This Country Assessment (CA) for Azerbaijan is prepared under the ADB Regional Technical Assistance (RETA) 7433: Mainstreaming Land Acquisition and Resettlement Safeguards in the Central and West Asia Region. The RETA objective is to foster more effective infrastructure development in the region through the improvement of land acquisition and resettlement (LAR) practices.This country assessment entailed an analysis of project documents, a review of national legislation and questionnaires/interviews with representatives of state agencies, and LAR-affected communities.

This Chad agriculture subsector review investigates the state of knowledge, key gaps and recent developments in relation to constraints to the sector and proposes policy actions and levers for future structural transformation of the sector. First, the report examines the opportunities for further development of the most important cash and staple crop value chains in Chad. Then it uses the latest open data and analytics available for Chad to better inform investment priorities for agriculture in the country.

Cette revue du sous-secteur agricole du Tchad fait le point sur l'état des connaissances, les principales lacunes et les développements récents concernant les contraintes du secteur et propose des actions politiques et des leviers pour la transformation structurelle venir du secteur. Tout dlabord, la revue examine les possibilités de développement futur des chaines de valeur des cultures de rente et de base les plus importantes au Tchad.

After more than ten years of hectic debates on international ‘land grabs’, academic interest in collapsed land deals or projects with unexpected results is growing. According to the Land Matrix, Tanzania is one of the target countries for such deals, with a number ‘abandoned’ or delayed and projects whose status is unknown. Labelling land deals as ‘failed’ poses conceptual and methodological challenges as long as the criteria for ‘failure’ are undefined.

A large share of the world's rural population depends on using land to feed themselves. Commercial agriculture and forestry investments are placing growing pressure on land as a resource. Especially when state capacities to steer and monitor land-based investments are low, this can lead to increasing pressure on natural resources, land-use conflicts and in the worst cases to forced expropriation and displacement. These factors can have a negative impact on livelihood and food security in rural areas, particularly when land rights are insecure.

Significant land-based investments in agriculture and forestry are essential to meet growing global demand for food and to help counteract the likely impacts of climate change. Such investments can have a number of beneficial impacts, such as enhancing food security, generating foreign currency, improving natural resource manage-

Pricing of direct industrial real estate (DIRE) has long been under-researched due to the paucity of analysable data. Compared to other types of real estate, DIRE has often been regarded as more inefficient because of information asymmetry amongst market players stemming from a lack of market transparency. Therefore, pricing of DIRE usually does not follow a random walk and should be more predictable than other types of real estate.

Analyzing the relationship between rural settlements and rural population change under different policy scenarios is key in the sustainable development of China’s urban and rural areas. We proposed a framework that comprised the mixed land use structure simulation (MCCA) model and the human–land coupling development model to assess the spatiotemporal dynamic changes in rural settlements and its’ coupling relationship with the rural population in the economically developed region of Deqing, Zhejiang Province.

Rapid urbanization results in farmland loss, habitat fragmentation, biodiversity decrease, and greenhouse gas emissions. Land-use policies and planning as administrative means are used to guide sustainable urban development and to balance the location of urban expansion and agricultural activities. To better understand the future implications of a variety of land-use policies, we used a FUTURES model scenario analysis to analyze the potential future patterns of urban areas and the loss and fragmentation of farmland and natural resources at the local level for Xi’an.

To combat land degradation and deterioration issues, the Grain to Green project (GGP) was implemented on the Chinese Loess Plateau in 1999 and substantially altered the land cover by converting slope farmland into forest and grassland. To effectively achieve sustainable land restoration management and avoid stakeholder conflicts, this study aimed to understand how local stakeholders perceived the current land restoration process and expectations for future land restoration policy, as well as how stakeholders assessed the GGP impacts on local ecosystem service changes.

The project-based construction land-use policy of ‘increasing versus decreasing balance’ (IVDB) is pivotal to easing the contradiction between urban and rural land in China. Understanding the relationship between the scale and revenue of the balanced quota is crucial for increasing the efficiency of quota-allocated, and further improving, IVDB performance. However, existing studies have rarely revealed the impact of the balanced quota’s scale on its revenue, supported through empirical evidence.

Knowledge of hydrologic connectivity is important to grasp the hydrological response at a basin scale, particularly as changes in connectivity can have a negative effect on the environment. In the context of a changing climate, being able to predict how changes in connectivity will affect runoff and sediment transport is particularly relevant for land-use planning. Many studies on hydrology, geomorphology and climatology have been conducted in the Lake Tana Basin in Ethiopia, which is undergoing rapid development and significant environmental changes.