Deforestation and drought are among the greatest environmental pressures on the Amazon rainforest, possibly destabilizing the forest-climate system. Deforestation in the Amazon reduces rainfall regionally, while this deforestation itself has been reported to be facilitated by droughts. Here we quantify the interactions between drought and deforestation spatially across the Amazon during the early 21st century.

What is the state of land information in South Africa? Is there really a lack of land data to support decisions and to improve land governance? This was the point of departure that a team of specialists grappled with to uncover the many different sources of land data and information available in South Africa. For the very first time, they attempted to systematically review and categorize the entire ecosystem of data and information related to key land topics in the country, assessing over 104 land datasets from 59 different sources.

The spread of COVID-19 in South Africa and other countries in the region has again brought to the fore the fact that very dense, under-serviced, mostly informal, settlements are not healthy places to live. They are also places where the spread of a disease is difficult to prevent or manage.

The kind of emergency response that was required to address the imminent spread of COVID-19 highlighted the widespread vulnerability of the poorest, compounded by highly unequal access to services and ongoing unhealthy living conditions.

Drastic growth of urban populations has caused expansion of peri-urban areas—the transitional zone between a city and its hinterland. Although urbanisation may bring economic opportunities and improve infrastructure in an area, uncontrolled urban expansion towards peri-urban areas will negatively impact the environment and the community living within the area. Malaysia, for example, has become one of the most urbanised countries in East Asia. However, cities in Malaysia are relatively small and less densely populated compared with other cities in East Asia.

Many actors in agricultural research, development, and policy arenas require accurate information on the spatial extents of cropping and farming practices. While remote sensing provides ways for obtaining such information, it is often difficult to distinguish between different types of agricultural practices or identify particular farming systems. Stochastic system behavior or similarity in the spectral signatures of different system components can lead to misclassification.

Understanding of people’s landscape preferences is important for decision-making about land planning, particularly in the disturbance patterns that usually occur in rural-urban gradients. However, the use of different types of images concerning the same landscape may influence social preferences and thus perceptions of landscape management and planning decisions. We evaluated landscape preferences and perceptions in four landscapes of southern Chile.

The report is based on a collaboration between the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa and the Land Portal Foundation, in collaboration with local partners, in individual countries. It is based on a wide-ranging survey of sources of land information in South Africa, conducted by the CSIR, ‘Sources of Land Information in South Africa and their Institutional Context’, published as a companion document.

Agriculture is directly linked to the socio-economic development of every region. Agriculture impacts us all, whether we are seeking food security, better health or striving to conserve natural resources. Goal 2 of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) underlines the significance of agriculture as a means to achieve food security. United Nations in its recently published report titled “World Economic Situation and Prospects 2020”(UN, 2020) has declared agriculture as one of the global priorities for achieving high-quality health care and formal employment opportunities.

This report provides a summary of a two-part online workshop in June 2020 to explore the creation of a community of experts to support the ongoing development of the LandVoc concept scheme, and to support ongoing contributions from the LandVoc community to AGROVOC. The workshops brought together 35 experts mprove awareness of the importance of controlled and multilingual vocabularies, and of value of semantics to management. of agriculture and land related knowledge.  

The Maghreb's oases systems provide a major contribution to the region's food security, economy and natural resources. Despite this potential, oasis ecosystems are threatened by a range of complex factors related to the expansion of agricultural land and increasing scarcity of water resources. The project, implemented by FAO in Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania from May 2016 to December 2019, brought together key stakeholders to address the lack of available information on the status of oases and to advocate on factual bases shared by all stakeholders and verifiable in the field.

Intensive land-cover changes (LCC) driven by unplanned urbanisation continue to threaten the sustainability of ecological assets in many cities in Africa. Evaluating the nature and processes of these changes is key to understanding the extent to which ecological instability may be affecting sustainability futures.