Agriculture terraces constitute a significant element of the Mediterranean landscape, enabling crop production on steep slopes while protecting land from desertification. Despite their ecological and historical value, terrace cultivation is threatened by climate change leading to abandonment and further marginalization of arable land imposing serious environmental and community hazards.

Indonesia has experienced one of the world’s greatest dynamic land changes due to forestry and agricultural practices. Understanding the drivers behind these land changes remains challenging, partly because landscape research is spread across many domains and disciplines. We provide a systematic review of 91 studies that identify the causes and land change actors across Sumatra and Kalimantan. Our review shows that oil palm expansion is the most prominent (65 studies) among multiple direct causes of land change.

Agricultural machinery services play an increasingly important role in the land transfer market, especially in developing countries. Prior studies have explored the impact factors of machinery use on agricultural production and land transfer, respectively. However, little research has focused on the relationship between the adoption of agricultural machinery services and the land transfer of rice farmers.

With the continuous and rapid rise of urbanization in China, land use transition research has been carried out extensively. Multiple cropping is the content of land use recessive morphology research, and it is also a common agricultural system in China. Accordingly, further research on multiple cropping index (MCI) can enrich the land use transition research and help to evaluate China’s food security.

The Fit-For-Purpose Land Administration (FFPLA) approach uses flexible techniques under basic regulations, avoiding complicated systems and aiming to fulfill the objective of land tenure security for all. In addition, a land administration system should evolve, starting as a simple system in rural areas and gradually evolving into a more complex system in more populated areas where requirements and quality increase progressively. The system can develop to a precision system.

The administration of land tenure, value, and use is undergoing a new wave of technological innovation [...]

A contemporary review of land administration, from the perspective of systems maintenance, is provided. A special emphasis is placed on emerging fit-for-purpose land administration solutions. The research synthesis uses reputable sources from the contemporary era. Results show the challenges of maintaining land administration systems and the data held are long recognized. The 1970s–1980s gave the issue impetus as data and processes moved from paper-based and manual to digital and automated.

The adverse effects of rapid urbanization are of global concern. Careful planning for and accommodation of accelerating urbanization and citizenization (i.e., migrants gaining official urban residency) may be the best approach to limit some of the worst impacts. However, we find that another trajectory may be possible: one linked to the rural development plan adopted in the latest Chinese national development strategy. This plan aims to build rural areas as attractive areas for settlement by 2050 rather than to further urbanize with more people in cities.

The world can learn two key lessons from spontaneous settlements: (i) design so as to adapt to human biology; and (ii) design to save energy. Timeless processes of urban growth and sustainability have forced societies to conserve energy. Yet, nowadays, a profession focused on design ideology and short-term profit discredits many economical and effective long-term design methods. Decision-makers, politicians, and urbanists talk of energy conservation while continuing to use failed notions of industrial urbanity in place of documented solutions that work.

The major global pressures of rapid urbanization and urban growth are being compounded by climate impacts, resulting in increased vulnerability for urban dwellers, with these vulnerabilities exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of this is concentrated in urban and peri-urban areas where urban development spreads into hazard-prone areas. Often, this development is dominated by poor-quality homes in informal settlements or slums with poor tenure security.

Forests and woodlands remain under threat in tropical Africa due to excessive exploitation and inadequate management interventions, and the isolated success stories of tree retention and tree cover transition on African agricultural land are less well documented. In this study, we characterize the status of tree cover in a landscape that contains forest patches, fallows, and farms in the southern part of Uluguru Mountains.

This research explored the impact of culture on farmer willingness to transfer rural land. Data from 30 interviews and 537 valid survey questionnaires were collected in three villages in Zhangzhou, Fujian, China that are representative of typical Southern Fujian culture. First, a qualitative analysis was conducted based on interview data using NVivo11. Thereafter, a quantitative analysis using structural equation modeling was completed.