Renewable energy sources (RES) can undoubtedly contribute to protecting the environment and conserving fossil fuels, as well as enhancing regional and rural development opportunities. However, every energy production process affects the environment and involves the use of land resources. The risks linked to intensified RES use should be adequately taken into consideration in any planning process, as ill-conceived energy policies may adversely impact land and local ecosystems, and lead to increases in public spending.

This special issue has presented some of the specific findings of the RE-Impact Project which was commissioned and funded by the EuropeAid Cooperation Office from 2007 until its conclusion in 2010. The project aimed to provide impact assessment frameworks and influence relevant policies through direct involvement in bioenergy projects and policy analysis in South Africa, Uganda, India and China. The papers summarised here have covered issues related to Jatropha curcas and forest-based bioenergy in these countries.

Rural development is of great significance for the future of both the EU and Hungary.We must reduce migration, create new jobs and focus on sustainability and the principles and goals of environmental protection and nature conservation.

The authors explore three problems confronting scientists working in the central African humid forest zone and show their interconnectedness in the context of the sociopolitical history of the area. These problems emerge from different domains at different spatial scales: agricultural development, natural resource management, and landscape scale conservation. Land and livelihoods are severely constrained in central Africa. Agriculture is rarely remunerative: prices are low, technology limited, land rights contested, and labor scarce.

An understanding of land use change and its drivers in semi-arid Mediterranean agro-ecosystems is important for informing ways to facilitate adaptation to future environmental and socioeconomic pressures. In this paper, we mapped and quantified land use changes in the semi-arid Mediterranean agro-ecosystem of Torrealvilla catchment between 1956 and 2008. Subsequently, we detected signs of landscape fragmentation and examined the relationship between land use change trajectories and a set of biophysical factors using Generalized Additive Models (GAMs).

The natural environment in Nicaragua has been damaged by rural development policies geared for the export of cash crops, by uneven land distribution and the near absence of concerns about the environmental effects of the prevailing model of development. The demands made by market forces for the export of primary materials have been reasons for land degradation in the big farms, and the need to survive a poverty stricken existence has forced the peasantry to damage the marginal and fragile land they worked.

In European mountain areas, shrub encroachment resulting from farmland abandonment is most often managed by mechanical operations such as roller chopping or controlled burning, which have proved to be ineffective and unsustainable. Recent agroecological findings highlight the potential impact of grazing on long-term shrub dynamics. We thus explored the potential contribution of livestock farms to the management of shrub encroachment.

This contribution discusses assets and limits of the local/territorial level as a core level to improve the sustainability of agriculture. The focus is on the issue of rural landscape maintenance through farming. Some possible institutional solutions to overcome the difficulties of family farms are examined. New institutional settings such as the "local group", constituting an interface for the negotiation among different local stakeholders, seem to effectively facilitate the stipulation of local contracts for landscape management.

Substituting fossil fuels has been a prominent issue in the EU in recent years. Energy security, agricultural and environmental considerations have all played a part in the development of alternative fuels and in the creation of incentives promoting their use. The system, like big systems in general, cannot react to new developments quickly and it seems there are elements that we should seriously consider removing or replacing to avoid adverse effects.

This study examined access of rural women to forest resources and its impact on rural household welfare in North Central Nigeria. Three states out of 6 states in the study area were purposively selected to cover 3 ethnic groups. A state was selected to cover at least one ethnic group. 4 villages were randomly selected in each state to make a total of 12 sample villages. Primary data were collected through structured questionnaire from 20 randomly selected rural women in each sample village to make a total of 240 respondents.