Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine Conflict on Land Use across the World

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine crisis on the world economy are real. However, these implications do not appear to be symmetric across countries and different economic sectors. Indeed, the consequences of these two shocks are more severe for some countries, regions and economic activities than for others. Considering the importance of the agricultural sector for global food security, it is important to understand the impacts of the pandemic and the conflict on the different dimensions of agriculture, namely land use. Given the scarcity of data for the last few years available from the various statistical databases, this research mainly considers the insights highlighted in the literature on the implications, in agricultural dimensions, of the most recent shocks. The study here presented shows that the Russia-Ukraine crisis has had more impact on land use changes than the pandemic, namely promoting adjustments in the decisions of farmers and policymakers to deal with constraints in agri-food chains. Nonetheless, the impacts of the conflict on land use were not totally explored.

Impacts of the Covid-19 Context on the European Union Energy Markets: Interrelationships with Sustainability

The current global pandemic context has implications for health, but also economic and social. Impacts on energy markets are examples of these consequences. Thus, the main objective of this research is to assess the impacts of the Covid-19 context on energy prices. Furthermore, it was intended to analyse the interrelationships of these contexts with unemployment rates and excess mortality. For this purpose, several data and other pertinent information from international databases were considered and analysed. For the empirical analysis, econometric approaches were taken into account, as well as other methodologies associated with statistical analyses. The main findings of this research highlight that the impacts of the pandemic context on energy markets were several phases and the last one is the implications for price increases. The rise in energy prices is not only a consequence of the pandemic context, but also an implication of energy policies adopted worldwide, namely in the European Union member-states.