Internationally, there is interest in increasing the trade in ‘green’ market products, such as organic, fair trade, reduction of deforestation and forest degradation/reduction of deforestation and forest degradation+ for reduced deforestation and mitigation of climate change, and environmental goods and services. This crucially needs to be extended to the many poor, hungry and marginalized smallholder farmers in developing countries.

Investigations were made of plant and soil responses to severe degradation through heavy grazing and browsing in arid, succulent, subtropical thicket. Severe degradation of thicket is of major concern in terms of threatened biodiversity, unsustainable utilization and collapse of other ecosystem services. We used a natural, field contrast, case‐study approach, sampling within plots under lightly and heavily stocked conditions.

Hydrological extremes are major weather related disasters, but little is known about their long‐term patterns in the context of environmental change. Better understanding of damaging rainfall (e.g. rainfall‐erosivity events) occurring at different time‐scales has important implications for hydrological and land degradation management. The study of the interdecadal variations may help in understanding some of the consequences of abrupt environmental changes over long time periods.

Grazing has been identified as the main cause of land degradation in Patagonia. However, land degradation is highly variable among areas, even within the same paddock. This strongly suggests that different plant communities differ in their resistance to land degradation. In this study, we have evaluated soil erosion at both microsite and community scales in coexisting plant communities subject to sheep grazing in northeastern Patagonia. Three plant communities coexist in the area: two shrub steppes dominated by Chuquiraga avellanedae Lorentz and Nassauvia ulicina (Hook.

Landscape metrics are used in a wide range of environmental studies such as land use change and land degradation studies, soil erosion and run-off predictions, management of hunting communities, and strategic planning for environmental management, to name just a few. Due to their utility for a variety of applications, there are many indices and software packages that have been designed to provide calculations and analysis of landscape structure patterns in categorical maps.

Agroforestry can help prevent land degradation while allowing continuing use of land to produce crops and livestock. A problem with the evaluation of agroforestry using long-run static models and traditional discounting techniques is that the present value of the forestry enterprise is generally much lower than that of other production activities. This problem is common with Australian native species which tend to have a high environmental value but a low market value.

To address land degradation and rural poverty the Chinese government has put in place a series of land conversion programmes in the Loess Plateau area in northern China. In addition to problems arising from unsustainable land use, water resource availability driven in part by climatic forcing is also a threat to livelihoods in this region. To understand climate impacts on farming practice in poor areas of China, field observation and village reconnaissance took place in the summer of 2009 in three selected counties of Shaanxi and Ningxia Province, northern China.

An agricultural watershed, situated on an island of the Aegean archipelago, was studied in order to gain insight into the structure and the design of a typical terrestrial ecosystem of the Mediterranean region. Fieldwork was focused on the comparative study of seasonal patterns of inorganic nutrients, organic nitrogen, and erosion over the most abundant vegetation types of the area, such as olive groves, maquis, and wetlands. Nutrient losses via the pathway of erosion were provided by the determination of nutrient concentrations in runoff sediments.

The AnnAGNPS model, widely utilized as a practical tool for addressing erosion problems and land use planning, was implemented in a small agricultural watershed located in central Belgium, to assess its prediction capacity of runoff, peak flow and sediment yield in humid temperate conditions. Model performance was evaluated at the event scale by using a database reporting hydrological, geomorphologic and land use data collected during a 2-year period. Seventeen events were modelled and compared with the corresponding observations at the watershed outlet.

Mountain ecosystems are, however, fragile and particularly vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change, deforestation and forest degradation, land-use change, land degradation and natural disasters.