In addition to global developments and food policy changes, 2014 also saw important developments with potentially wide repercussions in individual countries and regions. This chapter offers perspectives on major food policy developments in various regions including Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, East Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

Food and nutrition insecurity are becoming increasingly concentrated in conflict-affected countries, affecting millions of people. Policies and interventions that build resilience to these shocks have the power to not only limit the breadth and depth of conflict and violence around the world, but also strengthen national-level governance systems and institutions.

Appetite for fish continues to expand around the globe, despite the stagnant levels of capture fish production. What is the role that aquaculture can play in supplying the world with adequate animal protein? What lessons can be drawn from dynamic Asian aquaculture producers that might guide emerging fish farmers in Africa and elsewhere?

People in developing countries—particularly the agricultural poor—face a host of risks to their lives and livelihoods, including those stemming from globalization, climate change, and weather shocks. These experiences highlight the importance of social protection, which can have a potentially significant impact on reducing poverty and vulnerability when implemented with the optimal design, targets, and resources.

This 2014–2015 Global Food Policy Report is the fourth in an annual series that provides a comprehensive overview of major food policy developments and events. In this report, distinguished researchers, policymakers, and practitioners review what happened in food policy in 2014 at the global, regional, and national levels, and—supported by the latest knowledge and research—explain why. This year’s report is the first to also look forward a year, offering analysis of the potential opportunities and challenges that we will face in achieving food and nutrition security in 2015.

While geographers and economists regularly work together on the development of land-use and land-cover change models, research on how differences in their modelling approaches affects the results is rare. Answering calls for more coordination between the two disciplines in order to build models that better represent the real world, we (two economists and a geographer) developed an economically grounded, spatially explicit, agent-based model to explore the effects of environmental policy on rural land use in New Zealand.

Madagascar is renowned for the loss of the forested habitat of lemurs and other species endemic to the island. Less well known is that in the highlands, a region often described as an environmental “basket-case” of fire-degraded, eroded grasslands, woody cover has been increasing for decades. Using information derived from publically available high- and medium-resolution satellites, this study characterizes tree cover dynamics in the highlands of Madagascar over the past two decades.

Illegal occupation of argan forest parcels by local households is a new phenomenon in South West Morocco. This is primarily due to the weakening of traditional common control systems and to the boom of the argan oil price. The scope of this work is to develop a decision support system based on dynamic spatial modelling, allowing to anticipate the land tenure dynamics and their impact on forest stand degradation under different policy scenarios. The model simulates the change of land possession by locals and the forest stand degradation levels.

Initiatives to manage landscapes for both biodiversity protection and sustainable development commonly employ participatory methods to exploit the knowledge of citizens. We review five examples of citizen groups engaging with landscape scale conservation initiatives to contribute their knowledge, collect data for monitoring programs, study systems to detect patterns, and test hypotheses on aspects of landscape dynamics. Three are from landscape interventions that deliberately target biodiversity conservation and aim to have sustainable development as a collateral outcome.

The use of ecosystem services (ES) in agricultural management is expanding; however, its integration in decision making processes is still challenging. This project was formulated to examine the ES approach and its usefulness with regard to management dilemmas. The Shikma region, north of the Negev Desert, was chosen as a case study. The management issue identified was the effect of various alternatives (minimum-tillage, no-tillage, straw-mulch and stubble-grazing) on the supply of ES.

We developed an agent-based model (ABM) to simulate farmers’ decisions on crop type and fertilizer application in response to commodity and biofuel crop prices. Farm profit maximization constrained by farmers’ profit expectations for land committed to biofuel crop production was used as the decision rule. Empirical parameters characterizing farmers’ profit expectations were derived from an agricultural landowners and operators survey and integrated in the ABM.

This paper describes the application of geomorphological approach for environmental management and conservation of landforms. Specifically, we discuss the contribution of geomorphological field survey and adapted matrix methodology (in combination with understanding of geology) to identification, study and evaluation of those abiotic nature elements which represent geological and geomorphological heritage. We describe a case study carried out in that part of the protected landscape area “Augsdaugava” which encompasses the Upper Daugava spillway valley.