Land use change is a key requirement for improving rural incomes and making a significant reduction in poverty levels globally. Over 70% of the world’s poor are located in rural areas, with land use as a major source of subsistence. Improving the productivity of their land use systems is essential for increasing incomes and food security among them. Land use change is also a relatively low cost and rapidly implementable means of climate change mitigation.

Non-point source pollution, such as nutrient runoff to waterways from agricultural production, is an environmental problem that typically involves asymmetric information. Land use changes to reduce pollution incur opportunity costs that are privately known to landholders, but these changes provide environmental benefits that may be more accurately estimated by regulators. This paper reports a testbed laboratory experiment in which landholder/sellers in multi-round, sealed-offer auctions compete to obtain part of a fixed budget allocated by the regulator to subsidize pollution abatement.

Near-VAR, Energy, Bioenergy, Land use, Crude oil, Environmental Economics and Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty, Land Economics/Use, C14, C22, C51, D58, Q11, Q13,

A model of land allocation at the aggregate watershed level was developed assuming profit/net benefit maximization under risk neutrality. The econometric land use model was analyzed as an equation by equation SURE model as all the independent variables were the same for both equations. In analyzing effect of land use change on water quality, we took year 2005 as our baseline and postulated three land use scenarios.

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.

In this paper we analyze the Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) effects of ethanol production expansion in Brazil through the use of an inter-regional, bottom-up, dynamic general equilibrium model calibrated with the 2005 Brazilian I-O table. A new methodology to deal with ILUC effects is developed, using a transition matrix of land uses calibrated with Agricultural Censuses data. Agriculture and land use are modeled separately in each of 15 Brazilian regions with different agricultural mix.

Biofuels may make a substantial contribution to meeting the world’s energy needs. That contribution may come sooner and be greater if there is a strong climate policy to reduce greenhouse gases and biofuels can be produced in a way that minimizes greenhouse gas emissions. We investigate the land use implications of biofuels under different policy conditions using a computable general equilibrium model of the world economy that has been adapted to explicitly consider land use change.

This is the rst 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 signicantly contribute to the global land use change both through the direct and indirect land use change impact.

The increasing expansion of cropland is major driver of global carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. However, predicting plausible future global distributions of croplands remains challenging. Here, we show that, in general, existing global data aligned with classical economic theories of expansion explain the current (1992) global extent of cropland reasonably well, but not recent expansion (1992–2015).

As a result of high-density urbanization and climate change, both the frequency and intensity of extreme urban rainfall are increasing. Drainage systems are not designed to cope with this increase, and as a result, floods are becoming more common in cities, particularly in the rapidly growing cities of China. To better cope with more frequent and severe urban flooding and to improve the water quality of stormwater runoff, the Chinese government launched the national Sponge City Construction (SCC) program in 2014.

Low-meat and no-meat diets are increasingly acknowledged as sustainable alternatives to current Western food consumption patterns. Concerns for the environment, individual health or animal welfare are raising consumers’ willingness to adopt such diets. Dietary shifts in Western countries may modify the way human-environment systems interact over distances, primarily as a result of existing trade flows in food products.

Urban development and species invasion are two major global threats to biodiversity. These threats often co-occur, as developed areas are more prone to species invasion. However, few empirical studies have tested if both factors affect biodiversity in similar ways. Here we study the individual and combined effects of urban development and plant invasion on the composition of arthropod communities.