With an estimated 40 percent of people in Africa, South America and Asia living in drylands, land degradation poses a significant threat to food security and survival. This report looks at the relationship between gender and dryland management based on an analysis of field experiences in Africa…
This report presents a collection of case studies which focus on processes of conflict management and resolution and the different ways and means that conflicts are addressed. The authors examine the intervention strategies, methods and tools employed by different actors, as well as the…
We examine the ongoing transition from centrally planned to market agriculture in rural China. In particular, we examine the devolution of land rights from village governments to villagers and the corresponding evolution of tenure security in agricultural land. We find econometric support for…
A multi-disciplinary research with integration of the theory and methods of climatic change and history was carried out in the southern Loess Plateau of China. High-resolution soil-sedimentary data define an abruptly increased climatic aridity at 3100 a B.P. on the southern Loess Plateau. It was…
Human-induced desertification in the Horqin sandy land in the north-eastern part of China has been reversed since the mid-1970s through re-vegetation. This land cover change affects surface energy and water transfer processes. We employed the Bowen ratio energy balance technique to examine…
Vegetation restoration is one of the most common and effective ways to combat desertification and prevent adjacent areas from sand encroachment in many of the desertified regions of the world. However, vegetation restoration in desertified regions is very difficult because of low rainfall, the…
This paper uses household data from Northeast China to examine the link between investment and land tenure insecurity induced by China's system of village-level land reallocation. We quantify expropriation risk using a hazard analysis of individual plot tenures and incorporate the…
The industrial emission of carbon (C) in China in 2000 was about 1 Pg yr 1, which may surpass that of the United States (1.84 Pg C) by 2020. China’s large land area, similar in size to that of the United States, comprises 124 Mha of cropland, 400 Mha of grazing land and 134 Mha of forestland.…