This comic is based on field research conducted around the Feronia palm oil plantation in Tshopo province in north-east DR Congo as part of a project on ‘environmental defenders and atmospheres of violence’. The story focuses on people living next to the Feronia concession and how they experience and fight against the company. While the names in the comic are fictional;the described events are based on testimonies gathered during field research.

Urbanization is changing land use–land cover (LULC) transforming green spaces (GS) and bodies of water into built-up areas. LULC change is affecting ecosystem services (ES) in urban areas, such as by decreasing of the water retention capacity, the urban temperature regulation capacity and the carbon sequestration. The relation between LULC change and ES is still poorly examined and quantified using actual field data. In most ES studies, GS is perceived as lumped areas instead of distributed areas, implicitly ignoring landscape patterns (LP), such as connectivity and aggregation.

Sustainable forest management needs to address biodiversity conservation concerns. For that purpose, forest managers need models and indicators that may help evaluate the impact of management options on biodiversity under the uncertainty of climate change scenarios. In this research we explore the potential for designing mosaics of stand-level forest management models to address biodiversity conservation objectives on a broader landscape-level.

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a key tool for both environmental and land management. It identifies potential adverse and unintended consequences of the projects on land use and the environment and derives possible mitigation measures to address these impacts. Calculating the volume and severity of impacts is complex and often relies on selections and simplifications. Moreover, calculating impacts associated with nomadic-pastoral (dynamic) land use is still an unresolved methodological problem.

Environmental services of biodiversity, clean water, etc., have been considered byproducts of farming and grazing, but population pressures and a move from rural to peri-urban areas are changing land use practices, reducing these services and increasing land degradation. A range of ecosystem markets have been reversing this damage, but these are not widely institutionalized, so land managers do not see them as “real” in the way they do for traditional food and fiber products.

Urbanization poses a major threat to biodiversity worldwide. We focused on birds as a well-studied taxon of interest, in order to review literature on traits that influence responses to urbanization. We review 226 papers that were published between 1979 and 2020, and aggregate information on five major groups of traits that have been widely studied: ecological traits, life history, physiology, behavior and genetic traits. Some robust findings on trait changes in individual species as well as bird communities emerge.

Urban growth is a largely debated issue in social science. Specific forms of metropolitan expansion—including sprawl—involve multiple and fascinating research dimensions, making mixed (quali-quantitative) analysis of this phenomenon particularly complex and challenging at the same time. Urban sprawl has attracting the attention of multidisciplinary studies defining nature, dynamics, and consequences that dispersed low-density settlements are having on biophysical and socioeconomic contexts worldwide.

Today, the design and remodeling of urban environments is being sought in order to achieve green, healthy, and sustainable cities. The effect of air pollution in cities due to vehicle combustion gases is an important part of the problem. Due to the indirect effect caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, political powers in Europe have imposed confinement measures for citizens by imposing movement restrictions in large cities. This indirect measure has given us a laboratory to show how the reduction in vehicle circulation affects in a short time the levels of air pollution in cities.

The interaction between urbanization and the eco-environment is usually viewed as an effect–feedback framework. Its coupling system is composed of urbanization and eco-environment subsystems. In this paper, the coupling degree (CD) and the coupling coordinated degree (CCD) are used to reflect the coupling interaction and coupling coordination between the urbanization subsystem and the eco-environment subsystem.

The growing awareness of the negative impact of agriculture on the natural environment creates social expectation towards the reduction of this impact through the pro-environmental activities of farmers. Agri-environmental programmes are one of the key instruments of EU agricultural policy aimed at encouraging farmers to do so. Due to their voluntary nature and involvement of farmers in these activities, there has been a scientific discussion for a long time on the factors determining the participation of farmers in these programmes.

Livestock production is under increasing scrutiny regarding its impacts on the environment and its wider role in climate change. Consequently, there are a growing number of private agri-environmental schemes (AES) now operating alongside public AES that offer farmers economic rewards to maintain and enhance the environment. This study focused exclusively on a small number of commercial dairy producers located in the North West of England who were all suppliers of a global food producer and members of the producer’s own private AES.

Within the ecosystem services framework, cultural ecosystem services (CES) have rarely been applied in state-wide surveys of protected area networks. Through a review of available data and online research, we present 22 potential proxy indicators of non-material benefits people may obtain from nature in Natura sites in Greece. Despite the limitations due to data scarcity, this first distance-based study screens a recently expanded protected area system (446 Natura sites) providing steps towards an initial CES capacity review, site prioritization and data gap screening.