Diamonds in the Delta (DiD) is an international research-action network of scholars, water professionals and civil society advocates who are concerned about how climate change compounds problems of flooding and subsidence in delta cities.

In the Anthropocene, climate impacts are expected to fundamentally change the way we live in, and plan and design for, our cities and landscapes. Long-term change and uncertainty require a long view, while current planning approaches and policy making are mostly short-term oriented and are therefore not well suited to respond adequately.

In a context of a rapidly changing livability of towns and countryside, climate change and biodiversity decrease, this paper introduces a landscape-based planning approach to regional spatial policy challenges allowing a regime shift towards a future land system resilient to external pressures.

The rain gardens at Bryggen in Bergen, Western Norway, is designed to collect, retain, and infiltrate surface rainfall runoff water, recharge the groundwater, and replenish soil moisture. The hydraulic infiltration capacity of the Sustainable Drainage System (SuDS), here rain gardens, has been tested with small-scale and full-scale infiltration tests.

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.

The Environment and Planning Act is developed as a sequel to the Crisis and Recovery Act. In the context of the Global Financial Crisis, market players hardly realised buildings. In the rare case that a market player was willing to invest, the legal system should not limit investments, but facilitate initiative.

The current paper examines the legitimacy dilemmas that rise from local governments’ direct policy instruments and market interventions. It takes the case of public land management strategies. The paper argues that current societal challenges—such as energy transition, climate change and inclusive urban innovation—require planning practices to be more effective.

Given its wide scope on the work on forests, FAO requests information from its member countries in many different ways, using various reporting formats and questionnaires. The collected information is used to produce several outputs such as databases, overviews, reports, case-studies and other analyses.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has developed a series of Technical Guides to elaborate and provide more detailed guidance on thematic areas contained within the Guidelines.

This report aims to provide a conceptual framework to address food security under conditions of water scarcity in agriculture. It has been prepared by a team of FAO staff and consultants in the framework of the project `Coping with water scarcity: the role of agriculture?, and has been discussed at an Expert Consultation meeting organized in FAO, Rome in December 2009 on the same subject.