Four years since the Voluntary Guidelines were endorsed by the Committee on World Food Security as the global consensus on improving tenure, their principles and processes are inspiring people around the world to take action. With wide ownership by governments, civil society and the private…

As World leaders forged two new big deals in late 2015 – the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Climate Change Agreements – over 200 experts and technical officers working in fields related to land and water management, participated in the 3rd Land and Water Days held at the Food and…

Classification Concepts The FAO Land Cover Classification System software is due to be released in its third version, and with it come four supporting volumes. The first of these is Classification Concepts, which lays the foundation for an understanding of the Land Cover Metalanguage (LCML)…

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have a history of engagement in pastoral development which is likely to continue. In the face of growing challenges posed by climate change, as well as new economic…

Effective policy and legal advice requires a clear understanding of the gaps and discrepancies in the policies and legislation pertaining to gender and land. This paper introduces a Legal Assessment Tool (LAT) for gender-equitable land tenure, developed under the Gender and Land Rights Database…

Accurate and consistent information on forest area and forest area change is important given the reporting requirements for countries to access results based payments for REDD+ . Forest area change estimates usually provide data on the extent of human activity resulting in emissions (e.g. from…

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…

In recent years, the dependency of local public finance from various forms of taxation related to urban development and real estate has become increasingly evident in Italy. Nevertheless, to date no organic relationship seems to have been established between fiscal policies, on the one hand, and…

Cichorieae, one of the six tribes of the sub-family Cichorioideae (Asteraceae), produces a well-recognisable fenestrate pollen type. In the Mediterranean area, the significance of high percentages of Cichorieae pollen from archaeological layers is still questioned. We assessed the presence of…

CONTEXT: Unveiling the scale at which organisms respond to habitat features is crucial to understand how they are influenced by anthropogenic environmental changes. We implemented species distribution models (SDMs) based on multiple-scale landscape pattern analysis for four bat species…

We report the spatio-temporal dynamics of land cover changes from 1954 to 2008 in a hilly mountainous area in the Italian northern Apennine, and ecological factors and processes associated with these dynamics. Land cover patches were mapped and analysed at three time periods (1954, 1980 and 2008…