The relationship between forests and people is of substantial interest to peoples and agencies that govern and use them, private sector actors that seek to manage and profit from them, NGOs who support and implement conservation and development projects, and researchers who study these relationships and others. The term ⿿forest-dependent people⿿ is widely used to describe human populations that gain some form of benefits from forests.

The survival of farms requires innovative adaptation and investment to take advantage of the characteristics of the peri-urban environment. In Ontario, Canada, the Provincial Government passed in 2005 the Greenbelt Act that delimits Ontario’s Greenbelt—an area of 1.8 million acres where land is protected from development around the metropolitan region of the Greater Golden Horseshoe. This paper presents research on farm-level analysis of farmers’ investment decision-making aiming at understanding the impact of Ontario’s Greenbelt on farm investment.

Arguing organic vs. conventional land use is broadly discussed in research papers, political discourse, and even more practical issues at farm level. In macroeconomic approach, the dilemma is that intensive agriculture that utilizes large quantities of inputs made it possible to grow enough food to meet the current global needs, but this way of land use leads to environmental damage and degradation of ecosystem services. In microeconomic approach, the dilemma is whether is more profitable for a farm to convert conventional crops to organic ones.

Does ownership status of agricultural land determine farmers’ soil use behaviour? Why (not)? We investigate this old question using multiple methods and data. We apply econometric analysis to plot-level data to determine whether planting decisions differ between rented and owned plots. In addition, we analyse interviews with Austrian farmers with the aim of explaining (a lack of) differences. We find a very small influence of tenancy on crop choice in the quantitative part of the study, and qualify these findings in the qualitative part.

This study proposes a novel method to assess the overall economic effects of agricultural droughts using a coupled agronomic-economic approach that accounts for the direct and indirect impacts of this hazard in the economy. The proposed methodology is applied to Italy, where years showing different drought severity levels were analysed. Agricultural drought stress was measured using the fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (fAPAR).

Land use and management influence the magnitude of soil loss. Among the different soil erosion risk factors, the cover-management factor (C-factor) is the one that policy makers and farmers can most readily influence in order to help reduce soil loss rates. The present study proposes a methodology for estimating the C-factor in the European Union (EU), using pan-European datasets (such as CORINE Land Cover), biophysical attributes derived from remote sensing, and statistical data on agricultural crops and practices.

The environmental consequences of the decision to urbanise and displace peri-urban (PU) food production are not typically evaluated within a comprehensive, cross-sectoral approach. Using a novel application of life cycle assessment (LCA) within exploratory scenarios, a method for integrating housing and food production land uses in PU regions is proposed, based on relative environmental impacts.

Since around 2011 pilot projects to innovate land tenure documentation are being implemented in various countries in the global south in order to address the shortcomings of formal land registration. A longer-term question, underlying the present study, is how these innovations relate in the longer run to existing institutional arrangements of land governance in the respective context of implementation. Guided by this more general question, we discuss in this paper first the characteristics for 6 of these approaches.

Between 1940 and 2000, nearly 10 million housing units were constructed throughout California. This increased interaction between human and natural communities creates a number of significant socio-ecological challenges. Here we present a novel spatially explicit model that allows better characterization of the extent and intensity of future housing settlements using three development scenarios between 2000 and 2050. We estimate that California's exurban land classes will replace nearly 12 million acres of wild and agricultural lands.

While strengthening women’s land rights is increasingly on national and international agendas, there is little consensus on how to understand women’s tenure security. Analyses of women’s land rights often use very different definitions of land rights, from formal ownership to women’s management of plots allocated to them by their husbands. This paper identifies aspects of women’s tenure that should be included in indicators. It then provides a conceptual framework to identify the various dimensions of women’s land tenure security and the myriad factors that may influence it.

The viability of the climate pledges made by Brazil at the COP21 in Paris, 2015, heavily depends on the success of the country policies related to forest governance. Particularly, there are high expectations that the enforcement of the Brazilian Forest Code (BFC) will drive large-scale forest recovery and carbon mitigation. In this study, we quantified the potential role that ongoing forest regeneration may play in offsetting deficits from private properties with less vegetation cover than determined by the BFC, considering different law implementation settings.

Pervasive food insecurity and poverty in much of the world drives vulnerable populations to harvest natural resources as a means of generating income and meeting other household needs. Wild edible plants (WEPs) are a particularly common and effective coping strategy used to increase socio-ecological resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa where agricultural systems are often sensitive to environmental perturbations and instability. WEPs are collected across the landscape, from agricultural areas to government-managed hilltops with varying degrees of success and legality.