Guide to determine if monitoring is actually a viable activity that can be undertaken by their organisation. Choosing to undertake monitoring is dependent on considerations such as evaluating the sufficiency of resources, capacity to design a sound monitoring system, and availability of political windows to effect change, amongst others.

Monitoring land-based investments in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA): review of existing initiatives and options on way forward for developing a monitoring system

This manual illustrates a monitoring scheme for monitoring large-scale agricultural investments. It aims at providing orientation for establishing a monitoring scheme and implementing monitoring activities in the framework of LSAI with the collaboration of the authorities responsible for leasing out land to agricultural investors and supervising related activities. While focused on Ethiopia, it will be a useful resource for other countries too.

Drylands cover over 40% of the earth's surface and support over 2 billion people, globally (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). In East Africa alone, over 250 million people depend on drylands for their livelihoods (De Leeuw et al., 2014) and in Kenya, 70% of the total land area is classified as arid- and semi-arid (Batjes, 2004). Over the last several decades, an increasing and more sedentary human population has resulted in more pressure on these lands, and an expansion of agricultural production into marginal dryland areas that were traditionally rangelands.

This report was produced in the frame of the Project titled “Sustainability and Operationalization of Established Regional Agricultural Research Centers in Five Arab Countries”, funded by the Arab Fund for Economic & Social Development and implemented by ICARDA.

Since the onset of the phenomenon of large scale land acquisition for agri-business in Sierra Leone, after the first whistle was blown by Green Scenery, many studies have been conducted by various researchers, some to meet requirements for degree thesis, others for policy and development purposes. There is the fear in a school of thought opposed to large scale land acquisition that there is danger in corporate entities ascribing huge portions of land to themselves in the guise of investment and annihilating the actual land owners.

This paper presents the results of 39 years of observations conducted at the Chabyda station to monitor the thermal state of permafrost landscapes under current climatic warming. The analysis of long-term records from weather stations in the region has revealed one of the highest increasing trends in mean annual air temperature in northern Russia. The partitioning of the energy balance in different landscape units within the study area has been analyzed.

Understanding the effects of socio-ecological shocks on land use/land cover (LULC) change is essential for developing land management strategies and for reducing adverse environmental pressures. Our study examines the impacts of the armed conflict in Syria, which began in mid-2011, and the related social and economic crisis on LULC between 2010 and 2018. We used remote sensing for change detection by applying a supervised maximum likelihood classification to Landsat images of the three target years 2010, 2014, and 2018.

As an important component to quantify the carbon budget, accurate evaluation of terrestrial gross primary production (GPP) is crucial for large-scale applications, especially in dryland ecosystems. Based on the in situ data from six flux sites in northwestern China from 2014 to 2016, this study compares seasonal and interannual dynamics of carbon fluxes between these arid and semi-arid ecosystems and the atmosphere.

The application of global open data remote sensing satellite missions in land monitoring and conservation studies is in the state of rapid growth, ensuring an observation with high spatial and spectral resolution over large areas. The purpose of this study was to provide a review of the most important global open data remote sensing satellite missions, current state-of-the-art processing methods and applications in land monitoring and conservation studies.

Permafrost lies close to the surface of the day, therefore, it is able to quickly respond to modern climatic changes. Under these conditions, the goal of understanding the evolution of permafrost in the near future requires monitoring studies of the current state of permafrost and, first of all, its thermal conditions.

This guide aims to help community organisers and paralegals to use the method of “ground-truthing” to collect information about operations that might be illegal, prohibited or causing harm. It is a useful tool to monitor the impacts of investments and the proper implementation of agreements and contracts.

This resource is part of the CCSI’s Directory of Community Guidance on Agreements Relating to Agriculture or Forestry Investment.