Across the Gobi Desert in China and Mongolia, millions of newly planted trees struggle to survive amid adverse ecological conditions. They were planted by a wide variety of actors in an attempt to protect, restore, or modify the local environment, despite evidence of their negative consequences upon local ecosystems. This paper investigates how these afforestation projects both challenge and affirm recent theoretical work on conservation, while also providing key insights into the decision-making framework of land management across the world’s third largest desert region.

The scientific understanding of climate change is firmly established; it is occurring, it is primarily due to human activities, and it poses potentially serious risks to human and natural systems. Nevertheless, public understanding of this phenomenon varies widely among farmers and the public, the two-target audience of this paper. This paper introduces two research questions: (1) How climate change is perceived by public-farmers’ nexus; and (2) How perception and populism (as a thin-ideology moved by social forces) interact?

In this paper, we review the potential of biocultural heritage in biodiversity protection and agricultural innovation in sub-Saharan Africa. We begin by defining the concept of biocultural heritage into four interlinked elements that are revealed through integrated landscape analysis. This concerns the transdisciplinary methods whereby biocultural heritage must be explored, and here we emphasise that reconstructing landscape histories and documenting local heritage values needs to be an integral part of the process.

Protected Areas (PA) are the main strategy for nature conservation. However, PA are not always efficient for ecological conservation and social wellbeing. A possible alternative for conservation in human-dominated landscapes are Multifunctional Landscapes (ML), which allow the coexistence of multiple objectives, such as nature conservation and resource use. Using the activity system framework, we analyzed whether the ML concept was an operative alternative to PA within an area of interest for conservation in Veracruz, Mexico.

Urbanization is a rapid global trend, leading to consequences such as urban heat islands and local flooding. Imminent climate change is predicted to intensify these consequences, forcing cities to rethink common infrastructure practices. One popular method of adaptation is green infrastructure implementation, which has been found to reduce local temperatures and alleviate excess runoff when installed effectively. As cities continue to change and adapt, land use/landcover modeling becomes an important tool for city officials in planning future land usage.

Extensive land use changes in forest frontier landscapes are leading to trade-offs in the supply of ecosystem services (ES) with, in many cases, as yet unknown effects on human well-being. In the Tanintharyi Region of Myanmar, a forest frontier landscape facing oil palm and rubber expansion, little is known about local perspectives on ES and the direct impact of trade-offs from land use change. This study assessed the trade-offs experienced with respect to 10 locally important ES from land user perspectives using social valuation techniques.

Interest in green infrastructure (GI) has grown in research, policy and planning in recent decades. The central idea behind GI is the understanding of the physical non-built-up environment as an infrastructure capable of delivering a wide variety of benefits to society, including the ability to preserve biodiversity; to provide food, feed, fuel and fibre; to adapt to and mitigate climate change and to contribute to enhanced human health and quality of life.

This paper describes how subdivision and development of rangelands within a remote and celebrated semi-arid watershed near the US–Mexico border might affect multiple ecohydrological services provided, such as recharge of the aquifer, water and sediment yield, water quality, flow rates and downstream cultural and natural resources. Specifically, we apply an uncalibrated watershed model and land-change forecasting scenario to consider the potential effects of converting rangelands to housing developments and document potential changes in hydrological ecosystem services.

Ecosystem services (ESs) are increasingly being used by many countries around the world as a framework for addressing the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This review article of the usability of Libyan soil databases for ESs and SDGs is the first of its kind for North Africa.

Endemic species on mountains often have narrow altitudinal ranges and are more threatened at the higher altitudes, especially with climate changes. However, plants could use special microhabitats at the mountain tops as proper places for surviving the climate change (i.e., refugia). We assessed population attributes of three critically endangered endemic species (Primula boveana Decne ex Duby, Rosa arabica Crep., and Silene leucophylla Boiss.) in two growing seasons (2006/2007 and 2013/2014), differing in the received rainfalls in microhabitats at the high mountains of southern Sinai.

Savannas are extremely important socio-economic landscapes, with pastoralist societies relying on these ecosystems to sustain their livelihoods and economy. Globally, there is an increase of woody vegetation in these ecosystems, degrading the potential of these multi-functional landscapes to sustain societies and wildlife. Several mechanisms have been invoked to explain the processes responsible for woody vegetation composition; however, these are often investigated separately at scales not best suited to land-managers, thereby impeding the evaluation of their relative importance.

Global climate change policy enforcement has become the new driving force of resource grabbing in the context of the “scramble of resources” in Africa. Nevertheless, the environmental crisis should not be seen as an isolated phenomenon amid contemporary capitalism. On the contrary, a very distinct feature of the current wave of land grabs is the convergence of multiple crises, including food, energy/fuel, environmental, and financial. The Southern Mozambique District, Massingir, is an area with high potential regarding water sources and biodiversity.