Here’s a long open article from Ecological Economics about studying the competition for land. Land exists at the intersection of economics and ecology, and it is conspicuously absent from a lot of economic thinking. It can be thought of as capital, in a sense, but obviously it is not manufactured capital. We can’t make more of it, but we can intensify our activities on a given piece of it (for example, more intense agriculture or taller buildings). Land is the obvious source of a lot of ecosystem services, but the value of those services tends to accrue regionally or globally rather than to the landowner. These are my own thoughts, but anyway here is the abstract:

Possible negative effects of increased competition for land include pressures on biodiversity, rising food prices and GHG emissions. However, neoclassical economists often highlight positive aspects of competition, e.g. increased efficiency and innovation. Competition for land occurs when several agents demand the same good or service produced from a limited area. It implies that when one agent acquires scarce resources from land, less resource is available for competing agents. The resource competed for is often not land but rather its function for biomass production, which may be supplanted by other inputs that raise yields. Increased competition may stimulate efficiency but negative environmental effects are likely in the absence of appropriate regulations. Competition between affluent countries with poor people in subsistence economies likely results in adverse social and development outcomes if not mitigated through effective policies. The socioecological metabolism approach is a framework to analyze land-related limits and functions in particular with respect to production and consumption of biomass and carbon sequestration. It can generate databases that consistently link land used with biomass flows which are useful in understanding interlinkages between different products and services and thereby help to analyze systemic feedbacks in the global land system.