Landscape approaches to integrated land management have recently gained considerable attention in the scientific literature and international fora. The approach is gaining increasing support at governmental and intergovernmental levels, as well as being embraced by a host of international research and development agencies. In an attempt to determine whether, and how, these approaches compare with previous conservation and development paradigms, we reviewed the implementation of integrated landscape approaches across the tropics.

The United States Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) has evolved from near open enrollment, to competitive enrollment, and now to a mixture of competitive and targeted enrollment. This paper reviews the history of the CRP and the evolution of its enrollment mechanism. I discuss the use of bid caps and the Environmental Benefits Index bid ranking mechanism in the “general” CRP; and the use of highly targeted, but non-competitive, “continuous” CRP.

A multi-pollutant modelling framework for England and Wales is described. This includes emissions of nitrate, phosphorus and sediment to water and ammonia, methane and nitrous oxide to air, and has been used to characterise baseline (no uptake of on-farm measures) and business-as-usual (BAU) annual pollutant losses, comparing these with the loss under a range of new policies aimed at increasing the uptake of relevant source control measures to 95% across England and Wales.