Agricultural activities are directly dependent on the availability and quality of natural resources, particularly land and water. While the availability of land has featured strongly in South Africa’s growth and transformation policy agendas, this piece focusses on presenting a more detailed view of the quantity and quality of South Africa’s land resource, and how this impacts the agricultural use and viability of land resources in sustaining South Africa growth objectives. 

The paper provides the analysis of improving the land reform in the Republic of Kazakhstan. The authors examine the main development stages of land ownership relations, during which the work has been performed to transform agricultural enterprises, privatize land and change the land use. The main legal acts, intended to regulate the issues of land ownership and territorial organization and creating conditions for the development of the land market, are shown.

Environment statistics enumerate various aspects of the environment and human interactions with it. The scope of environment statistics encompasses all dimensions of the environment, be it Earth, Water or Air, the biotic and abiotiv matter found within the natural environment, and various concerns arising out of impacts of human footprints on it. The objective of environment statistics is to provide information about the environment, its changes over time and across locations, and the main factors that influence them.

Over the past half-century, the risk of urban flooding in Dar es Salaam has increased due to changes in land cover coupled with climatic changes. This paper aimed to quantify the impacts of climate and land-cover changes on the magnitudes and frequencies of flood runoffs in urban Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. A calibrated and validated SWAT rainfall-runoff model was used to generate flood hydrographs for the period 1969–2050 using historical rainfall data and projected rainfall based on the CORDEX-Africa regional climate model.

Key Messages and Recommendations

• Combating desertification and land degradation while mitigating the effects of drought can secure long-term socio-economic benefits for people living in drylands and reduce their vulnerability to climate change.

• Land degradation neutrality (LDN) is an approach that counterbalances the expected loss of productive land with the recovery of degraded areas.

• Land tenure insecurity, especially for women, often prevents farmers from adopting sustainable land management practices

HIGHLIGHTS

HIGHLIGHTS

With an estimated loss of up to 20 million ha of forest over the past decade, deforestation in Indonesia has come to the forefront of global environmental concerns. Indonesia is one of the most important areas of tropical forests worldwide. In addition to providing a multitude of benefits locally, including both products and services, these forests are also of global importance because of their biodiversity and the carbon they sequester.

This is the first paper that estimates the global land use change impact of growth of the bioenergy sector. Applying time-series analytical mechanisms to fuel, biofuel and agricultural commodity prices and production, we estimate the long-rung relationship between energy prices, bioenergy production and the global land use change. Our results suggest that rising energy prices and bioenergy production significantly contribute to the global land use change both through the direct and indirect land use change impact.

Climate change, coupled with biofuels development and other factors may well be changing US land usage patterns. We use a spatial econometric approach to estimate the drivers of US land use transitions in recent years. We consider transitions between six major land uses: agricultural land, forest, grassland, water, urban, and other uses. To examine drivers, we use a two-step linearized, spatial, multinomial logit model and estimate land use transition probabilities.

Global harvested area of crops has expanded (+8%) in the period of 2004-2011. Nevertheless, some crops such as maize, sugarcane, and oilseeds expanded area more rapidly than the average rise. Although, some economists attribute this effect to biofuel production, economy also has encouraged expansion in cropland to satisfy food demand. This paper analyzes the impact that biofuel production and economic variables has had on harvested area for corn, sugar, and oilseeds.