In Cameroon and elsewhere in the Congo Basin, the majority of rural households and a large proportion of urban households depend on plant and animal products from the forests to meet their nutritional, energy, cultural and medicinal needs. This paper explores the likely impacts of climate-induced changes on the provisioning of forest ecosystem goods and services and its effect on the economic and social well-being of the society, including the national economy and the livelihoods of forest-dependent people.

This themed issue of Land Use Policy builds on the papers presented at an international symposium entitled Social Dimensions of Market-based Instruments, convened by the Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, in November 2010. The symposium set out to review the extent to which market-based instruments were being employed as social policy tools in various contexts, what challenges achieving relevant social policy objectives posed, what trade-offs arose between environmental, social and economic objectives, and whether and how tensions could be resolved.

The paper examines the rural land and labour markets in the context of economic liberalization in India. Land and labour are the two fundamental resources available to the rural people for income generation. The access to land and to employment for labour become basic determinants of well-being for the rural households. Reforms are often seen as hostile to rural areas and the poor, although they should be beneficial not only for overall growth, but also rural growth and poverty alleviation.

The International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID), a global network organization with 106 member countries in its fold, is dedicated to the promotion of best practices in water for agriculture, and addresses water supply and management for food production, including drainage and flood control. While striving to improve water and land management, and enhancing the world supply of food and fibre, ICID takes on board environmental concerns and seeks sustainable solutions.

The growth of human populations around protected areas accelerates land conversion and isolation, negatively impacting biodiversity and ecosystem function, and can be exacerbated by immigration. It is often assumed that immigration around protected areas is driven by attraction in the form of economic benefits, but in many cases, people may be pushed from their areas of origin toward protected areas. Mitigating the effects of immigration around protected areas necessitates understanding the actual mechanisms causing it, which can be aided by analysis of patterns of land-cover change.

There is an increasing understanding that forests and the forestry sector are key elements in poverty reduction strategies in Africa. However, issues of equity between various forest users are becoming a major challenge to environmental development, forest management and poverty reduction. This paper presents an analysis of household representatives' socio-economic determinants and other constraints on accessing forest products, based on data collected through a questionnaire survey of 1865 respondents in seven districts of the Sissili province, southern Burkina Faso.

Among the world’s continents, Africa has the highest incidence of food insecurity and poverty and the highest rates of population growth. Yet Africa also has the most arable land, the lowest crop yields, and by far the most plentiful land resources relative to energy demand. It is thus of interest to examine the potential of expanded modern bioenergy production in Africa. Here we consider bioenergy as an enabler for development, and provide an overview of modern bioenergy technologies with a comment on application in an Africa context.

Land degradation and poverty are problems that must be tackled together for environmental conservation to succeed. However, it is rarely possible to move a population from degraded land to another area where the people can be more easily sustained. To find a new strategy that achieves both conservation and economic gains without the need to relocate a population, we examined/investigated a sustainable combination of ecological and economic development suitable for the restoration of areas of China with collapsing gullies, where the frequent steep slopes make restoration difficult.

Land is an important asset for rural households, and having secure land rights is important for poverty reduction. Despite the large body of literature on the relationship between land tenure security, livelihoods, and poverty, most of this literature is based on household-level data and does not consider possible intrahousehold inequalities in land ownership.

The Global Donor Working Group on Land releases this policy brief to reiterate its commitment on the SDG indicator 1.4.2 for achieving global land tenure security. The policy brief clarifies the status of indicator 1.4.2 towards its implementation by countries, as well as informs how the Global Donor Working Group on Land is supporting the custodian agencies for this indicator (UN-Habitat and WB) to have it re-classified by the Inter-Agency Expert Group on SDG Indicators by October 2018.