Food production is the basis for ensuring human survival. Ecological compensation for arable land is important to ensure the sustainable use of arable land and food production. However, how is it possible to set the standard of ecological compensation and how to achieve it scientifically? In this paper, we take China as the study area and link the ecological compensation of arable land with the production, circulation and consumption of three staple foods. The amount of food is converted into the area of arable land needed to produce that food.

The initial focus of implementing the Fit-for-Purpose Land Administration (FFPLA) methodology was to address the significant, global security of tenure divide. We argue that this land tenure methodology is proving successful in scaling up the provision of security of tenure for developing countries.

Agricultural support programs distribute payments to farms based on a diverse set of policy objectives. Adequate targeting of this support to priority areas is key to efficient and effective policy. We evaluated the targeting strategy of a national-level program in Mexico that distributed support based on seven criteria that prioritized poor smallholder farming communities at high risk of cropland failure. We used a series of logistic models to assess the coverage and leakage rates of the program’s targeting strategy and found rates of about 80 and 20 percent, respectively.

After the political change in Nepal of 1951, leapfrog land policy improvements have been recorded, however, the land reform initiatives have been short of full success. Despite a land administration system based on cadaster and land registries in place, 25% of the arable land with an estimated 10 million spatial units on the ground are informally occupied and are off-register. Recently, a strong political will has emerged to ensure land rights for all.

A major challenge faced by human societies is to promote development that truly makes difference for people without jeopardizing their environment. This is particularly urgent in developing countries where, despite decades of development programs, local populations often live under poverty thresholds. With this study, we participate in the ongoing debate about the necessary global revision of development theory and practice in the rural Sahel. We retrace the development trajectories in the Ferlo, the northern silvopastoral zone of Senegal.

Well-managed rangelands provide important economic, environmental, and cultural benefits. Yet, many rangelands worldwide are experiencing pressures of land-use change, overgrazing, fire, and drought, causing rapid degradation. These pressures are especially acute in the Hawaiian Islands, which we explore as a microcosm with some broadly relevant lessons. Absent stewardship, land in Hawaiʻi is typically subject to degradation through the spread and impacts of noxious invasive plant species; feral pigs, goats, deer, sheep, and cattle; and heightened fire risk.

Across contemporary East Africa, fencing is spreading with incredible speed over hundreds of thousands of hectares of rangelands, fundamentally reconfiguring land tenure dynamics. But why is this happening now, what are the precursors, and what will happen in the years to come? In this article, we ask how pre- and post-colonial landscape gridding perpetuate a slow violence across the landscape through processes of de-/fencing. Fencing, we argue, is embedded in a landscape logic that favours exclusive rights and conditioned access.

Land fragmentation (LF) is widespread worldwide and affects farmers’ decision-making and, thus, farm performance. We used detailed household survey data at the crop level from ten provinces in China to construct four LF indicators and six farm performance indicators. We ran a set of regression models using OLS methods to analyse the relationship between LF and farm performance.

Urban forests provide many ecosystem services, such as reducing heat, improving air quality, treatment of stormwater, carbon sequestration, as well as biodiversity benefits. These benefits have resulted in increasing demand for urban forests and strategies to maintain and enhance this natural infrastructure. In response to a broader resilience strategy for Melbourne, Australia, we outline how a metropolitan-wide urban forest strategy (Living Melbourne) was developed, encompassing multiple jurisdictions and all land tenures.

Understanding changes in urban vegetation is essential for ensuring sustainable and healthy cities, mitigating disturbances due to climate change, sustaining urban biodiversity, and supporting human health and wellbeing. This study investigates and describes the distribution and dynamic changes in urban vegetation over a 15-year period in Greater Melbourne, Australia.

Mozambique started a massive land registration program to register five million parcels and delimitate four thousand communities. The results of the first two years of this program illustrated that the conventional methods utilized for the land tenure registration were too expensive and time-consuming and faced several data quality problems.

Ordinary Malawians who live in customary land have been suffering from land grabbing due to their weak and ill-defined land rights. Although Malawi has experienced a number of land reforms that should have contributed to strengthening customary land rights, many people in customary land still suffer from land grabbing. Accordingly, it is important to understand the factors that lead to land grabbing in customary land in Malawi.