The 2017 South African Urban Conference took place at the Moses Mabhida Stadium, Durban on 30 October 2017. It was hosted by the South African Cities Network (SACN) in collaboration with the Departments of Human Settlements (DHS) and Cooperative Governance (DCOG), the National Treasury, the South African Local Government Association (SALGA), South African Council for Planners (SACPLAN), and the Ethekwini Municipality.

This report by Colin Marx and Margot Rubin explores how urban land is divided and re-divided within the context of the interaction between formal and informal land use management systems.

This was a presentation at a Workshop on Development of an Interim Framework for the National Land Use Classification Standard, Methodology and Symbology for South Africa.  It shows why land use and land cover are not the same, why land use often cannot be determined from imagery alone, and why land use, zoning and planning are not the same.

Cities are about people, first and foremost. In addition, as the national integrated urban development framework states, South African cities should be safe, liveable socially integrated, economically inclusive and globally competitive, with an active citizenry. The 2016 State of Cities Report (SoCR) makes an important call to action for all segments of society, from communities and neighbourhoods to cities, from cities to the nation and from the nation to the global, to support the inclusive growth and development of South African cities.

This guide has been written as the first step towards concretising and standardising the process involved in the identification and assessment of well-located land for human settlement. The

Recognizing successful climate-smart agricultural (CSA) practices is not enough for them to be adopted at scale.

At many sites, government or development-led interventions to promote CSA practices face low adoption rates or are not adopted at all.

Data shows that CSA adoption depends on drivers and constraints beyond the CSA practices. Blanket adoption of a specific intervention should never be assumed: the adoption of CSA practices is usually patchy because of many conditions.

In the United States 20% of privately owned rangelands are vulnerable to accelerated soil loss. Estimated annual costs of direct and indirect damage caused by soil erosion in the United States is $27 billion dollars. More than 50% of Asia and 70% of Middle Eastern rangelands are degraded. Exact estimates of economic costs and total area degraded is unknown; however, costs may be significantly higher than in the United States due to the extent of degradation/desertification in these regions.

Though a lot has been done and achieved in erosion research and control in Kenya, most of the erosion research methods have in the past put emphasis more on quantifying soil loss or measuring soil erosion, rather than pinpointing to areas that are likely to suffer soil erosion. In most cases the erosion processes have been assumed to occur in a uniform manner at all levels of the landscape hierarchy, and hence the results of one level observation can be factored to cover other levels for which data was not collected.