Devolution is a promising tool to enhance forest management. The literature has discussed many factors that affect the outcomes of forest devolution policies; however, insufficient attention has been paid to the role of exogenous socio-economic changes. Using the longitudinal case study method, we focus on how socio-economic changes affect the effectiveness of forest devolution policies using a case from Southeast China.

The development of tourism determines the cultural landscape transformation, spatial development of coastal localities, scale of recreational architecture and other forms of development related to tourism services. The article presents research aiming to analyze tourism development in the context of its impact on the cultural landscape of Polish coastal localities, taking into account the specificity of post-communist countries and supra-regional tendencies.

Reasonably assessing the effectiveness of government expenditure on the Grain for Green project (GFG) in providing forest carbon sequestration would contribute to the development of China’s forest carbon sequestration. Using the government expenditure data from the GFG in Yunnan Province from 2001 to 2015 and the MODIS Land Cover Type (MCD12Q1) time-series datasets, we calculated the forest carbon sequestration of various counties (cities or districts).

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect has been extensively studied as a global issue. The urbanization process has been proved to be the main reason for this phenomenon. Over the past 20 years, the built-up area of Zhengzhou city has grown five times larger, and the UHI effect has become increasingly pressing for the city’s inhabitants. Therefore, mitigating the UHI effect is an important research focus of the expanding capital city of the Henan province.

To make regions more resilient, a useful idea is that of synergy between tourism and landscape (i.e., a win-win situation). To help policymakers manage for synergy, we provide practical recommendations. Using the case of Terschelling (the Netherlands), an island that is part of the UNESCO World Heritage listed Wadden Sea, we analyzed how policy and public opinion have been changing, and how multilevel governance is arranged.

Despite a growing recognition of the importance of social learning in governing and managing land use, the understanding and practice of learning has received limited attention from researchers. In global environmental programs and projects aimed at supporting sustainable land use in developing countries, learning is often promoted but without explicit learning goals. The focus may be on capacity building and community participation, and on testing policy tools, rather than on collaborative social learning.

Brazil has become an agricultural powerhouse, producing roughly 30 % of the world’s soy and 15 % of its beef by 2013 – yet historically much of that growth has come at the expense of its native ecosystems. Since 1985, pastures and croplands have replaced nearly 65 Mha of forests and savannas in the legal Amazon. A growing body of work suggests that this paradigm of horizontal expansion of agriculture over ecosystems is outdated and brings negative social and environmental outcomes.

Understanding stakeholder power relations—such as between land sellers, land buyers, and local governments—is crucial to understanding Land Value Capture (LVC). While scholars have focused on stakeholder relationships through approaches such as stakeholder salience, stakeholder interaction, stakeholder value network, and stakeholder multiplicity, much research either places insufficient focus on power or only stresses partial attributes of power. As a result, the role of power relations among key stakeholders in LVC remains insufficiently explored.

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.

Several studies have shown human impacts on urban wetlands. These impacts are mostly studied at broad scales, which may generalize and aggregate important information needed for landscape quantification or terrain analysis. This situation can weakly or inappropriately address the structure of wetland landscapes, thus affecting the assessment of the quantities and qualities of terrestrial wetland habitats.

The editorial team greatly appreciates the reviewers who have dedicated their considerable time and expertise to the journal’s rigorous editorial process over the past 12 months, regardless of whether the papers are finally published or not.[...]

Demand for agricultural exports in Brazil has stimulated the expansion of crop production and cattle raising, which has caused environmental impacts. In response, Brazil developed public policies such as the new Forest Code (FC) and supply chain arrangements such the Soy and the Cattle Moratoriums. This paper analyzes the effectiveness of these policies, considering the trajectories of agricultural expansion in the state of Mato Grosso in three years: 2005 (pre-moratorium and before the new FC), 2010 (post-moratorium and before the new FC) and 2017 (post-moratorium and post-new FC).