Five Southeast Asian countries (Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Philippines and Malaysia) have experienced forest transitions, that is, a shift from net deforestation to net increases in forest area, since the 1990s. Climate change mitigation policies such as REDD+ actively promote reforestation, especially in the Global South, where they have been accompanied by exclusionary effects, known as green grabbing.

The Annual Country Reviews reflect upon current land relations in the Mekong Region, and has been produced for researchers, practitioners and policy advocates operating in the field. Specialists have been selected from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam to briefly answer the following two questions:

Land degradation, especially soil erosion, is a societal issue that affects vineyards worldwide, but there are no current investigations that inform specifically about soil erosion rates in Chinese vineyards. In this review, we analyze this problem and the need to avoid irreversible damage to soil and their use from a regional point of view. Information about soil erosion in vineyards has often failed to reach farmers, and we can affirm that to this time, soil erosion in Chinese vineyards has been more of a scientific hypothesis than an agronomic or environmental concern.

Indicator 15.1.1: Forest area as a proportion of total land area
 

Indicator 15.2.1: Progress towards sustainable forest management
 

Urgent climate challenges have triggered calls for radical, widespread changes in what we eat, pushing for the drastic reduction if not elimination of animal-source foods from our diets. But high-profile debates, based on patchy evidence, are failing to differentiate between varied landscapes, environments and production methods. Relatively lowimpact, extensive livestock production, such as pastoralism, is being lumped in with industrial systems in the conversation about the future of food.

The authors would like to change the authors’ affiliation in the recent published paper [...]

The conversion of natural forests to different land uses still occurs in various parts of Southeast Asia with poor records of impact on ecosystem services and biodiversity. We quantified such impacts on earthworm diversity in two communes of Quang Nam province, Vietnam. Both communes are situated within buffer zones of a nature reserve where remaining natural forests are under threat of continued conversion.

Within the ecosystem services framework, cultural ecosystem services (CES) have rarely been applied in state-wide surveys of protected area networks. Through a review of available data and online research, we present 22 potential proxy indicators of non-material benefits people may obtain from nature in Natura sites in Greece. Despite the limitations due to data scarcity, this first distance-based study screens a recently expanded protected area system (446 Natura sites) providing steps towards an initial CES capacity review, site prioritization and data gap screening.

Land-use and cover change (LUCC) impacts global environmental changes. Therefore, it is crucial to obtain cross-national level LUCC data that represents past and actual LUCC. As urban areas exhibit the most significant dynamics of the changes, accompanied by such processes as urban sprawl, it seems desirable to take into account LUCC information from such areas to acquire national level information. The paper analyses land-use changes (LUCs) in urban areas in Czechia, Poland, and Slovakia.