This paper explores the potential of climate finance to support developing country efforts to shift away from unsustainable land use patterns in the context of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. We pursue two research objectives here. Through a meta-analysis of 40 developing country Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), we provide, first, a comprehensive qualitative overview of developing country perspectives on climate financing needs for mitigation and adaptation activities in the land use, land-use change and forestry sectors (LULUCF).

Researchers and policy makers are increasingly looking at the drivers of forest recovery (or forest transition) for inspiration in their search for win-win solutions to deforestation. However, causal generalizations regarding forest transitions are subject to significant problems. First, forest transition theory (FTT), at least in its simplest renditions, tends to emphasize socially benign processes and fails to pay sufficient attention to the causal role—and social impacts—of negative (push) dynamics.

The primary objective of this article is to review the evolution of urban land-use survey methodologies during the last century, with a special focus on the methodologies concerning field surveys that are conducted for urban planning purposes. Our review reveals, on the one hand, that there has been a steep decrease of interest in the further development of these methodologies over the last 50 years, and, on the other, that they have been seriously trivialized, as shown by the simplistic and empirical approach to land-use survey methodology in contemporary textbooks.