Agriculture around the world is one of the industries most affected by, and faced with responsibility to mitigate, climate change. Through improvements in technology and efficiency as well as changes to land use management, agriculture can make an important contribution to meeting global commitments such as the Paris agreement or the Sustainable Development Goals. Yet international carbon markets have not resulted in sufficiently high financial returns to motivate the full potential of land sector changes in Australia and globally.

Land use and land cover change (LULCC) affects the climate through both biogeochemical (BGC) and biophysical (BPH) mechanisms. While BGC effects are assessed at global scale and are at the heart of climate treaties such as the Paris Agreement, BPH effects are totally absent despite their increasingly recognized impact, especially at local scale. This stems from the complexity in characterizing their climate impacts both at local and global scale, which makes it impractical to offer clear advices for the development of climate policies.

Forests cover about 40 % of the European Union (EU), providing a wide spectrum of invaluable ecosystem services to more than half a billion people. In order to protect and harness this crucial asset, EU policies are advancing multifunctional management. This study lays a basis for such an effort by mapping the supply of key forest ecosystem services (FES) across the entire EU: wood, water supply, erosion control, pollination, habitat protection, soil formation, climate regulation and recreation.

Climate change is a major driver of land use with implications for the quality and quantity of water resources. We apply a novel integrated impact modelling framework (IIMF) to analyze climate change impacts until 2040 and stakeholder driven scenarios on water protection policies for sustainable management of land and water resources in Austria. The IIMF mainly consists of the sequentially linked bio-physical process model EPIC, the regional land use optimization model PASMA[grid], the quantitative precipitation/runoff TUWmodel, and the nutrient emission model MONERIS.

Five Southeast Asian countries (Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Philippines and Malaysia) have experienced forest transitions, that is, a shift from net deforestation to net increases in forest area, since the 1990s. Climate change mitigation policies such as REDD+ actively promote reforestation, especially in the Global South, where they have been accompanied by exclusionary effects, known as green grabbing.

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are widespread in conservation policy. In PES, environmental effectiveness and social equity are often perceived as conflicting goals. Empirical studies on the relationship between popular design features, such as payment differentiation and payment conditionality, and effectiveness and equity are scarce. Further, they struggle with measuring and separating ecological and equity outcomes.

Over the past 15 years Australia has been trialling conservation tenders and other market based instrument approaches to generate environmental outcomes, particularly on private lands. The best known of these is the BushTender auction for vegetation protection in Victoria, begun in the early 2000s. Subsequently, nearly 100 other tenders for biodiversity protection have been run in Australia with substantial variations in application and methodology generated by a mix of both intended design and case study differences.

Support for large scale agricultural investments in Africa has been mainly premised on their employment prospects for local populations. However, despite earlier calls by Tania Li to centre labour in the land grabs debate, labour is generally invisible in both mainstream policy and academic research. This paper, through a governance lens, draws attention to the implications of the global land rush on wage labour.

Based on government statistics and interviews with villagers across Malawi this article argues that customary matrilineal and patrilineal land tenure systems serve to weaken security of land tenure for some family members as well as obstructing the creation of gender-neutral inheritance of lands. Data from the National Census of Agriculture and Livestock 2007and the 2008 Population and Housing Census are used to characterize marriage systems and landholding patterns of local communities. Marriage systems correspond to customary land-tenure patterns of matrilineal or patrilineal cultures.

The use of tree-based fallowing as a sustainable land management system may serve as an important developmental pathway out of poverty across drought-prone watersheds in the Upper Blue Nile Basin, Ethiopia. This study employs a financial analysis technique, the computation of net present values, to explore the financial viability of farmers’ investments in an intercropping farming system known as taungya. The analysis employs scenarios that include different farming systems, such as A. decurrens (J.C. Wendl.) Willd. cum teff (Eragrostis tef) intercropping, A.

Despite the increasing importance of studies dealing with acceptance in the field of land use, few theoretical-conceptual reflections and reviews have been published. To address this gap, this paper offers a critical and systematic review of recent literature regarding acceptance and land use. Our aim is to synthesise the contributions of these publications in order to advance scientific debate on this topic. The data set consists of 132 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters and is dominated by empirical papers (mostly quantitative studies) and European case studies.

We assess the production impacts of a 100% conversion to organic agriculture in England and Wales using a large-scale linear programming model. The model includes a range of typical farm structures, scaled up across the available land area, with the objective of maximising food production. The effects of soil and rainfall, nitrogen (N) supply/offtake and livestock feed demand are accounted for. Results reveal major reductions in wheat and barley production, whilst the production of minor cereals such as oats and rye increase.