Rural residential land is the main space of a farmer’s life, rural culture, and social relations. Prior research of rural residential land has focused more on its evolvement in plain and traditional agricultural areas. Yet, there is no clear picture of rural residential land expansion, especially in ecologically fragile areas.

The triggering of slope failures can cause a significant impact on human settlements and infrastructure in cities, coasts, islands and mountains. Therefore, a reliable evaluation of the landslide hazard would help mitigate the effects of such landslides and decrease the relevant risk. The goal of this paper is to develop, for the first time on a regional scale (1:100,000), a landslide susceptibility map for the entire area of the Attica region in Greece.

Protected areas are places that provide diverse ecosystem services, including cultural ecosystem services. At the same time, the development and unbalanced use of natural resources in protected areas often create environmental threats and social conflicts. This study estimates the economic value of environmental consequences derived from the construction of an airport in a national park in Korea.

Assessing transport CO2 emissions is important in the development of low-carbon strategies, but studies based on mixed land use are rare. This study assessed CO2 emissions from passenger transport in traffic analysis zones (TAZs) at the community level, based on a combination of the mixed-use development model and the vehicle emission calculation model. Based on mixed land use and transport accessibility, the mixed-use development model was adopted to estimate travel demand, including travel modes and distances.

Population growth rates in Sub-Saharan East Africa are among the highest in the world, creating increasing pressure for land cover conversion. To date, however, there has been no comprehensive assessment of regional land cover change, and most long-term trends have not yet been quantified. Using a designed sample of satellite-based observations of historical land cover change, we estimate the areas and trends in nine land cover classes from 1998 to 2017 in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zambia.

Agricultural development is determined by various factors, such as environmental, economic, demographic, or social circumstances. In order to present the level of this development as com-prehensively as possible, a multidimensional analysis should be carried out with an appropriate methodology. In this article, a taxonomic approach known as the Hellwig’s method was used to determine the level of agricultural development. The area of research was the territory of Poland, divided into voivodships, which are the main units of the administrative division of the country.

Sharing the economic agglomeration effects of large cities is considered an effective way to enhance economic growth in small and medium-sized cities, yet there remains a lack of relevant quantitative empirical research. In this study, the three dimensions of borrowing size of 285 prefecture-level cities and nighttime lighting data from 2004 to 2013 in China are used to assess its effect on economic development by a fixed-effects model with panel data. The results show that first, the effect of borrowing size on small and medium-sized cities’ economic development is significantly positive.

The growth of Pakistan’s agriculture-based economy depends on elevating agriculture production and raising the per-capita income of rural communities. This paper evaluates the value of two simultaneous initiatives for the economic development of Pakistan, i.e., (i) reforming and modernization of the cadastre system, and (ii) the implementation of national spatial data infrastructure (NSDI). Both can provide crucial frameworks to assemble geographic information necessary for effective agriculture policies in the country.

Communal forests are a unique land tenure system and comprise a singular legal category in Galicia. Their persistence over time demonstrates that this community-owned resource has overcome the “tragedy of the commons”, showing their capability to successfully develop self-governing institutions. However, communal forests have rarely been studied through the lens of economics. This minimizes the opportunity to explore to what extent communities of communal forests might be a driving force of general well-being, citizen empowerment, equity, employment, and local development.

The modernization of economic activities in mountain areas is conditioned by the physical characteristics of the territory, the weight of activities related to the primary sector, infrastructure deficits, low population density, as well as the declining and ageing population. The response to this situation has involved implementing a certain degree of functional diversification. One of the aspects that has assisted in the expansion of the tertiary sector is leisure and recreational activities.

This work evaluates the relationships between bioenergy and related biomass supply chains and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Using Nilsson et al. (2016) seven-point scoring framework, the relationships between biomass supply for bioenergy and the SDGs were evaluated based on existing synthesis papers, modeling studies and empirical analyses, and expert knowledge. To complement this, contributions to SDG targets of 37 best practice case studies from around the world were documented.

The German Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) has been deemed successful in promoting German biogas production. However, the German state-level biogas production development (BPD) under the EEG has not been systematically studied and compared. This research aimed to study the German state-level BPD using the multivariate linear regression model with a dummy variable, and to spatially quantify the environmental and agricultural consequences using the geographic information system (GIS) technique to identify the necessities of regional-based analysis on Germany’s BPD.