Human land use contributes significantly to the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Changes in land management practices have been proposed as a critical and cost-effective mechanism for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting the storage of additional carbon in vegetation and soils. However many discussions of the potential for land use to mitigate climate change only take into account biophysical factors such as vegetation and land cover and neglect how the agency of land owners themselves affects whether additional carbon storage can be achieved.

Climate change in the Mediterranean is expected to lead to lower total rainfall and soil moisture, together with higher storm intensities; different vegetation types are expected to react positively or negatively to these and other changes. Climate change could therefore have positive or negative impacts on runoff and soil erosion during storms, and previous research has indicated that the impacts could be different at the field, hillslope and catchment scales.

This work addresses increasing concerns about water management for rural productive activities in the vast dry regions of Latin America by assessing renewable energy technologies (RETs) that could be suitable for localized needs. Forecasted trends in climate change and variability make this analysis very relevant, in an area where very little published work exists. While Argentina is widely known for its fertile pampas, around 75 % of the country consists of dry lands. In addition, erosion is increasing by up to 650,000 hectares each year.

Agriculture and animal husbandry are important contributors to global emissions of greenhouse (GHG) and acidifying gases. Moreover, they contribute to water pollution and to consumption of non-renewable natural resources such as land and energy. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology allows evaluation of the environmental impact of a process from the production of inputs to the final product and to assess simultaneously several environmental impact categories among which GHG emissions, acidification, eutrophication, land use and energy use.

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.

It is increasingly recognised that designing and implementing adaptive land management and development policies for the coastal zone requires an interdisciplinary and integrated approach. Yet, integrative thinking and action often remain problematic due to the competing interests and ambitions involved in coastal zone planning and management and the legacy of established development on the coast.

Urban and community forests play an important role in the overall carbon budget of the USA. Accurately quantifying carbon sequestration by these forests can provide insight for strategic planning to mitigate greenhouse gas effects on climate change. This study provides a new methodology to estimate net forest carbon sequestration (FCS) in urban and community lands of northern New England using ground based forest growth rates, housing density data, satellite derived land cover and tree canopy cover maps at the county level.

Land and resource managers often use detection–nondetection surveys to monitor the populations of species that may be affected by factors such as habitat alteration, climate change, and biological invasions. Relative to mark‐recapture studies, using detection–nondetection surveys is more cost‐effective, and recent advances in statistical analyses allow the incorporation of detection probability, covariates, and multiple seasons.

In Central Asia, water is a particularly scarce and valuable good. In many ecosystems of this region, the vegetation development during the growing season is dependent on water provided by rainfall. With climate change, alterations of the seasonal distribution of precipitation patterns and a higher frequency of extreme events are expected. Vegetation dynamics are likely to respond to these changes and thus ecosystem services will be affected.

The northeastern China is an important commodity grain region in China, as well as a notable corn belt and major soybean producing area. It thus plays a significant role in the national food security system. However, large-scale land reclamation and non-optimum farming practices give rise to soil degradation in the region. This study analyzed the food security issues coupled with global climate change in the northeastern China during 1980–2000, which is the period of modern agriculture.

The present study estimates the potential costs of land degradation (LD) in agriculture at the national scale in Italy during 2000–2006 and provides a medium-term scenario for 2015 based on changes in climate conditions and human pressure. According to the user cost approach, a depletion factor (S) to agricultural income has been derived from the observed changes in a composite index of land sensitivity to degradation. Based on S figures, the investigated area has been classified into five risk categories from ‘negligible’ to ‘high’.