This publication is a practical guide to the Youth and Land Responsiveness Criteria, which is a tool that can be used to increase the incorporation of youth perspectives into land matters at both institutional and programme levels, through a participatory process.

This publication provides an overview of the findings of a review of land tenure security in Asia and the Pacific region in collaboration with key partners. It highlights the major land challenges, barriers and opportunities as the basis for future decisions about partnerships and engagement in the land sector at sub-regional and country level. The findings are based on an extensive literature review, interviews, a questionnaire, validation at several multi-stakeholder meetings and peer review.

Lesotho regularly features in the African and international media as a country blighted by drought, hunger and food insecurity. Much of the discussion about the causes and remedies for food insecurity, including within Lesotho itself, focuses on the rural population and the precipitous decline in domestic food production in recent decades. This report argues that the rural bias of both donors and government ignores the fact that poverty and food insecurity are increasingly important urban issues as well.

This study investigates dynamics of land-use shifts, agricultural land-use, and its intensity in relation with urbanization and other factors in Jammu & Kashmir, a mountainous state of India. Results revealed an unfavourable increasing trend in the undesirable ecology class (barren) and declining trend in desirable land-use (forests, pastures and miscellaneous trees) which are likely to have serious long-term ecological implications. Inter-sectoral budgeting analysis revealed that shifts in land are occurring from desirable towards undesirable ecological sector.

Almost two decades have passed since China first enacted legislation to protect farmland from conversion to nonagricultural use. Yet hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land are still developed to urban area each year, raising the question of whether the legislation is effective in preserving farmland from development. This paper examines the effectiveness of the Basic Farmland Protection Regulation in protecting high-quality farmland from urban development in China in the first decade after it came into effect (1995‒2005).

This report summarises provisional results of Myanmar’s 2014 population and housing census. (Main census results released in May 2015.) The provisional results provide the total population by sex and administrative unit, from national, state/region, district down to township level. It also shows the population sizes of Yangon, Mandalay and Nay Pyi Taw cities, as well as the state/region capitals. Other indicators included are sex ratio and population density.

The need for countries in Sub-Saharan
Africa to build more productive, modern, and market-oriented
farming sectors is one of our most pressing development
challenges. In coming years, African agriculture will have
to increase food production and expand and intensify value
chains in order to meet changing demand on the part of a
rapidly expanding and urbanizing consumer base. The process
of doing this will enable African countries to begin pushing

We developed a cost-based methodology to assess the value of forested watersheds to improve water quality in public water supplies. The developed methodology is applicable to other source watersheds to determine ecosystem services for water quality. We assess the value of forest land for source water mitigation of total organic carbon (TOC) through the use of linked watershed and reservoir simulation models and cost-based valuation economics. Watershed modeling results indicated that expected urbanization will increase TOC loads to Converse Reservoir (Mobile, AL).

A growing trend towards increased urbanization emphasizes the role of suburban parks in wildlife conservation. Spatial planning aimed at maintaining biological diversity and functionality must consider how changes at landscape and more local scales will influence the biotic structure of urban areas. From May 2006 to July 2010, bird surveys were conducted in three metropolitan parks in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.

The green vegetation fraction (GVF) and surface albedo are important land surface parameters often used for validation of climate and land surface models that are influenced largely by environmental gradients and human activities. In this study, fine resolution GVF and albedo values derived from Landsat Thematic Mapper/Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus images from 1990 to 2000 were used to examine the relationship of both GVF and albedo values to the spatial gradients of parameters related to dramatic urbanization in the Greater Guangzhou metropolitan area, Guangdong Province, in South China.

Most species face multiple anthropogenic disruptions. Few studies have quantified the cumulative influence of multiple threats on species of conservation concern, and far fewer have quantified the potential relative value of multiple conservation interventions in light of these threats.

This study analyzes land use dynamics, land fragmentation, variation of ecosystem service value (ESV), and the underlying driving forces in the context of rapid urbanization in Taizhou city, China. An integrated approach utilizing geographic information system and remote sensing was used to analyze land use/land cover change, spatiotemporal patterns of land fragmentation and variation of ESV over the period of 1995–2010.