Food production is the basis for ensuring human survival. Ecological compensation for arable land is important to ensure the sustainable use of arable land and food production. However, how is it possible to set the standard of ecological compensation and how to achieve it scientifically? In this paper, we take China as the study area and link the ecological compensation of arable land with the production, circulation and consumption of three staple foods. The amount of food is converted into the area of arable land needed to produce that food.

Agricultural support programs distribute payments to farms based on a diverse set of policy objectives. Adequate targeting of this support to priority areas is key to efficient and effective policy. We evaluated the targeting strategy of a national-level program in Mexico that distributed support based on seven criteria that prioritized poor smallholder farming communities at high risk of cropland failure. We used a series of logistic models to assess the coverage and leakage rates of the program’s targeting strategy and found rates of about 80 and 20 percent, respectively.

Well-managed rangelands provide important economic, environmental, and cultural benefits. Yet, many rangelands worldwide are experiencing pressures of land-use change, overgrazing, fire, and drought, causing rapid degradation. These pressures are especially acute in the Hawaiian Islands, which we explore as a microcosm with some broadly relevant lessons. Absent stewardship, land in Hawaiʻi is typically subject to degradation through the spread and impacts of noxious invasive plant species; feral pigs, goats, deer, sheep, and cattle; and heightened fire risk.

Across contemporary East Africa, fencing is spreading with incredible speed over hundreds of thousands of hectares of rangelands, fundamentally reconfiguring land tenure dynamics. But why is this happening now, what are the precursors, and what will happen in the years to come? In this article, we ask how pre- and post-colonial landscape gridding perpetuate a slow violence across the landscape through processes of de-/fencing. Fencing, we argue, is embedded in a landscape logic that favours exclusive rights and conditioned access.

Land fragmentation (LF) is widespread worldwide and affects farmers’ decision-making and, thus, farm performance. We used detailed household survey data at the crop level from ten provinces in China to construct four LF indicators and six farm performance indicators. We ran a set of regression models using OLS methods to analyse the relationship between LF and farm performance.

This article draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork to examine some recent livelihood transformations that have taken place in the Turkana region of northern Kenya. In doing so, it discusses some of the ways in which uncertainty and variability have been managed in Turkana to date and considers what this means in relation to a future that promises continued radical economic and ecological change.

The purpose of this paper was to analyze the influence mechanism of the new round of Collective Forest Rights Reform (CFRR) on farmers’ production efficiency from the perspective of forestland transfer. Based on the panel data of field investigation in Jiangxi Province, a panel logit model was used to verify whether the new round of CFRR has affected farmers’ forestland circulation behavior. The results showed that the new round of CFRR has played a significant role in promoting forestland circulation.

Mountain environments and communities are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Changes in temperature are greater than at lower elevations, which affect the height of the cloud base and local rainfall patterns. While our knowledge of the biophysical nature of climate change in East Africa has increased in the past few years, research on Indigenous farmers’ perceptions and adaptation responses is still lacking, particularly in mountains regions.

Southern Africa is an exceptionally diverse region with an ancient geologic and climatic history. Its mountains are located in the Southern Hemisphere mid-latitudes at a tropical–temperate interface, offering a rare opportunity to contextualise and frame our research from an austral perspective to balance the global narrative around sustainable mountain futures for people and biodiversity. Limited Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) was initiated more than a century ago in South Africa to optimise catchment management through sound water policy.

Protecting and improving cultivated land quality is a key way to the realization of agricultural modernization. The Chinese government advocates agricultural producers to implement cultivated land protection and quality improvement behavior (CLPQIB). However, the cultivated land management rights of family farms are not so stable.

Brazil’s zero-deforestation Cattle Agreements (CAs) have influenced the supply chain but their impact on deforestation has been limited in part because slaughterhouses monitor deforestation only on the properties they buy from directly. Consequently, deforestation continues to enter the supply chain indirectly from properties that are not monitored. Knowledge gaps and data limitations have made it challenging to close this loophole and achieve meaningful reductions in deforestation.

Abandonment of agricultural land is a process described from different regions of many industrialized countries. Given the current focus on land use, land use change and food security, it appears highly relevant to develop improved tools to identify and monitor the dynamics of agricultural land abandonment. In particular, the temporal aspect of abandonment needs to be assessed and discussed. In this study, we used the detailed information available through the Norwegian subsidy claim database and analyzed the history of use of unique land parcels through a fourteen-year period.