Continued overexploitation of natural resources and the associated impacts of climate change threaten the sustainability and biodiversity of our global social-ecological systems. ‘Integrated landscape approaches’ are governance strategies that attempt to reconcile multiple and conflicting land-use claims to harmonize the needs of people and the environment and establish more sustainable and equitable multi-functional landscapes.

Since, the Common Agricultural Policies (CAP) reform in 2003, many efforts have been made at the European level to promote a more environmentally friendly agriculture. In order to oblige farmers to manage their land sustainably, the GAEC (Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions) were introduced as part of the Cross Compliance mechanism. Among the standards indicated, the protection of soils against erosion and the maintenance of soil organic matter and soil structure were two pillars to protect and enhance the soil quality and functions.

This study examines the farm-level economic benefits and aggregate welfare impacts of adopting push–pull technology (PPT)—an innovative, integrated pest and soil-fertility management strategy—with a set of household- and plot-level data collected in western Kenya. The evaluation is based on a combination of econometric and economic surplus analysis. Treatment effect estimates are used to assess the technology-induced shift in the maize supply curve, which is then used as an input to the economic surplus analysis.

This paper offers solutions to some of the challenges around maintaining productive agricultural land close to cities in countries facing a decline in urban populations. In such circumstances, some farmers have been observed to convert their land into real estate and leave farming before land prices decline, therefore decreasing the area of agricultural land close to large cities. In contrast, many suburban farmers in developed countries remain in farming even when land prices decline and suburbs shrink.

Different forms of income diversification represent important strategies of farmers to either cope with the changing economic framework conditions or to valorise given territorial potentialities. Nevertheless, the decision to diversify economic activities on or off the farm will heavily depend on the agricultural business and household characteristics. Our study used a survey of 2154 farms from eleven European regions to identify distinct farm types in order to investigate differences regarding the willingness to diversify in the future.

The primary objective of this article is to review the evolution of urban land-use survey methodologies during the last century, with a special focus on the methodologies concerning field surveys that are conducted for urban planning purposes. Our review reveals, on the one hand, that there has been a steep decrease of interest in the further development of these methodologies over the last 50 years, and, on the other, that they have been seriously trivialized, as shown by the simplistic and empirical approach to land-use survey methodology in contemporary textbooks.

Private forests are widespread in Europe providing a range of ecosystem services of significant value to society, and there are calls for novel policies to enhance their provision and to face the challenges of environmental changes. Such policies need to acknowledge the importance of private forests, and importantly they need to be based on a deep understanding of how property rights held by private forest owners vary across Europe. We collected and analysed data on the content of property rights based on formal legal requirements existing in 31 European jurisdictions.

As new industries emerge in rural areas, land use change can have important implications for affected communities. In-turn, social responses to developments can have important implications for industry. The idea that communities may, or may not, approve of landuse change has been conceptualised in the literature on ‘social license to operate’.

Credibility is the measure of how institutions are perceived as a result of autonomous endogenous patterns of interaction and power differences. It is not the tenure security in the sense of neo-classical economics that matters but the perceived security and whether developers have the assurance to retain the fruits of their investment. What matters in performance of institutions is not their form but their functions as it is determined temporally and spatially in terms of economic efficiency, stability and growth.

In parts of the northern hemisphere, many pollinator species are in decline, with potential adverse implications for pollination and the ecosystem service of food production. It is therefore important to understand how habitats primarily orientated towards food production can be managed in an efficient way to enhance pollinator populations for current and future food security. In Europe, agri-environment schemes are a well-established method for promoting nature conservation on farmland.

Ten years after the Global Financial Crisis, this research examines how resilience theory and rhetoric relating to the economy and housing markets has been translated into policy and practice. The methodology involves a case study of a city (Auckland) with a nationally dominant housing market and high unaffordability. Via secondary literature and a series of interviews we analyse questions connected to resilience from what, how, by whom, and discuss the implications and limits of the approach.

In developing countries, cities are rapidly expanding and urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) has an important role in feeding these growing urban populations; however such agriculture also carries public health risks such as zoonotic disease transmission. It is important to assess the role of UPA in food security and public health risks to make evidence-based decisions on policies. Describing and mapping the peri-urban interface (PUI) are the essential first steps for such an assessment.