ncreasing flood risks in Thailand are leading to new challenges for flood management and subsequently for livelihoods, which are still significantly agricultural. Policy makers prefer building flood protection infrastructure over utilizing non-structural measures like urban planning regulations to mitigate risks. We argue that unplanned urbanization intensifies flood risks and livelihood vulnerability and may even create new poverty patterns in peri-urban areas.

This article summarized the spatiotemporal pattern of land use/land cover (LU/LC) and urban heat island (UHI) dynamics in the Metropolitan city of Tehran between 1988 and 2018. The study showed dynamics of each LU/LC class and their role in influencing the UHI. The impervious surface area expanded by 286.04 (48.27% of total land) and vegetated land was depleted by 42.06 km2 (7.10% of total land) during the period of 1988–2018.

To achieve sustainable rural development, it is necessary to simultaneously protect ecologically important land and efficiently use existing agricultural land. Land use functions (LUFs) are widely used to assess regional sustainable development. Guyuan is located in a typical hilly and gully region of western China, with ecologically fragile land. Rural land transfer (RLT) has been advocated to prevent abandonment of agricultural land and promote rational, effective utilization of the land.