National challenges of food insecurity and unemployment in South Africa prompted an increase in expectations for agricultural land acquired through land reform programmes to make meaningful contributions. Embedded in these expectations is the need for understanding the situation in reformed farms. This study reviewed policies and literature on land reform, and analyzed beneficiary participation in reformed farms and the impact of land reform on land use in land restitution and land redistribution farms in the Waterberg District Municipality.

Land Degradation Neutrality is one of the Sustainable Development Goal targets, requiring on-going degradation to be balanced by restoration and sustainable land management. However, restoration and efforts to prevent degradation have often failed to deliver expected benefits, despite enormous investments. Better acknowledging the close relationships between climate, land management and non-linear ecosystem dynamics can help restoration activities to meet their intended goals, while supporting climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Context: Hedgerows are typical landscape features of high environmental and cultural value that often have been sacrificed for agricultural intensification and scale enlargement. Objectives: We studied the dynamics of hedgerow quality over time in a case study area renowned for its hedgerow landscapes: South West Devon (UK) answering the following research questions: (1) how does the imperative of scale enlargement affect hedgerow quality? and (2) to what extent can cultural landscape degradation be countered by targeted policies?

Problems in agriculture and land use are increasingly recognised as complex, uncertain, operating at multiple levels (field to global value chains) and involving social, economic, institutional, and technological change. This has implications for how projects navigate complexity to achieve impact. However, few studies have systematically evaluated how project actors engage with other actors to configure capabilities and resources across multiple levels in agricultural innovation systems (AIS), from the individual to the network, to mobilise and build systemic innovation capacity.

Research gaps in understanding flood changes at the catchment scale caused by changes in forest management, agricultural practices, artificial drainage, and terracing are identified. Potential strategies in addressing these gaps are proposed, such as complex systems approaches to link processes across time scales, long-term experiments on physical-chemical-biological process interactions, and a focus on connectivity and patterns across spatial scales.

Sphagnum farming - the production of Sphagnum biomass on rewetted bogs - helps towards achieving global climate goals by halting greenhouse gas emissions from drained peat and by replacing peat with a renewable biomass alternative. Large-scale implementation of Sphagnum farming requires a wide range of know-how, from initial species selection up to the final production and use of Sphagnum biomass based growing media in horticulture. This article provides an overview of relevant knowledge accumulated over the last 15 years and identifies open questions.

Widespread palm oil production causes much controversy due to its negative impacts in the tropics. But whatever is said about it, it is big business and getting bigger by the day due to increasing global demands. Alongside this, the size and depth of the social and environmental debates surrounding palm oil production are also growing. As a major globally-consumed commodity, its production in the humid and sub-humid tropics raises concerns due to its impacts on the environment, biodiversity, local communities, smallholder livelihoods, land rights and climate change.

Almost one-quarter of the world’s land area has been degraded over the past 50 years because of soil erosion, salinization, peatland and wetland drainage, and forest degradation. The resulting damage, in terms of lost ecosystem goods and services, costs the world an estimated US$6.3 trillion a year. Almost a quarter of the world’s land area has been degraded over the past 50 years.
This is the result of soil erosion, salinization, peatland and wetland drainage, and forest degradation.

Why is it so important to restore degraded landscapes? It’s actually very simple.
We rely on healthy ecosystems to provide us with our food, water, clean air, climate stability, social and economic wealth; even our happiness and well-being. We only have to look at history to see the devastating consequences of not valuing or understanding ecosystems: whole civilizations have vanished after overexploiting their natural resources.

Rangelands cover a surface area of more than 2 million hectares in Cameroon. Despite their relatively unpredictable climate and unproductive nature they provide a wide variety of goods and services including forage for livestock, habitat for wildlife, water and minerals, woody products, recreational services, nature conservation as well as acting as carbon sinks. Rangelands in Cameroon are predominantly grassland savanna with three types distinguishable: the Guinean savanna, Sudan savanna (also known as ‘derived montane grasslands’), and the Sahel savanna.

How land is used affects a wide range of outcomes – from day-to-day quality of life, such as the length of commutes, to the environmental sustainability of urban and rural communities, including the possibility for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Moreover, the economic importance of land is immense. Land and the buildings on it are approximately seven times as valuable as all other assets taken together and land-use policies play a crucial role in determining land and property prices. Beyond economic value, land also has important sentimental value.

A review of needs at various scales for tools and processes that can help countries and stakeholders meet emerging challenges, address increasing degradation of and competition for resources, support the sustainable use and restoration of land and water resources, and ensure resilient ecosystems.