Poverty and deforestation are critical issues in a number of developing countries where the policy framework is in many cases insufficient to provide rural people an incentive to afforest. This paper analyzes both the impact of land privatization on afforestation efforts of rural farm households in the Northern Uplands of Vietnam and the economic incentive of farm households on afforestation efforts. The determinants of afforestation by farm households were analyzed.

This paper presents an assessment of renewable energy resource potential and the current status of exploitation in Kenya. As an importer of petroleum fuels, Kenya spends a substantial amount of foreign reserves to import oil. The oil import bill in 2008 consumed 55% of the country's foreign exchange earnings from exports. On the other hand, there is a high dependence on wood biomass energy, leading to an imbalance in its supply and demand. This has exerted considerable pressure on the remaining forest and vegetation stocks, thereby accelerating the processes of land degradation.

There exists gender bias in resource ownership in many parts of Kenya with women being more disadvantaged. Resource ownership and control within the household has differential impacts on the health and overall well-being of male and female members. This paper examines intra-household resource ownership and how it affects nutrition and health status of household members. Data from a household survey containing detailed gender-disaggregated information on resource ownership as well as food and anthropometry were collected from a rural Kenyan district and used in the analysis.

Rural places acquire value in different ways and geographers have adopted a range of approaches to understand the way value is created in land and place. This paper analyses the case of the Gimblett Gravels wine district in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand. This district has been transformed over the space of 20 years from a peri-urban wasteland to, now, one of the most sought-after and expensive winegrowing areas in the country. In this process of revaluation, several forces were evident.

Fire was arguably the most important forest and rangeland disturbance process in the Inland Northwest United States for millennia. Prior to the Lewis and Clark expedition, fire regimes ranged from high severity with return intervals of one to five centuries, to low severity with fire-free periods lasting three decades or less. Indoamerican burning contributed to the fire ecology of grasslands and lower and mid-montane dry forests, especially where ponderosa pine was the dominant overstory species, but the extent of this contribution is difficult to quantify.

Recent research underscores the continued importance of gender in rural Africa. Analysis of interactions within households is becoming more sophisticated and continues to reject the unitary model. There is some evidence of discriminatory treatment of girls relative to boys, although the magnitudes of differential investments in health and schooling are not large and choices seem quite responsive to changes in opportunity costs. Social norms proscribing and prescribing male and female economic behavior remain substantial, extending into many domains, especially land tenure.

Land use/cover change (LUCC) is often the cumulative result of individual farmer's decisions. To understand and simulate LUCC as the result of local decisions, multi-agent systems models (MAS) have become a popular technique. However, the definition of agents is not often based on real data, ignoring the inherent diversity of farmers and farm characteristics in rural landscapes. The aim of this paper is to describe an empirical method that defines an agent typology and allocates agents into the different agent types for an entire region.

To assess sustainability of rural management in the Changjiang River basin, human behavioral (food consumption, lifestyle pattern, and human waste disposal) impact on nitrogen flow was quantitatively evaluated. A survey of day-to-day activities was conducted in two representative counties: Taoyuan and Taihe. Daily nitrogen intake from food per capita and potential nitrogen load from human waste on the environment were calculated. The former in Taoyuan and Taihe was 17.0 and 16.0gN, respectively.

Rapid and far-reaching development transition has triggered corresponding restructuring in rural China especially since the turn of the new millennium. Recently, there has been an increasing trend emphasizing regional resources in formulating rural development policy and restructuring rural areas. This paper analyzes the rural restructuring in China affected by the allocation and management of critical resources including human resource, land resource and capital, by establishing a theoretical framework of “elements-structure-function” of rural territorial system.

Rural landscape of the southern part of Lithuania as well as its use is analysed in the article. The defects of land reclamation system cause the rise of deserted lands. Dampness and bagged up soils are a large obstacle for the proper use of deserted lands. One more reason is lands of low productivity. The third reason of the rise of deserted lands is the shortage and default of perspective farmers and agricultural companies who are able to lease and cultivate land.

The Cerrado is the second largest Brazilian biome and contains the headwaters of three major hydrological basins in Brazil. In spite of the biological and ecological relevance of this biome, there is little information about how land use changes affect the chemistry of low-order streams in the Cerrado. To evaluate these effects streams that drain areas under natural, rural, and urban land cover were sampled near Brasília, Brazil. Water samples were collected between September 2004 and December 2006. Chemical concentrations generally followed the pattern of Urban > Rural > Natural.