Land-titling programs, land and forest allocation programs, and projects on state-allocated land for development and investment in Laos have been key drivers of change in land tenure. These have triggered major shifts in land use rights, from customary, to temporary, and then to permanent land use rights. This article explores how government programs to grant land use rights to individual households have affected the way people have been able to acquire and secure land tenure.

This paper consists of a review of existing literature relating to Incorporated Land Groups in Papua New Guinea (PNG), followed by a case study of two urban incorporated land groups (ILGs) in the city of Lae. The paper is an attempt at assessing the sustainability of ILGs in the country. The challenges facing the ILGs have heightened public fears that the land groups may not be sustainable.

Tallgrass prairie once occupied 67.6 million hectares in the North American Midwest but less than 0.1% remains today. Consisting of more than 2200 ha, Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge (NSNWR) was established by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the 5217 ha Walnut Creek watershed in Jasper County, Iowa. Large tracts of land are being converted from row crop agriculture to native prairie and savanna with the goal to restore the landscape to a semblance of the condition that existed prior to Euro-American settlement.

Conservation thinking will benefit from the incorporation of a resilience perspective of landscapes as social-ecological systems that are continually changing due to both internal dynamics and in response to external factors such as a changing climate. The examination of two valley oak stands in Southern California provides an example of the necessity of this systems perspective where each stand is responding differently as a result of interactions with other parts of the landscape.

Land cover modeling is used to inform land management, but most often via a two-step process, where science informs how management alternatives can influence resources, and then, decision makers can use this information to make decisions. A more efficient process is to directly integrate science and decision-making, where science allows us to learn in order to better accomplish management objectives and is developed to address specific decisions.

Genetically modified (GM) crops have single or multiple genes introduced to obtain crop characteristics that cannot be obtained through conventional breeding. Pollen mediated gene flow from GM to non-GM crops causes some crops planted as non-GM to become GM, and this imposes economic losses on farmers who planted a non-GM crop but then have to sell the harvest on a GM market. The economic losses that result when both crops are grown together depend on the institutional arrangements and the type of property rights in place.

As calls for bolstering ecosystem services from croplands have grown more insistent during the past two decades, the search for ways to foster these agriculture-sustaining services has become more urgent. In this context we examine by means of a meta-analysis the argument, proposed by Robert McC. Netting, that small-scale, mixed crop-livestock farming, a common livelihood among poor rural peoples, leads to environmentally sustainable agricultural practices.

Interacting land use demands and competing interests originating from fields such as agriculture, housing, mobility and nature conservation call for integrated governance approaches that incorporate disciplinary perspectives and arbitrate between them. The German research program “Sustainable Land Management” targets this challenge and provides an umbrella for a number of regional projects involving transdisciplinary system-oriented approaches to sustainable land use, connecting researchers and practitioners.

Urban areas are directly or indirectly responsible for the majority of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. In this study, we characterize observed atmospheric CO2 mixing ratios and estimated CO2 fluxes at three sites across an urban-to-rural gradient in Boston, MA, USA. CO2 is a well-mixed greenhouse gas, but we found significant differences across this gradient in how, where, and when it was exchanged. Total anthropogenic emissions were estimated from an emissions inventory and ranged from 1.5 to 37.3 mg·C·ha−1·yr−1 between rural Harvard Forest and urban Boston.

The Siwalik Hills is one of the most fragile and vulnerable ecosystems in the Nepalese Himalaya where soil erosion and land degradation issues are fundamental. There is very limited knowledge on soil erosion processes and rates in this region in comparison to other regions of the Himalaya. The aims of the present paper are to document, measure and interpret key soil erosion processes and provide an estimate of erosion rates in the Khajuri Stream catchment located in the eastern Siwalik Hills.

Residents of Southern Africa depend on rangeland for food, livelihoods, and ecosystem services. Sustainable management of rangeland ecosystems requires attention to interactive effects of fire and grazing in a changing climate. It is essential to compare rangeland responses to fire and grazing across space and through time to understand the effects of rangeland management practices on biodiversity and ecosystem services in an era of global climate change.

The objective of this article was to develop a deeper understanding of the interdependences between smallholder farming and the state of environmental management in rural Malawi. We examined the agricultural local governance framework in Malingunde Extension Planning Area (EPA), its contribution to food security and how it conflicts with overall land and forest resources management. The charcoal production process was discussed in line with its implications for agricultural production and environmental sustainability.