Uganda designated 16% of its land as Protected Area (PA). The original goal was natural resources, habitat and biodiversity conservation. However, PAs also offer great potential for carbon conservation in the context of climate change mitigation.
West African savannas are experiencing rapid land cover change that threatens biodiversity and affects ecosystem productivity through the loss of habitat and biomass, and carbon emissions into the atmosphere exacerbating climate change effects. Therefore, reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in these areas is critical in the efforts to combat climate change. For such restorative actions to be successful, they must be grounded on a clear knowledge of the extent to which climate change affects carbon storage in soil and biomass according to different land uses.
Urban agriculture is said to be increasing with global urbanization. However, there is little examination of the temporal or spatial dynamics of urban agriculture. We investigated the benefits and challenges experienced by community gardeners in four towns in South Africa, along with GIS analysis of the number, area, and location of urban food community gardens over the last three decades. Common reasons for practicing community gardening were cash poverty (37%) and the need to grow food (34%).
Innovative, pragmatic approaches are needed to support sustainable livelihoods and landscape management in complex social-ecological systems (CSES) such as river catchments. In the Tsitsa River Catchment, South Africa, researchers and natural resource managers have come together to apply such innovative approaches. Since CSES are characterised by uncertainty and surprise, understanding and managing them requires a commitment to reflexive praxis and transdisciplinarity.
This paper is a summary of the findings of research work conducted in two case studies in the Rift Valley, Kenya. This study used the Neo-Institutional theory to interrogate how the rules and regulations (institutions involved) of the agrarian reform process in Kenya are constantly changing and helping to shape the livelihoods of social actors around Mau Forest. The first case study—Ndungulu, is a settlement scheme where the Ogiek ethnic community were resettled between 1995 and 1997 after the land clashes of 1992.
Sustainable land use systems planning and management requires a wider understanding of the spatial extent and detailed human-ecosystem interactions astride any landscape. This study assessed the extent of historical, current, and future land use systems in Uganda. The specific objectives were to (i) characterize and assess the extent of historical and current land use systems, and (ii) project future land use systems.
Governments, multilateral organisations, and international conservation NGOs increasingly frame nature conservation in terms that emphasise the importance of technically managing and economically valuing nature, and introducing markets for ecosystem services. New mechanisms, such as REDD+, have been incorporated in national-level policy reforms, and have been piloted and implemented in rural project settings across the Global South.
With the rapid rate of population growth and economic development, cities face enormous challenges that require both optimal and integrated solutions to meet the needs of growth and to protect the environment and sustainable development. These urban dynamics, which change over time, extend not only horizontally and upward, but also downward. Thus, underground space has been utilized increasingly to relieve the urban surface and to ensure the exploitation of underground resources.
Historically, the Nile Delta has played an integral part in Egyptian civilization, as its fertile soils have been cultivated for centuries. The region offers a lush oasis among the expansive arid climate of Northern Africa; however, in recent decades, many anthropogenic changes to the environment have jeopardized Egypt’s agricultural productivity. Political instability and lack of sufficient regulations regarding urban growth and encroachment have put agricultural land in the area at risk.
Recent developments in satellite data availability allow tropical forest monitoring to expand in two ways: (1) dense time series foster the development of new methods for mapping and monitoring dry tropical forests and (2) the combination of optical data and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data reduces the problems resulting from frequent cloud cover and yields additional information.
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