Mokoro’s practical and action-oriented long-term strategic research project, the Women’s Land Tenure Security Project (WOLTS), is piloting its methodology through a ‘Study on the threats to women’s land tenure security in Mongolia and Tanzania’.

Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination, yet the social sector remains focused on the isolated intervention of individual organizations.

In 1991, Terminology for Grazing Lands and Grazing Animals was published with the objective of ‘developing a consensus of clear definitions of terms used in the grazing of animals.’ This first effort involved primarily organizations and agencies within the USA but included representation from New Zealand and Australia. It was the intent from the beginning to expand this to a truly international effort at a later date.

From the mid-2000s, a commodity boom underpinned a wave of land use investments in low- and middle-income countries. While agribusiness, mining and petroleum concessions often involve promises of jobs and public revenues, they have also prompted concerns about land dispossession, exclusionary investment models and infringements of the rights of vulnerable groups. 

Resource-use decisions affect the ecological and human components of the coupled human and natural system (CHANS), but a critique of some frameworks is that they do not address the complexity and tradeoffs within and between the two systems. Land system architecture (LA) was suggested to account for these tradeoffs at multiple levels/scales. LA and landscape ecology (LE) focus on landscape structure (i.e., composition and configuration of land-use and land-cover change [LULCC]) and the processes (social-ecological) resulting from and shaping LULCC.

The food-biodiversity nexus is a concept that defines and characterizes the complex interactions between agricultural systems and biodiversity conservation. Here we use a social-ecological systems approach that combines fuzzy cognitive mapping and graph theoretic analyses to uncover system properties that determine food security and biodiversity outcomes at a landscape scale. We studied a rice-based agricultural landscape system situated in Mbeliling district of West Flores, Indonesia.

Tropical countries are now facing increasing global pressure to conserve tropical forests, while having to maintain cultivated lands (particularly shifting cultivation) for the subsistence of local people. To accomplish the effective conservation of tropical forests in harmony with subsistence shifting cultivation, we evaluated the influence of shifting cultivation on ecosystem services (i.e., biodiversity and carbon stock) at a landscape level based on three land-use scenarios.

In arid regions, oases ecosystems are fragile and sensitive to climate change, and water is the major limiting factor for environmental and socio-economic developments. Understanding the drivers of land use/cover change (LUCC) in arid regions is important for the development of management strategies to improve or prevent environmental deterioration and loss of natural resources.