Across rural Africa, land legislation struggles to be properly implemented, and most resource users gain access to land on the basis of local land tenure systems.

In the course of the present century, the world population has increased from less than two thousand million to over five and a half thousand million. Until one hundred years ago, the expanding population's increasing needs for food, fuel, fibre and construction materials were met from the land by cultivating progressively larger areas. In the course of the next twenty-five years a further two thousand million people will be added to the global population. Most of these people will live in the tropics.

The identification of an appropriate justification for Agri-Environment-Climate (AEC) payments is a crucial issue in the new Rural Development Programme (RDP). Given the environmental importance of grasslands in Trentino (Italy), the Management Authority in charge of the RDP decided to integrate an approach based on Ecosystem Services (ES) into the calculation of AEC payments. The paper presents the methodology used for this approach as well as the preliminary results. The first step entails building a probabilistic model for the ES, named Sustainable Fodder Production.

We use the hybrid modeling laboratory of the Mediterranean Landscape Dynamics (MedLanD) Project to simulate barranco incision in eastern Spain under different scenarios of natural and human environmental change. We carry out a series of modeling experiments set in the Rio Penaguila valley of northern Alicante Province. The MedLanD Modeling Laboratory (MML) is able to realistically simulate gullying and incision in a multi-dimensional, spatially explicit virtual landscape. We first compare erosion modeled in wooded and denuded landscapes in the absence of human land-use.

The environment of the mountain-steppe-taiga of northern Mongolia is often characterized as marginal because of the high altitude, highly variable precipitation levels, low winter temperatures, and periodic droughts coupled with severe winter storms (known as dzuds). Despite these conditions, herders have inhabited this landscape for thousands of years, and hunter-gatherer-fishers before that. One way in which the risks associated with such a challenging and variable landscape are mitigated is through social networks and inter-family cooperation.

The current Amazon landscape consists of heterogeneous mosaics formed by interactions between the original forest and productive activities. Recognizing and quantifying the characteristics of these landscapes is essential for understanding agricultural production chains, assessing the impact of policies, and in planning future actions. Our main objective was to construct the regionalization of agricultural production for Rondônia State (Brazilian Amazon) at the municipal level.

Increasing temperatures and wildfire incidence and decreasing precipitation and river runoff in southern Africa are predicted to have a variety of impacts on the ecology, structure, and function of semi-arid savannas, which provide innumerable livelihood resources for millions of people.

Long-term slash-and-burn experiments, when compared with intensive tillage without manuring, resulted in a huge data set relating to potential crop yields, depending on soil quality, crop type, and agricultural measures. Cultivation without manuring or fallow phases did not produce satisfying yields, and mono-season cropping on freshly cleared and burned plots resulted in rather high yields, comparable to those produced during modern industrial agriculture - at least ten-fold the ones estimated for the medieval period.

This study investigates how two existing pan-tropical above-ground biomass (AGB) maps (Saatchi 2011, Baccini 2012) can be combined to derive forest ecosystem specific carbon estimates. Several data-fusion models which combine these AGB maps according to their local correlations with independent datasets such as the spectral bands of SPOT VEGETATION imagery are analyzed. Indeed these spectral bands convey information about vegetation type and structure which can be related to biomass values. Our study area is the island of Borneo.

Botswana is a semi-arid, middle-income African country that imports 90 percent of its food. Despite its relative prosperity, Botswana also suffers from one of the highest measures of income inequality in the world, persistent poverty, and relatively high levels of food insecurity. The objective of this paper is to explore how political economy, climate change and livelihood dynamics are synergistically impacting household food security.

Gendered relations in resource access and farming are two important intersecting themes of gender studies in a northern rural context. However, conventional analysis and perceptions of the economy conceal the contribution of women within families, in businesses and in the labor market. This article demonstrate the significance of capital to farming women’s engagement with agriculture using a Swedish case study, based on descriptive analyses of data from the Federation of Swedish Farmers.

The socio-ecological system dominated by pastureland in the Asteroussia Mountains (Crete, Greece) was analyzed over a long time interval (1945–2010) to identify the most relevant system’s characteristics and changes. Vegetation cover and land-uses have been quantified by analyzing aerial photographs exploring the whole study period. Soil characteristics have been assessed by carrying out an extensive field survey for the last reference year (2010) and by estimating the average soil loss for the past period using the PESERA soil erosion model validated by field measurements.