Competing socioecological demands and pressures on land and water resources have the potential to increase land use conflict. Understanding ecosystem service provisioning and trade-offs, competing land uses, and conflict between stakeholder groups in catchments is therefore critical to inform catchment management and the sustainable use of natural resources.

Increasing flood damage has led to a rising importance of land use in flood risk management policies, commonly referred to as the spatial turn in flood risk management. This includes policies aiming at making space for rivers, which, in practice, lead to an increasing demand for land. Although research has been conducted on the variety of policies, the resulting land use conflicts in flood-prone areas have not been paid much attention to. This paper therefore analyses the current land use and its changes in Alpine flood-prone areas in Austria.

As land is limited, conflicts between land uses, and, consequently, conflicts between land users about land use inevitably arise. However, how these land use conflicts affect local land use actors has remained underexplored. The objective of this paper is to provide a broad, cross-sectoral overview of land use conflicts as perceived by local land use actors and to explore the actors’ experiences with these conflicts.

A spatial analysis was carried out to evaluate the compatibility of human activities and biophysical characteristics in the Mexican Caribbean Sea, in order to identify the most viable areas for energy generation from ocean currents and the areas where the population would most benefit from such energy projects. Of the study area, 82% have some form of protection legislation. Tourism is the main economic activity in the area and this is reflected in a wide range of activities and services that often overlap within the same spatial area.

With the rapid population growth and accelerating urbanization process, people compete for the scarce land resources to pursue their incompatible interests. Thus, a series of land-use conflicts (LUCs) problems are caused. Scientifically identifying the intensity of LUCs is the basis for coordinating the man-land relations.

Land use conflicts induced by human activities cause accelerated soil erosion. The response of soil erosion to spatial conflict in production-living-ecological space (PLES) is not clearly understood. In this research, models such as PLES spatial conflict, revised universal soil loss equation, bivariate spatial autocorrelation, and an optimal parameter-based geographical detector were used to explore the characteristics and drivers of soil erosion in response to spatial conflict in the PLES of the Dongting Lake watershed.

Growing cities face severe land use conflicts. Urban expansion and the densification of existing built areas are increasing the pressure on green spaces, which are key for climate change adaptation. Planning procedures embroiled in these land use conflicts are often complicated and slow. This is due to the increasing complexity in planning processes, which involve a multitude of stakeholders and decision-makers, whose responsibilities are not always entirely clear. Governance-oriented forms of decision making with horizontal structures are often required, but these also entail challenges.

With the development of the green food industry, land conflicts are gradually escalating, and the coordinated development of competitiveness level and land use efficiency is crucial to the green food industry.

Accurate identification of land use conflicts is an important prerequisite for the rational allocation of land resources and optimizing the production–living–ecological space pattern. Previous studies used suitability assessment and landscape pattern indices to identify land use conflicts. However, research on land use conflict identification from the perspective of ecological security is insufficient and not conducive to regional ecological, environmental protection, and sustainable development.

In the context of China’s new round of land reform, narrowing the scope of land expropriation, standardising the procedures for land expropriation, and building a unified urban and rural construction land market have become the objectives of land expropriation reform. The new Land Management Law of the People’s Republic of China confirms land expropriation for tract development as a new situation for the land acquisition system.

According to the World Bank, approximately 55% of the population lives in cities and a growing trend is expected in the future. Cities generate more than 80% of the world’s GDP, so accurate urban land management would favor sustainable growth, increasing productivity and facilitating innovation and the emergence of new ideas. The use and management of public resources and the concern for cities to become increasingly smart are, therefore, of particular importance.

The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP), known as the “Third Pole of the Earth”, contains fragile ecosystems and is sensitive to global environmental changes. With the intensification of climate change and human activities, the land cover of the QTP is changing significantly, which affects its function as an ecological security barrier.