The Purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of technology on
sustainable irrigation of small scale dry land farming in Kitui Central District,
Kitui County, Kenya. The study sought to establish the extent to which adoption
of new irrigation technology, gravity free flow irrigation and access to access
to credit has influenced sustainable irrigation of small scale dry land farming.
Descriptive survey research design was adopted. A sample of 150 participants
was randomly selected from 1540 small-scale dry land irrigation farmers in the

Rural livelihoods, which are basic human activities, have long interacted with the environment. In light of the complexity of the human–environment system, more interdisciplinary analyses from geographical, environmental, and social sciences are needed. Using qualitative and quantitative methods from social, environmental, and geographical sciences, this study conducted a geographical regionalization and a comparative analysis of rural livelihoods in different zones in the Loess Plateau to explore the relationship between rural livelihoods and the environment.

This paper is one of three thematic case studies resulting from a set of pilot projects undertaken jointly by civil society and private business partners from 2016–2019 in five countries in sub-Saharan Africa. These pilots sought to test how private companies could collaborate with civil society organisations and other stakeholders to implement responsible agribusiness investments that recognise and respect community land rights, and to develop innovative tools and approaches that could be adopted and implemented at greater scale.

Groundwater resources became a recognized enabler of important rural and socio-economic development in Mediterranean countries. However, the development of this groundwater economy is currently associated with an increased pressure on the available resource and negative implications on the socio-ecological system. Managing complex socio-ecological systems, such as those that occur in water resource management, is a multi-actor, multi-scale and dynamic decision-making process.

The topic of large-scale land acquisition (LSLA) has attracted wide interest in the literature and the media. However, there is little work on the gendered institutional changes and gendered impacts on common pool resources (CPR) due to LSLA. The aim of this paper is to address these impacts.

The Mediterranean Basin is at the same time a region of stark social and ecological contrasts and a global biodiversity hotspot, where complex local evolving land use and land cover patterns compose the region’s landscapes. In this context, we aimed for a specific case study of the southeast of France, to assess land and farming systems’ dynamics, to identify their underlying drivers, and to propose possible shared future scenarios for local policies’ implementation. We based our analyses on a mixed approach and operated at downscale from territorial to local scale.

In recent decades, Russia has experienced substantial transformations in agricultural land tenure. Post-Soviet reforms have shaped land distribution patterns but the impacts of these on agricultural use of land remain under-investigated. On a regional scale, there is still a knowledge gap in terms of knowing to what extent the variations in the compositions of agricultural land funds may be explained by changes in the acreage of other land categories.

This article presents an analysis of the complexities implied by the implementation of the Colombian land restitution policy, as an example of the way in which the state works in its day-to-day practice. The document highlights the role played by the bureaucracy of “land” in the management of the so-called post-conflict setting. It is constructive in showing the multiscale nature of the state, whose operation cannot be understood outside the various levels and scales that compose it.

This paper focuses on a three-year rural landscape strategy-making process, which was driven by a Danish municipality and involved a large number of stakeholders. The project was part of an action research program aimed at developing new approaches to collaborative landscape planning. Gaining experiences with such approaches was part of this aim. During the course of the project, the focus and scale of the strategy changed significantly. The process developed in interesting ways in respect to three dimensions of collaborative landscape planning: collaboration, scale, and public goods.

The urban heat island (UHI) effect has become a significant focus of research in today’s era of climate change, and a key consideration for the next generation of urban planning focused on green and livable cities. UHI has traditionally been measured using in situ data and ground-based measurements. However, with the increased availability of satellite-based thermal observations of the Earth, remotely sensed observations are increasingly being utilized to estimate surface urban heat island (SUHI), using land surface temperature (LST) as a critical indicator, due to its spatial coverage.

Spatially explicit assessments of ecosystem services (ES) potentials are a key component in supporting a sustainable land use management. The ES matrix method is a commonly used approach as it allows for a comparably fast, comprehensible and accessible ES assessment. As it is often based on land use/land cover data (LULC) with no spatial variability, a main critique is that the results fail to assess spatial variability at landscape levels, which limits the reliability of the outputs for spatial planning applications.

Although the way in which vegetation phenology mediates the feedback of vegetation to climate systems is now well understood, the magnitude of these changes is still unknown. A thorough understanding of how the recent shift in phenology may impact on, for example, land surface temperature (LST) is important. To address this knowledge gap, it is important to quantify these impacts and identify patterns from the global to the regional scale.