Environmental resource management requires negotiation among state and non-state actors with conflicting goals and different levels of influence. In northwestern Argentina, forest policy implementation is described as weak, due to governance structure and ambiguities in the law. We studied how policy actors’ attitudes and their positions in the forest governance network relate to the implementation of land tenure regularization in a context where land tenure regularization is at the core of struggles over environmental policies.

Southern Africa is an exceptionally diverse region with an ancient geologic and climatic history. Its mountains are located in the Southern Hemisphere mid-latitudes at a tropical–temperate interface, offering a rare opportunity to contextualise and frame our research from an austral perspective to balance the global narrative around sustainable mountain futures for people and biodiversity. Limited Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) was initiated more than a century ago in South Africa to optimise catchment management through sound water policy.

Protecting and improving cultivated land quality is a key way to the realization of agricultural modernization. The Chinese government advocates agricultural producers to implement cultivated land protection and quality improvement behavior (CLPQIB). However, the cultivated land management rights of family farms are not so stable.

An unprecedented magnitude of land-use/land-cover changes have led to a rapid conversion of tropical forested landscapes to different land-uses. This comparative study evaluates and reconstructs the recent history (1976–2019) of land-use change and the associated land-use types that have emerged over time in two neighboring rural villages in Southern Mexico. Qualitative ethnographic and oral histories research and quantitative land-use change analysis using remote sensing were used.

In Ethiopia, like in other developing countries, land disputes are critical problems both in peri-urban and rural areas. Handling such disputes requires scientific and evidence-based interventions. This study analyzes the nature, types, and causes of land tenure disputes and the resolution mechanisms thereof in peri-urban and nearby rural kebeles of Debre Markos town. Interviews for the investigation were conducted with sample landholders and concerned legal experts in Debre Markos town’s peri-urban area and Gozamin Wereda of Amhara National Regional State in Ethiopia.

Secondary cloud forests (SCFs), those that regenerate naturally following abandonment of human activities in previously deforested land, are of great value as refuges of high species diversity and for their critical role in hydrological regulation. This opinion paper analyzes the main environmental, socio-economic, and regulatory aspects that currently hamper the sustainable use and conservation of SCFs in Mexico for the provision of timber and ecosystem services.

Brazil’s zero-deforestation Cattle Agreements (CAs) have influenced the supply chain but their impact on deforestation has been limited in part because slaughterhouses monitor deforestation only on the properties they buy from directly. Consequently, deforestation continues to enter the supply chain indirectly from properties that are not monitored. Knowledge gaps and data limitations have made it challenging to close this loophole and achieve meaningful reductions in deforestation.

Abandonment of agricultural land is a process described from different regions of many industrialized countries. Given the current focus on land use, land use change and food security, it appears highly relevant to develop improved tools to identify and monitor the dynamics of agricultural land abandonment. In particular, the temporal aspect of abandonment needs to be assessed and discussed. In this study, we used the detailed information available through the Norwegian subsidy claim database and analyzed the history of use of unique land parcels through a fourteen-year period.

Since the early 1990s, China has experienced rapid industrialization and urbanization. As cities have expanded rapidly, the spatial patterns of rural settlements also changed significantly. This study uses land use data from satellite imagery interpretation, socioeconomic statistics, and field survey data, together with techniques including landscape pattern analysis, kernel density estimation, and spatial measurement models, to analyze the evolving spatial patterns of rural settlements influencing factors in China from 1995 to 2015.

Coastal areas have been growing massively worldwide. The fast growth also affects the land value in either a positive or a negative way. Many scholars have studied land value and the factors that affect it in areas prone to sudden-onset disasters. In contrast, studies on urbanized coastal areas that suffer from slow-onset disasters are still lacking. Using a case study from Semarang City in Indonesia, this research aims at ameliorating this limitation.

This article addresses the global issue of preserving cultural heritage, which is associated, among other things, with the lack of provision for boundaries of protection zones for cultural heritage sites. This paper analyzes the worldwide experience in the field of establishing protection zones for cultural heritage sites, identifies the issues of preserving cultural heritage in Russia, as well as imperfections in the management of lands containing cultural heritage sites.

Due to natural phenomena as well as human activities, changes are occurring in land use. Techniques and environment GIS have made it possible to process large amounts of data from various sources. In Slovakia, mapping of topography and elevation is being carried out as part of the elaboration of land readjustment projects. This is also a starting point for updating estimated pedologic-ecological units (EPEUs).