Urban Tenure

The rise of urbanization and development in Cambodia in recent years has led to a dramatic increase in land prices, with particularly high values for land in the capital city of Phnom Penh. Some government officials have benefited from the high price of land by unlawfully granting land title to private developers in exchange for compensation.

The Land Law of 2001 was a landmark statute intended to strengthen and protect the rights of ordinary Cambodian landholders. A land titling programme (LMAP) was initiated soon afterwards, with extensive World Bank and donor support.

The presentation will highlight the importance of establishing knowledge and understanding about “gender mainstreaming” strategies and gender equality within the Cambodian Land Administration Sub Sector Program (LA-SSP) and the land policy.

The Outlook is a diagnostic tool that provides a comprehensive overview of local development trends in Cambodia. It also discusses policy and governance reforms aimed at reducing disparities and exploiting the enormous potential of Cambodian territories.

In this paper, we provide an assessment of plantation forests and private land resources potentially available for pine plantation development in 11 southern states of the United States. After a sustained growth for 50 years, plantation forests (softwood and hardwood on both private and public lands) amounted to 18 million ha or 24 percent of all timberlands in these states in 2007.

Widespread and increasing urbanization has resulted in the need to assess, monitor, and understand its effects on stream water quality. Identifying relations between stream ecological condition and urban intensity indicators such as impervious surface provides important, but insufficient information to effectively address planning and management needs in such areas.

Protected areas are crucial for biodiversity conservation because they provide safe havens for species threatened by land-use change and resulting habitat loss. However, protected areas are only effective when they stop habitat loss within their boundaries, and are connected via corridors to other wild areas.

During 2008 the world witnessed a global food crisis which caused social unrest in many countries and drove 75 million more people into poverty. The crisis resulted from sharply higher oil prices, increased bio-fuel production, dwindling grain stocks, market speculation, changing food consumption patterns in emerging economies, and changes in world trade agreements, among other factors.

The development of synergies between efforts to mitigate land degradation and biological diversity decline can enhance effectiveness, speed up implementation and avoid potential conflicts. Due to the variable nature of these processes and to the variable characteristics of the areas where they occur, there is no general rule linking land degradation and biological diversity decline.

Aim To examine the effect of climate change on the occurrence and distribution of Pipistrellus nathusii (Nathusius' pipistrelle) in the United Kingdom (UK). Location We modelled habitat and climatic associations of P. nathusii in the UK and applied this model to the species' historical range in continental Europe.

Questions: What is the relative importance of landscape variables compared to habitat quality variables in determining species composition in floodplain forests across different physiographic areas? How do species composition and species traits relate to effects of particular landscape variables? Do lowland and mountain areas differ in effects of landscape variables on species composition?

Because habitat loss due to urbanization is a primary threat to biodiversity, and land-use decisions in urbanizing areas are mainly made at the local level, land-use planning by municipal planning departments has a potentially important--but largely unrealized--role in conserving biodiversity.