For a long time sub-Saharan Africa has been considered to have abundant and underutilized land than any other continent. On the contrary, recent studies show that many rural Africans live in increasingly densely populated areas where all arable land is allocated or under cultivation. This has led to a long-term decline in farm size and reduced fallows.

Alpine pastures and meadows are agroecosystems of biological, cultural-historical, and economic importance that are undergoing profound imbalances and which are in a rapid decline due to changes in management and/or abandonment. The European Union is making efforts to protect this heritage and resource. However, the dialog among the different professionals in charge of studying and managing these agroecosystems needs to be as easy and comprehensible as possible for grasslands conservation/restoration actions to be successful.

Globally, there is growing demand for increased agricultural outputs. At the same time, the agricultural industry is expected to meet increasingly stringent environmental targets. Thus, there is an urgent pressure on the soil resource to deliver multiple functions simultaneously. The Functional Land Management framework (Schulte et al., 2014) is a conceptual tool designed to support policy making to manage soil functions to meet these multiple demands. This paper provides a first example of a practical application of the Functional Land Management concept relevant to policy stakeholders.

Most stakeholder-based research concerning agri-environmental schemes (AES) derives from work engaging with farmers and land managers. Consequently, the voices and opinions of other actors involved in AES tends to be unrepresented in the wider literature. One group of actors that seem particularly overlooked in this respect are private (independent) farm advisors (i.e., the consultants contracted by farmers and land managers to advise-on AES and agronomic matters).

Societal drivers including poverty eradication, gender equality, indigenous recognition, adequate housing, sustainable agriculture, food security, climate change response, and good governance, influence contemporary land administration design. Equally, the opportunities provided by technological development also influence design approaches. The Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) attempts to align both: the data model provides a standardised global vocabulary for land administration.

The presented paper synthesizes and reviews the history of Fist Nation land management, forming the background of three land management regimes types; the Indian Act land management (IALM), First Nations land management (FNLM) and frameworks of self-government land management (SGLM). The three regimes are compared to the Community Well-Being (CWB) index, being a measure of socio-economic development of communities across Canada.

Whereas ecosystem service research is increasingly being promoted in science and policy, the utilisation of ecosystem services knowledge remains largely underexplored for regional ecosystem management. To overcome the mere generation of knowledge and contribute to decision-making, scientists are facing the challenge of articulating specific implications of the ecosystem service approach for practical land use management.

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.

Building on the current international discourse and United Nation's System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) this study provides further empirical evidences on how failure to include natural capital resources in national accounting leads to erroneous calculation of macroeconomic estimates. The SEEA methodological framework for integrating natural capital into the System of National Accounts amplifies analytical power of computable general equilibrium (CGE) models and allows to investigate relationship between the economy and the environment.

The African Highlands Initiative works to enhance livelihoods and reverse natural resource degradation
through the development of innovative methods,practices,policies and approaches.

Land degradation and desertification reduce the provision of ecosystem services by lands and soils. This constrains development, reduces water, food, and energy security, and triggers resource conflicts. Although biophysical processes and economic impacts are increasingly understood, efforts to combat degradation have been failing thus far to prevent further losses of land productivity, a cost estimated at 42 billion USD/year (Dregne & Chou, 1992; Requier-Desjardins, 2007).

Human activity and related land use change are the primary cause of accelerated soil erosion, which has substantial implications for nutrient and carbon cycling, land productivity and in turn, worldwide socio-economic conditions. Here the authors present an unprecedentedly high resolution (250 × 250 m) global potential soil erosion model, using a combination of remote sensing, GIS modelling and census data. The authors challenge the previous annual soil erosion reference values as our estimate, of 35.9 Pg yr−1 of soil eroded in 2012, is at least two times lower.