Demand for agricultural exports in Brazil has stimulated the expansion of crop production and cattle raising, which has caused environmental impacts. In response, Brazil developed public policies such as the new Forest Code (FC) and supply chain arrangements such the Soy and the Cattle Moratoriums. This paper analyzes the effectiveness of these policies, considering the trajectories of agricultural expansion in the state of Mato Grosso in three years: 2005 (pre-moratorium and before the new FC), 2010 (post-moratorium and before the new FC) and 2017 (post-moratorium and post-new FC).

More and more studies on land transfer prices have been carried out over time. However, the influencing factors of the industrial land transfer price from the perspective of spatial attributes have rarely been explored. Selecting 25 towns as the basic research unit, based on industrial land transfer data, this paper analyzes the influencing factors of the price distribution of industrial land in Dingzhou City, a rural land system reform pilot in China, by using a geographically weighted regression (GWR) model.

For the success of aquatic conservation efforts, it is imperative for there to be an understanding of the influences multiple stressors across the landscape have on aquatic biota, as it provides an understanding of spatial patterns and informs regional stakeholders. The central and southern Appalachians contain biodiversity hotspots for aquatic fauna. Therefore, we sought to create a comprehensive multimetric model that is based on the influence of abiotic factors on fish and aquatic macroinvertebrates that could predict watershed quality.

Agricultural infrastructure is a typical public good, and it plays an important role in rural development. The “participation of beneficiary groups (PBG)” system is encouraged by government to supply village level public goods in China. Based on micro survey data from the village level in Jiangsu Province, this study analyzes the status of agricultural infrastructure construction and the promotion of PBG model and quantitatively analyzes the impact of different factors using an econometric model.

Vegetation activity in many parts of Africa is constrained by dynamics in the hydrologic cycle. Using satellite products, the relative importance of soil moisture, rainfall, and terrestrial water storage (TWS) on vegetation greenness seasonality and anomaly over Africa were assessed for the period between 2003 and 2015. The possible delayed response of vegetation to water availability was considered by including 0–6 and 12 months of the hydrological variables lagged in time prior to the vegetation greenness observations.

The implications of change on local processes have attracted significant research interest in recent times. In urban settings, green spaces and forests have attracted much attention. Here, we present an assessment of change within the predominantly desert Middle Eastern city of Riyadh, an understudied setting. We utilized high-resolution SPOT 5 data and two classification techniques—maximum likelihood classification and object-oriented classification—to study the changes in Riyadh between 2004 and 2014.

Protected areas offer diverse ecosystem services, including cultural services related to recreation, which contribute manifold to human wellbeing and the economy. However, multiple pressures from other human activities often compromise ecosystem service delivery from protected areas. It is thus fundamental for effective management to understand the recreational values and visitor behaviors in such areas.

Building inclusive societies that reflect the needs of all categories of people within the social spectrum is critical to achieving sustainable development. This is reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which among things seek to ‘by 2030, empower and promote the social, economic and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex. This places enormous tasks on all governments especially in developing countries like Ghana to ensure that the youth are not left behind in access and control over land as a building block for economic empowerment.

In recent years, the sugar industry in Malawi has been criticized for its connections to land-grabbing. The general trend in the current literature has been the attempt to identify the main actors and factors that were instrumental in the displacement of local communities. These studies often neglect the importance of each community’s in-depth perspectives on land-grabbing, which is essential in obtaining a comprehensive understanding of land-grabbing.

This document summarises the UK Land Policy Forum meeting held on 4 November 2015

This is the agenda of the UK Land Policy Forum meeting held on 4 November 2015.

This is the agenda of the UK Land Policy Forum meeting held on 13 April 2016.