HIGHLIGHTS

A local famer-herder conflict over grazing rights in the Mauritanian-Senegal border region has triggered a spiral of violence between Senegalese and Mauritanians in the southern Senegal River bank and different Mauritanian cities. This escalation has to be understood against the background of persistent racism and discrimination of the ‘black’ population of Mauritania.

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.

Countries in Southeast Asia have been developing quickly from a predominantly rural to predominantly urban society, leading to a rapid increase in urban land. This increase in urban land has mainly occurred in river deltas and floodplains, exposing humans and human assets to flood hazard. Here we present an assessment of current and future flood risk in five countries of mainland Southeast Asia, using a new modeling approach that accounts for differences in urban land systems.

Ecosystem Services (ESs) are bundles of natural processes and functions that are essential for human well-being, subsistence, and livelihoods. The ‘Green Revolution’ (GR) has substantial impact on the agricultural landscape and ESs in India. However, the effects of GR on ESs have not been adequately documented and analyzed. This leads to the main hypothesis of this work – ‘the incremental trend of ESs in India is mainly prompted by GR led agricultural innovations that took place during 1960 - 1970’. The analysis was carried out through five successive steps.

As the impact of climate change on the agricultural sector has begun to manifest itself in its severity, adaptation planning has come under scrutiny for favoring the preservation of status-quo conditions over more substantial changes. The uptake of transformational adaptations, involving a significant re-structuring of the agricultural system, is however hindered by a lack of assessment tools capable of quantifying the effects of these often more complex, far-reaching, and unprecedented changes.

The importance of land manifests in various components of the everyday lives of people insocieties: cultural heritage, livelihood, the environment, economy, and community, among manyothers. Land is a factor of development. It is the most influential determinant of developmentbecause women, youths, and men (and households) depend on it for their livelihoods and formaintaining their living conditions in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas.

Today, the Coalition for Urban Transitions releases a new report ‘Seizing the Urban Opportunity’, which provides insights from six emerging economies on how national governments can recover from COVID-19, tackle the climate crisis and secure shared prosperity through cities. Launching as a call to action for national governments ahead of COP26 in Glasgow, it builds on the Coalition’s flagship 2019 report: Climate Emergency, Urban Opportunity.

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) work with nature to benefit both natural ecosystems and the people that depend on them. By putting nature at the centre, NbS address a range of societal challenges: protecting, sustainably managing or restoring natural or modified ecosystems and supporting their health, function and biodiversity.

The research collated in this brief confirms that NbS deliver simultaneously multiple benefits and shows the wide-ranging beneficial impacts of scaling up their implementation across Europe.

The rise of urban populations has rendered cities in both developed and developing countries vulnerable to poor health and diseases that are associated with urban living conditions and environments. Therefore, there is a growing consensus that while personal factors are critical in determining health, the urban environment exacerbates or mitigates health outcomes, and as such the solution for improving health outcomes in urban settings can be found in addressing socio-environmental factors that shape urban environments.

Rapid economic development has a significant negative impact on the rural ecological environment. Evaluating the ecological environmental effect of land use and its change trend at the village scale has important practical significance for maintaining ecological functions and ensuring ecological safety. Taking a typical village in Yudian Town as an example, we applied a land-use ecological environment effect evaluation and the CA-Markov change trend prediction model and constructed an index of ecological environmental effect status.

The presence of land use conflicts is often unavoidable as land is finite and a scarce resource. With development as a prime goal, the increasing demands for specific uses make the situation more serious than it was before. In the context of land uses, suitability determines the inherent capacity of the land to perform a defined use with optimum efficiency and sustainability. However, single land use suitability analysis could not answer the overall objective of land allocation.