Degraded territory is land which has been damaged by either industrial and other activities or no activities at all to the stage where any economic activity is impossible unless special renewable measures are implemented. One of the aims of sustainable environment resolutions adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 25 September, 2015 was ‘to restore degraded land and to aim to achieve having a world neutral to land degradation’. This is the first worldwide document where universal and comprehensive actions regarding land degradation are provided.

It is widely known that ecological and socioeconomic functions of the land are the basis for social and economic well-being. Despite this fact, land is still a relatively neglected natural resource, which can be concluded by analyzing the pressures on the land and the lack of systematic monitoring, which involves considering the situation and defining the program for its protection.

One of the goals of a sustainable environment adopted in the United Nations General Assembly resolution (September 25, 2015) was «to restore degraded lands and strive to achieve a world neutral to land degradation». The problem was identified at the international and European level, but it is also a very pressing problem in Latvia. With regard to the risks of land degradation and their prevention in Latvia, the Law «On Land Management» came into force on January 1, 2015.

Conservation projects have often been criticised for creating global benefits while causing negative impacts on local livelihoods. Ecosystem services approaches have been seen as one way to change this by focussing explicitly on maintaining ecosystems for human well-being of stakeholders at various scales. However, ecosystem services approaches have often ignored trade-offs between groups of people and issues of power and do not automatically lead to better outcomes in terms of human well-being.

This paper presents a conceptual model of land as a coupled human–environment system. Land use and land cover are incorporated as elements of the human and environment system respectively. Drivers and associated processes that influence land use, land cover, and land system dynamics are incorporated within a set of sub-systems. The model includes consideration of driving sub-systems as a set of capital funds and flows, and how these are influenced by linkages between processes in the human (socio-economic) and environment systems and sub-systems.

Complex couplings and feedback among climate, fire, and herbivory drive short- and long-term patterns of land cover change (LCC) in savanna ecosystems. However, understanding of spatial and temporal LCC patterns in these environments is limited, particularly for semi-arid regions transitional between arid and more mesic climates.

This study focuses on watershed management in Northern Thailand, where conflict over forest, land and water-use is a prevailing problem. A characteristic of watershed conflicts is that they are often multifaceted and involve multiple stakeholders with different interests and values, consequently requiring conflict management approaches that are sustainable in their outcomes, including addressing the underlying causes of the conflicts.

This paper explores assumptions about the drivers of forest cover change in a Payments for Environmental Services (PES) and Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) context in the Lam Dong Province in Vietnam. In policy discourses, deforestation is often linked to'poor' and 'ethnic minority' households and their unsustainable practices such as the expansion of coffee production (and other agricultural activities) into forest areas.