This article synthesises the challenges faced by the English (urban) spatial planning system to become an enabler of urban health and explores some keys features of the evidence base, policy tools and policy implementation issues that urban planners need to be aware of to become health enablers. It draws on good practice identified in an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) seminar series involving over 500 academic researchers and practitioners between 2015 and 2017. A number of key recommendations emerged out of the project.

Agri-environmental schemes have become an effective policy measure to prompt farmers to protect rural farmland and landscapes. In recent years, 17 provincial governments including Sichuan, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Guangxi and Guangdong have shown increasing interest in promoting local experimentation with agri-environmental schemes.

Evidence-based policy guidance necessary for addressing mixed outcomes of community-based rangeland management (CBRM) is limited, dominated by case studies, and lacking coverage of diverse ecological settings. In remedy, we studied 65 traditional neighborhoods and 77 formally-organized CBRM groups across four ecological zones and investigated how and when CBRM obtains greater social outcomes than non-CBRM neighborhoods.

Driven by the development of information and communications technology as well as the spread of social networking services (SNS), access to spatial information has changed the way people select sites or areas. This study determines whether new urban place selection—that is, the selection of places in a way that differs from the classic locational principle of land use—occurs via SNS by examining changes in the location of Food and Beverage(F&B) retail facilities patronized by citizens daily.

Slower than desired growth in crop yields coupled with rising food demand present ongoing challenges for food security in Africa. Some countries, such as Tanzania, have signed the Malabo and Abuja Declarations, which aim to boost food security through increasing crop productivity. The more intensive use of seed and fertilizer presents one approach to raising crop productivity. Our simulation study examined the productivity and economic effects of planting different seed cultivars and increasing fertilizer application rates at multiple spatial scales for maize in Tanzania.

The construction of consistent time series of land use presents a key challenge when accounting for elective land use-based activities under the Kyoto Protocol (wetland drainage and rewetting (WDR), cropland management (CM) and grazing land management (GM)), in which current land use-driven greenhouse gas emissions are compared to a reference situation in 1990. This case study is the first to demonstrate the feasibility of using high-resolution land-use proxies from different datasets for Kyoto accounting in a data-rich case study region in Germany.

The contribution of small farms to local food supply, food security and food sovereignty is widely acknowledged at a global level. In the particular case of Europe, they often are seen as an alternative to large and specialised farms. Assessing the real role of small farms has been limited by a lack of information, as small farms are frequently omitted from agricultural censuses and national statistics.

Oil palm plantations in Indonesia have been linked to substantial deforestation in the 1990s and 2000s, though recent studies suggest that new plantations are increasingly developed on non-forest land. Without nationwide data to establish recent baseline trends, the impact of commitments to eliminate deforestation from palm oil supply chains could therefore be overestimated. We examine the area and proportion of plantations replacing forests across Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Papua up to 2015, and map biophysically suitable areas for future deforestation-free expansion.

The values ascribed to industrial tree plantations are often controversial. Hence knowledge of their perceived impacts is important for improving their integration in rural landscapes. In 2016 we conducted household surveys with 606 respondents living in villages adjacent to acacia, teak and pine plantations across three islands in Indonesia (Java, Borneo, Sumatra). Results show that perceptions toward pine and teak plantations tend to differ from those toward acacia pulpwood plantations in several ways.

The article sought to understand public perceptions on city landscaping during the outbreak of COVID-19. The research aimed to discuss the theoretical aspects related to restrictions on travel during the pandemic and city landscaping and to conduct an empirical study of experiences of the Vilnius Pop-up Beach, Lithuania. The thematic analysis selected for the empirical study is not limited and flexible, allowing for revealing the experiences and public opinion, including that expressed in the media, relating to the Vilnius Pop-up Beach.

Most studies on the effects of tillage operations documented the effects of tillage on losses through surface runoff. On flat areas, the subsurface runoff is the dominating pathway for water, soil and nutrients. This study presents results from a five-year plot study on a flat area measuring surface and subsurface runoff losses. The treatments compared were (A) autumn ploughing with oats, (B) autumn ploughing with winter wheat and (C) spring ploughing with spring barley (n = 3).

Africa is a continent of youth. However, its high rates of youth unemployment linked to high levels of landlessness suggest a close correlation with youth poverty and access to land. This paper presents the perspective of an approach for capacitating youth through research on land and natural resource tenure in Eastern and Southern Africa.