Palm oil production is currently the focus of much contentious debate. On the one hand, palm oil production has a substantial, positive (socio-) economic impact in countries which produce it, like Indonesia, and is a powerful engine of rural development. On the other hand, palm oil production has a severe negative impact regarding ecological and social sustainability. This is due above all to its large carbon footprint, reduced biodiversity, and its potential for triggering land rights conflicts.

The current land administration system in Pakistan aims at land revenue assessment and tax collection for the fiscal purposes. This system is organised or structured on the traditional land registers and cadastral maps in paper formats, and their maintenance is mainly dependent on the hard works of the local land administrator so called “Patwari” at the grass-root level within his jurisdiction.

Existing studies on blockchain within land administration have focused mainly on replacing or complementing the technology for land registration and titling. This study explores the potential of using blockchain technology to enhance the transparency of all land administration processes using an integrative review methodology coupled with a framework analysis. This study draws on the Ghanaian land administration perspective to make this insightful. It appears possible to apply a permissionless public blockchain across all land administration processes.

Most election pledges require a significant budget for their implementation. In the case of a candidate for the head of a local government who presented his pledges related to urban planning by subdividing them into voting districts, we tested how the size of the budget committed to the voters affected the votes. Based on the urban planning-related pledged budget, the economic utility value of one vote was estimated to be about 2050 USD.

Green infrastructure is a strategically planned network of natural and semi-natural areas, including green and blue spaces and other ecosystems, designed and managed to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services at various scales. Apart from the ecological functions, green infrastructure, as a planning tool, contributes to social and economic benefits, leading to the achievement of sustainable, resilient, inclusive and competitive urban areas.

Beginning during the colonial period, and greatly accelerating following independence in 1965, Singapore has used land reclamation to increase its national domain by nearly 25 per cent. The construction of new land was a key component of the nation’s celebrated rise from ‘third world’ to ‘first world’ in the postcolonial period. But the economic benefits of remaking Singapore’s coastline came at significant ecological and social costs. Nearly all of the original shore, and its attendant mangrove forests and natural beaches, were lost. So too were two-thirds of Singapore’s coral reefs.

Distinguishing between the ecosystems’ capacity to generate ecosystem services (ES) and the actual use of these service (ES flow) in ES assessment and mapping is important to develop an understanding of the sustainability of ES use. This study assesses the spatial variation in ES capacity and flow in the Mediterranean small island state of Malta. The services included in this study were crop provisioning, beekeeping and honey production, fodder and livestock production, crop pollination, air quality regulation, and aesthetic ES.

Over the past centuries, cities have undergone major transformations that led to global urbanization. One of the phenomena emerging from urbanization is urban sprawl, defined as the uncontrolled spread of cities into undeveloped areas. The decrease in housing prices and commuting costs as well as the failure to internalize the real costs associated with natural land, led to households moving-out into the urban fringe – resulting in fragmented, low-density residential development patterns that has multiple negative impacts.

The primary objective of this article is to review the evolution of urban land-use survey methodologies during the last century, with a special focus on the methodologies concerning field surveys that are conducted for urban planning purposes. Our review reveals, on the one hand, that there has been a steep decrease of interest in the further development of these methodologies over the last 50 years, and, on the other, that they have been seriously trivialized, as shown by the simplistic and empirical approach to land-use survey methodology in contemporary textbooks.

In this paper, we present an analysis of the change in household land use following a conservation-driven process of indigenous land titling reform in a Cambodian protected area. In each of the two study villages, we investigated how household land use had changed and the extent of compliance with both legal boundaries of titled areas and community regulations created to govern land use within these areas. A comparison of current household land holdings in each village with those at the start of the tenure reform process indicated a significant increase in household land holdings.

Formal regulation of private property and exploration of “risk transmission” across ownerships are two popular means for addressing wildfire management at landscape scales. However, existing studies also indicate that a number of barriers exist for implementing formal regulations surrounding wildfire risk, and that few efforts gauge influences on the resident support that serves as an important antecedent to implementation.

The demand for additional agricultural land is expected to rise by approximately 50 per cent by 2050 on a global level, and agricultural land of high quality needs to be preserved to ensure future food security. However, agricultural land per capita is decreasing. One of the main reasons for this in the EU and globally is the building of houses or infrastructure on agricultural land. There is a possibility that the Swedish agricultural sector will grow in the future and supply more regions than its own territory with food due to, e.g., climate change.