This report provides a synoptic analysis of the legal and governance frameworks that relate to the use and management of mangrove forests globally. It highlights the range of challenges typically encountered in the governance and tenure dimensions of mangrove forest management. This assessment forms part of a broader study that includes national-level assessments in Indonesia and Tanzania. It was carried out under the USAID-funded Tenure and Global Climate Change Program.

Based on new evidence from Darfur, this report presents a scientifc account of the environmental principles of pastoralist livestock mobility, combined with a review of other key infuences on livestock movements throughout the year. Our goal is to provide policy makers and other stakeholders with an objective account of what mobile pastoralists in Darfur can achieve, how they do it, and what they might need to do it better.

In August 2013, the Government of Uganda gazetted the National Land Policy (NLP) after having initiated the policy process over three decades ago. The NLP is to provide an over-arching policy framework for land governance and management, consolidating the many other policies and laws that have governed land and natural resources since colonial times.

Basic survival is very difficult for the 1.2 million people who live in Karamoja, a remote region in northeastern Uganda bordering Kenya marked by chronic poverty and the poorest human development indicators in the country. Traditional dependence on semi-nomadiccattle-raising has been increasingly jeopardized. Extreme climate variability, amongst other factors, has made the region’s pastoralist and agro-pastoralist people highly vulnerable to food insecurity.

This paper investigates how Borana pastoralists of southern Ethiopia have adapted resource use and livestock mobility practices amid multiple constraints including rising population, loss of rangeland to other pastoral communities and changing access rights, among others. This study uses an innovative multi-scalar methodology to understand how herders' grazing management decisions are made within a context of communal regulations governing access to resources.

From the mid-2000s, a commodity boom underpinned a wave of land use investments in low- and middle-income countries. While agribusiness, mining and petroleum concessions often involve promises of jobs and public revenues, they have also prompted concerns about land dispossession, exclusionary investment models and infringements of the rights of vulnerable groups. 

The study uses information from different sources and on different scales in an integrated set of models in order to analyze possible land use change scenarios arising in response to CAP reform. Five main steps were followed: (1) analysis of past land use changes, (2) multivariate analysis of future land use changes using a neural network time series forecast model (Multi-Layer Perceptron Method), (3) modelization of land use change demand (Markovian Chains Method), (4) allocation of the demand to define transition localization, (5) definition of policy scenarios.

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is a voluntary set-aside program in the United States designed to amelioratesoil erosion, control crop overproduction, enhance water quality, and provide wildlife habitat by replacing crops with other forms of land cover. Because CRP includes primarily grass habitats, it has great potential to benefitdeclining North American grassland bird populations. We looked at the change in national and state population trends of grassland birds and related changes to cover-specific CRP variables (previous research grouped all CRP practices).

This paper takes the move from the uncertainty surrounding ecosystem thresholds and addresses the issue of ecosystem-state assessment by means of ecological integrity indicators and ‘ecological risk‘. The concept of ‘ecological risk‘ gives a measure of the likelihood of ecosystem failure to provide the level of natural ecological goods and services expected/desired by human societies. As a consequence of human pressures (use of resources and discharge into the environment), ecosystem thresholds can be breached thus resulting in major threats to human health, safety and well-being.

Climate warming during the past century has imposed recession of glaciers and perennial snow/ice patches along the entire Swedish Scandes. On the newly exposed forefields, subfossil wood remnants are being outwashed from beneath ice and snow bodies. In Scandinavia, this kind of detrital wood is a previously unused source of postglacial vegetation and climate history. The present study reports radiocarbon dates of a set of 78 wood samples, retrieved from three main sites, high above modern treelines and stretching along the Swedish Scandes.

Sacred sites are of conservation value because of their spiritual meaning, as cultural heritage and as remnants of
near-natural biotopes in landscapes strongly transformed by man. The vegetation of sacred sites in Morocco was
studied recently. Information about their number, spatial pattern or relief position is fragmentary. However, these
parameters are important to evaluate their role as refuge for organisms and their representativeness of potential
natural vegetation.

Spatial planning is connected with speculations in real estate market, which deepens the process of urban sprawl. Adequate land management supporting free market – both investment decision of businesses and location decisions of households – is necessary if amorphous city growth is to be prevented. A change, or even information about change in the local plan determines decisions in the real estate market. On the basis of the studies conducted it can be said that the factor causing the greatest value increment is the possibility of development.