions, and their environments. The modeling approach complements current efforts aimed at integrating GIS and agent-based models for basic research and policy analysis, providing an innovative and significant methodological thrust in computational social science and geospatial modeling. |
