The accelerated development of new urban areas has an impact on changes in the spatial use and complexity of ecosystems.

Global changes impact the human-environment relationship, and, in particular, they affect the provision of ecosystem services. Mountain ecosystems provide a wide range of such services, but they are highly sensitive and vulnerable to change due to various human pressures and natural processes. We conducted a literature survey that focused on two main issues. The first was the identification of quantitative methods aimed at assessing the impact of land use changes in mountain regions and the related ecosystem services.

In this report the authors aim to assess and evaluate historic and current changes in land use and forestry at the national and sub-national level in Sri Lanka. Different drivers, policies and data related to forest and land use are assessed to explore factors that have contributed to changes.

These are the main conclusions of the report:

The narrative of Ethiopia’s remarkable economic growth path under a developmental state model is that of a strong ruling coalition united behind the vision of the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

This paper estimates global logistic regression and logistic geographically weighted regression (GWR) models of urban growth in the adjacent border cities of Laredo, Texas in the United States and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas in Mexico, for two time periods from 1985 to 2014. Historical land use and land cover patterns were monitored through Landsat imagery from the United States Geological Survey to identify instances of urban growth through land type change. Data on socioeconomic variables related to urban growth were collected from various sources and used as independent variables.

In the last decade, Myanmar’s Kachin State has seen a boom in tissue-culture banana plantations driven by cross-border Chinese investors. This Case Study compiles field research and publicly available knowledge about the scale of the production and its economic, social and environmental consequences. The study provides a detailed snapshot of the investment model and key actors in Kachin State, the methods of land access, landscape outcomes, and experiences of plantation workers.

Land is one of the important input resources in a highly populous and land-scarce country such as Bangladesh. When different factors change (such as, geophysical, proximity, socioeconomic and climatic), there are dramatic changes in the spatial pattern of land uses. Thus, shedding light on the dynamics of land use and land cover changes has great importance for finding the changing pattern of land use in Bangladesh.

The reform of collective land ownership in post-socialist contexts offers a useful window into how changes in property rights shape and structure the dynamics of territorial transformation. Focusing on China's rural revitalization campaign, this paper demonstrates how the state, as creator and regulator of land rights and property titles, facilitates landscape change by relaxing regulations over the lease of rural land and creating market institutions that favour land transfers to organized capital, in this case tourism companies and property developers.

The 2019 fire crisis in Amazonia dominated global news and triggered fundamental questions about the possible causes behind it. Here we performed an in-depth investigation of the drivers of active fire anomalies in the Brazilian Amazon biome. We assessed a 2003–2019 time-series of active fires, deforestation, and water deficit and evaluated potential drivers of active fire occurrence in 2019, at the biome-scale, state level, and local level. Our results revealed abnormally high monthly fire counts in 2019 for the states of Acre, Amazonas, and Roraima.

Many of the world’s agricultural frontiers are located in the tropics. Crop and cattle expansion in these regions has a strong environmental impact. This paper examines land use and land cover transformations in Brazil, where large swaths of natural vegetation are being removed to make way for agricultural production. In Brazil, the land use dynamics are of great interest regarding the country’s sustainable development and climate mitigation actions, leading to the formulation and implantation of public policies and supply chain interventions to reduce deforestation.

The present research focuses on estimating forest area change with respect to the ongoing forest land conversion. The study tests the hypothesis that forest land is being converted to the selected land use categories with high growth tendency and controlling deforestation rate to its half of the present level would significantly improve the land cover under forest. The rate of forest land conversion to other land use categories is analyzed and then compared with the total area expanded under three land use classes.

Agricultural land uses can contribute to land degradation, water quality decline, and loss of ecosystem function and biodiversity in the surrounding catchment. Trees can assist in catchment management, and re-afforestation strategies have been implemented in an effort to mitigate agricultural impacts and improve degraded land and waterways worldwide. Re-afforestation strategies often target private land, and their success relies on landholder participation.