Housing land consolidation and relocation has been widely implemented in rural China as a policy tool to reduce the area of built-up land, reclaim agricultural land, and redistribute the use of land. Despite of the large scale of implementation, the impact of this policy on the daily life of rural people is not sufficiently evaluated. Our work aims to fill in this gap by examining the daily activity pattern of rural residents in consolidated and unconsolidated villages through mobile phone locational data, using the Chengdu city-region as the case.

Globally, there is growing demand for increased agricultural outputs. At the same time, the agricultural industry is expected to meet increasingly stringent environmental targets. Thus, there is an urgent pressure on the soil resource to deliver multiple functions simultaneously. The Functional Land Management framework (Schulte et al., 2014) is a conceptual tool designed to support policy making to manage soil functions to meet these multiple demands. This paper provides a first example of a practical application of the Functional Land Management concept relevant to policy stakeholders.

In recent years, numerous articles have addressed management strategies aimed at assisting forests to adapt to climate change. However, these seldom take into account the practical and economic implications of implementing these strategies, notably, supply of forest plants and seed.

Nature-based Solutions (NBS) are increasingly promoted to support sustainable and resilient urban planning. However, design and planning urban NBS targeted at the needs of the local context require knowledge about the causal relationships between NBS, ecosystem services (ES) and urban challenges (UC) This paper aims at contributing to this knowledge, by systematically identifying nexuses (i.e. qualitative links) between UC, ES and NBS, and describing plausible causal relationships.

We propose a causal analysis framework to increase understanding of land-use change (LUC) and the reliability of LUC models. This health-sciences-inspired framework can be applied to determine probable causes of LUC in the context of bioenergy. Calculations of net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for LUC associated with biofuel production are critical in determining whether a fuel qualifies as a biofuel or advanced biofuel category under regional (EU), national (US, UK), and state (California) regulations.

Land tenure remains one of the most critical factors determining equity under REDD+, as we demonstrated through our previous article, ‘Roots of inequity: how the implementation of REDD+ reinforces past injustices”. Githiru responded to this paper, with some apparent challenges to both the empirical basis and theoretical arguments, that we had put forward.

Due to the multidisciplinary nature of landscape research, many different systems and methods for landscape identification and classification exist. This paper provides a systematic review of 54 contemporary landscape characterisation approaches from all over the world, with the aim of identifying major methodological strategies. Multivariate statistical analyses revealed segregation of the approaches according to the landscape concept applied, the degree of observer independence and various other factors involved in the landscape characterisation process.

The novelty of this study lies in the analyses of legislation concerning land use policies by examining the specific boundary between land ownership and land take. The basic motive was that the European Commission (EC) withdrew the Soil Framework Directive (SFD) in 2014 following the objections of certain Member States (MS) who countered that as most lands are privately owned, they should not fall under the remit of public governance. Since the withdrawal of the SFD land take is an issue receiving more attention.

The conciliation between different issues such as agriculture production, biodiversity conservation and water management remains unsolved in many places in the world. As a striking example, the wet grasslands of the Marais Poitevin region (France) presents many obstacles against the integration of these issues, especially in terms of public policy design.

Contemporary discourses on customary land tenure in Africa, and South Africa in particular, have emphasized the socially embedded and flexible nature of customary land rights, recognising these as inherently more ‘pro-poor’ than individual titling. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observations in Venda, a former homeland in South Africa, this paper explores how in the context of expanding commodity frontiers, customary land markets have emerged, leading to de facto privatisation of customary land.

Mobilising under-utilised low carbon (ULC) land for future agricultural expansion helps minimising further carbon stock loss. This study examined the regency cases in Kalimantan, a carbon loss hotspot, to understand the key factors for mobilising ULC land via narrative interviews with a range of land-use actors and complementary desktop analyses.

In response to powerful trends in technology, resource and land supply and demand, socioeconomics and geopolitics, cities are likely to increase use of the subsurface in the near future. Indeed, the subsurface and its appropriate use have been put forward as being of crucial importance if we are to achieve resilient and sustainable cities.