The research employs case studies to grasp the processes and forms of ongoing land consolidation, factors affecting land consolidation, viewpoints on land consolidation and impacts of land consolidation on stakeholders and the society. Nine models of land consolidation are selected in the research in various provinces.
The adoption of crop-livestock integration (CLI) among smallholder farmers in the developing countries is no doubt one of the solutions to food security, risk management, and poverty alleviation in sub-Saharan Africa. However, adequate assessment on the current status of CLI becomes necessary for the development and its evolution among smallholder farmers. This article presents a basic and multi-objective linear programming (LP) model to determine enterprise combinations of crop and livestock activities that maximize total gross margin (TGM) among small farms in the Eastern Cape Province.
Changes in flora biodiversity are a dilemma facing managers in order to cope with challenges of extinction or endangering plant species as well as replacement by invasive species. Such problems can occur in the region as disruption of ecosystem balance. The first step of proper management of a watershed is obtaining accurate information about plant communities and their dominance and biodiversity status. Such information will help decision makers to adopt an appropriate management approach.
Although protected areas in Africa contain possibly the highest repositories of carbon and thus can play a role in mitigating the effects of climate change through carbon sequestration, they are threatened due to increasing levels of deforestation and forest degradation (DFD). However, little information is available on the on-site causes of DFD in these areas. This paper estimates the levels of DFD and identifies the drivers in the Ankasa Conservation Area (ACA) in Ghana as a case study. A survey was used to identify both direct and underlying factors that promote the DFD.
By the year 2050, agriculture will have to provide the food and nutrition requirements of some 9 billion people. Moreover, to maintain that level of productivity indefinitely it must do so using environmentally sustainable production systems. This task will be profoundly complicated by the effects of climate change, increasing competition for water resources and loss of productive lands.
Guaranteeing households’ equal access to land has long been advocated as paramount to implement development policies in Rural China. Given the chronic land scarcity in densely populated regions of China, finding a compromise between private and collective land rights has been important to protect livelihood safety nets and to address poverty issues in rural areas, especially in the initial stages of reform.
Climate change impacts on agriculture could arguably be most critical for developing countries in tropical regions: their populations rely importantly on agriculture and climate-dependant resources, poverty limits their capacity to anticipate and adapt to climate change, and population increase already poses a serious challenge to food security in those regions. Current projections of climate change impacts on tropical crop yields, even though on average negative, remain largely uncertain: there is need for more consistent, large-scale, quantitative assessments.
Over the last three decades, many soil and water conservation projects have been implemented in various parts of eastern and southern Africa to control land degradation, and improve land productivity, especially under ‘catchment approach’ initiatives of the 1980s. In Ethiopia, many of these soil conservation projects were implemented following the severe drought of 1974.
There has been renewed interest in the academic discourse on land reforms due to recent high profile works suggesting a positive correlation between reforms and poverty reduction. Land is held under different tenure regimes in different regions, countries and communities. These are often in the form of community tenure, state tenure, individual tenure or a mixture of two or three of them. However, land reformers are in constant debate as to which of the three offers the most appropriate pathway to poverty reduction.
This themed issue of Land Use Policy builds on the papers presented at an international symposium entitled Social Dimensions of Market-based Instruments, convened by the Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, in November 2010. The symposium set out to review the extent to which market-based instruments were being employed as social policy tools in various contexts, what challenges achieving relevant social policy objectives posed, what trade-offs arose between environmental, social and economic objectives, and whether and how tensions could be resolved.
Land degradation and poverty are problems that must be tackled together for environmental conservation to succeed. However, it is rarely possible to move a population from degraded land to another area where the people can be more easily sustained. To find a new strategy that achieves both conservation and economic gains without the need to relocate a population, we examined/investigated a sustainable combination of ecological and economic development suitable for the restoration of areas of China with collapsing gullies, where the frequent steep slopes make restoration difficult.
