Sierra Leone has recently emerged from a long period of political instability and civil war, and is ranked among the world’s poorest countries. Thousands of displaced people are in the process of returning totheir villages to rebuild their mainly farming-based livelihoods, and many are growing food crops for the first time in a decade.

This paper explores options for including land use in a future (post-2020) climate change agreement as anticipated by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP). Options are considered with an eye toward reaching agreement under the ADP, keeping in mind the level of ambition of global efforts, and the need to accelerate the reduction of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

This study presents the findings of an agricultural assessment for St. Kitts and Nevis in 1983 funded by USAID.

It suggests that more intensive use of labour and land could occur if individuals or groups of individuals have more widespread and secure access to government controlled land. The paper recommends that a project be developed that assists several hundred people to become farm operators, through land purchase arrangements or long term land leases, on land that is government controlled.

Population pressures play less of a role in deforestation than earlier studies of Thailand found. Between 1976 and 1989, Thailand lost 28 percent ofits forest cover. To analyze how road building, population pressure,and geophysical factors affected deforestation in Thailand during that period, Cropper, Griffiths, and Mani develop a model in whichthe amount of land cleared, the number of agricultural households,and the size of the road network are jointly determined.The model assumes that the amount of land cleared reflects an equilibrium in the land market.

The adaptation of land-use patterns is an essential aspect of minimising the impact of climate change at regional and local scales; for example, adapting watershed land-use patterns to mitigate the impact of climate change on a region’s hydrology. The aim of this study is to simulate and assess a region’s ability to adapt to hydrological changes by modifying land-use patterns in the Wu-Du watershed in northern Taiwan.

Report on a donor consultative meeting at the World Bank on land policy lessons learned and new challenges for the World Bank’s development agenda. Contains background, areas of donor agreement, outstanding issues and outcomes. The greatest controversy continued to centre around market assisted land reform.

Will intensifying the road network around market areas produce greater economic returns and less environmental damage than extending the road network into new areas?Rural roads promote economic development but also facilitate deforestation. To explore the trade-offs between development and environmental damage posed by road building, Chomitz and Gray develop and estimate a spatially explicit model of land use.

This study explores the relationship between HIV/AIDS and land rights in Kenya, with a particular focus on women as a socially vulnerable group. It examines: the ways that HIV/AIDS-affected households are coping in terms of land access, use and management; the consequences of these coping strategies on security of access and rights to land; and how changes in land tenure, access and rights to land among different categories of people are affecting agricultural productivity, food security and poverty.

Policy Brief 41
by Ruth Hall

Attempts at settling or sedentarizing nomadic herders in semi-arid and arid regions have been largely unsuccessful, partly on account of the difficulty of restricting the movements of domestic livestock in areas where low and irregular rainfall lead to scant and unreliable sources of water and grazing. But for the herders in sub-humid regions, where both water and vegetation resources are much more reliable and substantial, there appear to be different possibilities.

Assesses the process of rural land registration in Mozambique and the outcomes for poor and marginalised groups. The research finds that community land registration, under the 1997 land law, can strengthen community rights to use and benefit from their land in relation to outsider interests in land. However, intra-community and intra-household land rights are not addressed, since it is only community land boundaries which are registered.

Soil erosion has conventionally been perceived as the chief cause of land degradation, yet the limited effectiveness and poor uptake of widely promoted physical and biological anti-erosion methods challenges this logic. An alternative perception focusing on prior land damage - notably to soil cover, architecture and fertility - permits an holistic, farmer-centred approach which has generated positive response to date.