Global efforts to combat climate change will require a transition to renewable energy and government action to reduce reliance on fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. If followed through, such action will create stranded assets – in other words, economic assets affected by premature write-downs or downward revaluations, or converted to liabilities.

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.

With the rapid development of urbanization and industrialization, China’s metropolitan areas have experienced dramatic transitions of land use, which has had a profound impact on the eco-environment. Accordingly, the contradictions of regional production, living, and ecological spaces have intensified. In this context, analysis of the dynamics of regional production–living–ecological (PLE) spaces has become an important entry point for studying land use transition and its eco-environmental effects, by constructing a classification system of PLE land functions.

Papua New Guinea is a country in Oceania that hosts unique rain forests and forest ecosystems which are crucial for sequestering atmospheric carbon, conserving biodiversity, supporting the livelihood of indigenous people, and underpinning the timber market of the country. As a result of urban sprawl, agricultural expansion, and illegal logging, there has been a tremendous increase in land-use land cover (LULC) change happening in the country in the past few decades and this has triggered massive deforestation and forest degradation.

Central and Eastern Europe has experienced fundamental land use changes since the collapse of socialism around 1990. We analyzeanalyzed the patterns and determinants of agricultural land abandonment and recultivation in Slovakia during the transition from a state-controlled economy to an open-market economy (1986 to 2000) and the subsequent accession to the European Union (2000 to 2010).

Globally, protected areas are faced with a myriad of threats emanating principally from anthropogenic drivers, which underpins the importance of the human element in protected area management. Delving into the “exclusive” and “inclusive” approaches to nature conservation discourse, this study explored the extent to which local communities collaborate in the management of protected areas and how the governance regime of these areas influences local perceptions and attitudes.

Global changes impact the human-environment relationship, and, in particular, they affect the provision of ecosystem services. Mountain ecosystems provide a wide range of such services, but they are highly sensitive and vulnerable to change due to various human pressures and natural processes. We conducted a literature survey that focused on two main issues. The first was the identification of quantitative methods aimed at assessing the impact of land use changes in mountain regions and the related ecosystem services.

Understanding future land-use related water demand is important for planners and resource managers in identifying potential shortages and crafting mitigation strategies. This is especially the case for regions dependent on limited local groundwater supplies. For the groundwater dependent Central Coast of California, we developed two scenarios of future land use and water demand based on sampling from a historical land change record: a business-as-usual scenario (BAU; 1992–2016) and a recent-modern scenario (RM; 2002–2016).

Human land use intensity affects the surface energy balance by changing the biogeophysical parameters. This study used Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer remote sensing data and surface energy balance algorithms to quantify changes in surface energy budgets corresponding to changes in land use in Beijing from 2000 to 2015. Land use was reclassified by considering land use intensity. The difference in the latent heat flux (LE) and net radiation (Rn) (LE−Rn) expressed the warming or cooling effect.

This study presents an integrated examination of both the ecosystem services (ES) and ecosystem disservices (EDS) associated with smallholder animal husbandry in rural livelihoods in three villages in southeast South Africa. It recognises the contribution of ES supporting and resulting from smallholder livestock and poultry production, but also details the limiting factors or EDS, such as tick-borne disease, birds of prey or unpalatable rangeland, produced by the same system.

Nine Latin American countries plan to use silvopastoral practices—incorporating trees into grazing lands—to mitigate climate change. However, the cumulative potential of scaling up silvopastoral systems at national levels is not well quantified. Here, we combined previously published tree cover data based on 250 m resolution MODIS satellite remote sensing imagery for 2000–2017 with ecofloristic zone carbon stock estimates to calculate historical and potential future tree biomass carbon storage in Colombian grasslands.

Mapping the characteristics and extent of environmental conflicts related to land use is important for developing regionally specific policies. However, because it is only possible to verify the frequency of conflicts on a specific predetermined subject, it is difficult to determine the various reasons for conflicts in a region. Therefore, this study mapped the current status of regional environmental conflicts in South Korea using a spatial text mining technique, then proposed relevant management policies.