The rise and fall of Maltese terraced landscapes

Human-modified landscapes modulate the effects of climate change on human societies. For example, concrete surfaces increase flood risks and dense cities exacerbate the effects of warming. However, urbanisation is not the only major form of landscape modification.

Agricultural terraces represent one of the largest-scale human modifications of the planet, and have many positive effects for cultivation, soil retention, carbon and water storage, and biodiversity.

Despite their profound importance for soil modification and a sustainable future, the causes, chronology, and consequences of terracing are all poorly understood, as is the impact of their growing abandonment.

This limits our ability to understand how climate change will impact human societies, and the extent to which terraces can help build resilience and sustainability.

Pilot research suggests that terracing may have had a uniquely early development on the Maltese Islands, which ultimately became one of the most heavily terraced landscapes on Earth.

TerraForm will therefore use Malta as a model system for understanding the evolution and consequences of terracing, from inception to abandonment, alongside societal feedbacks over time.

Through its small size, remote location, and limited soil development, Malta offers controlled conditions for such a study.

As Malta sits at the front line of climate change, understanding terracing here also has urgent implications for soil erosion, food security, and flooding - both regionally and in areas facing analogous futures.

Finally, many of Maltas terraces have recently been abandoned and are rapidly collapsing, resulting in the loss of an important archive for climate mitigation.

Using Malta as a model system is therefore timely, and as the most intensive single-locus study of terracing ever conducted, TerraForm will generate multidisciplinary data and transferable methodologies to ultimately inform sustainable land use policies and improve planetary health.