Currently, there is a major concern about the future of nutrient loads discharged into the Baltic Sea from Polish rivers because they are main contributors to its eutrophication. To date, no watershed-scale studies have properly addressed this issue. This paper fills this gap by using a scenario-modeling framework applied in the Reda watershed, a small (482� km²) agricultural coastal area in northern Poland. We used the SWAT model to quantify the effects of future climate, land cover, and management changes under multiple scenarios up to the 2050s.

The implementation of an international programme for reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) can help to mitigate climate change and bring numerous benefits to environmental conservation. Information on land change modelling and carbon mapping can contribute to quantify future carbon emissions from deforestation. However limitations in data availability and technical capabilities may constitute an obstacle for countries interested in participating in the REDD programme.

Land use and agricultural practices can result in important contributions to the global source strength of atmospheric nitrous oxide (N₂O) and methane (CH₄). However, knowledge of gas flux from irrigated agriculture is very limited. From April 2005 to October 2006, a study was conducted in the Aral Sea Basin, Uzbekistan, to quantify and compare emissions of N₂O and CH₄ in various annual and perennial land-use systems: irrigated cotton, winter wheat and rice crops, a poplar plantation and a natural Tugai (floodplain) forest.

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) is a conservation finance instrument based on the payments for ecosystem services model, wherein governments, private landowners, concession holders, and/or communities are compensated for undertaking activities which mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from forest use and land use change. This article reviews the numerous sources for REDD+ finance within the context of total global conservation finance.

Australia has long been a major exporter of the products of broadacre agriculture, a production system well suited to the economic and climatic conditions of the country. According to the conventional wisdom, Australia holds a comparative advantage in these products, among which wheat and livestock products predominate. However, the future validity of this proposition is sensitive to the projected impacts of climate change.

During 2008 the world witnessed a global food crisis which caused social unrest in many countries and drove 75 million more people into poverty. The crisis resulted from sharply higher oil prices, increased bio-fuel production, dwindling grain stocks, market speculation, changing food consumption patterns in emerging economies, and changes in world trade agreements, among other factors. Although the rise in food prices was sudden, the fragility of global food security had been developing for years.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the study of climate change effects on plant phenology. However, the effects of other more localized components of global change such as land degradation have been almost completely ignored. In this paper we evaluate the phenological patterns of 10 plant species at three sites with contrasting levels of land degradation due to overgrazing in the Patagonian Monte, Argentina, and their relationship with plant morphology, browsing intensity, and plant competition.

Soil and water conservation measures including terracing, afforestation, construction of sediment‐trapping dams, and the ‘Grain for Green Program’ have been extensively implemented in the Yanhe River watershed, of the Loess Plateau, China, over the last six decades, and have resulted in large‐scale land use and land cover changes. This study examined the trends and shifts in streamflow regime over the period of 1953–2010 and relates them to changes in land use and soil and water conservation and to the climatic factors of precipitation and air temperature.

Climate change, water supply limits, growing environmental values of water and worldwide population growth continue to raise the scarcity of water. These challenges have intensified the transfer of water from farms to cities. Water right transfers are an important international institution to stretch water supplies. In North America's Rio Grande Basin water right transfers are an especially important institution for meeting the growth in urban demands.

Aeolian desertification in Otindag Sandy Land has expanded dramatically during the past 50 years. This research explored processes and causes of aeolian desertification in the study area. The results showed that aeolian desertification development in Zhenglan Qi of typical region located at the center in the study area can be divided into three stages including rapid occurrence before 1987, parts of rehabilitation and most of deterioration from 1987 to 2000 and little rapid rehabilitation occurrence from 2000 to 2005, according to remote sensing images and field investigations.

Canada's forests will be affected by climate change to a greater degree than many other regions. The ability of the Canadian forest sector to successfully adapt to climate change, i.e. its adaptive capacity, was assessed through a series of group discussions and interviews with a variety of forestry stakeholders across Canada.

Crop and land management practices affect both the quality and quantity of soil organic matter (SOM) and hence are driving forces for soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration. The objective of this study was to assess the long‐term effects of tillage, fertilizer application and crop rotation on SOC in an agricultural area of southern Norway, where a soil fertility and crop rotation experiment was initiated in 1953 and a second experiment on tillage practices was initiated in 1983.