The increasing expansion of cropland is major driver of global carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. However, predicting plausible future global distributions of croplands remains challenging. Here, we show that, in general, existing global data aligned with classical economic theories of expansion explain the current (1992) global extent of cropland reasonably well, but not recent expansion (1992–2015).
As a result of high-density urbanization and climate change, both the frequency and intensity of extreme urban rainfall are increasing. Drainage systems are not designed to cope with this increase, and as a result, floods are becoming more common in cities, particularly in the rapidly growing cities of China. To better cope with more frequent and severe urban flooding and to improve the water quality of stormwater runoff, the Chinese government launched the national Sponge City Construction (SCC) program in 2014.
There is wide engagement with large-scale land deals in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly from the perspectives of development and international political economy. Recently, scholars have increasingly pointed to a gendered lacuna in this literature. Engagement with gender tends to focus on potential differential impacts for men and women, and it also flags the need for more detailed empirical research of specific land deals.
Urban development and species invasion are two major global threats to biodiversity. These threats often co-occur, as developed areas are more prone to species invasion. However, few empirical studies have tested if both factors affect biodiversity in similar ways. Here we study the individual and combined effects of urban development and plant invasion on the composition of arthropod communities.
Inclusionary housing (IH) is a regulatory instrument adopted by local governments in many countries to produce affordable housing by capturing resources created through the marketplace. In order to assess whether it is efficient, scholarly attention has been widely focused on its evaluation. However, there is a lack of studies evaluating IH from a governance perspective.
The Eastern Africa Land Administration Network has since 2006 been collaborating in the development of education, short courses for land professionals and research in the eastern Africa region. This study presents the establishment and activities of a project on Strengthening the network and draws on results from the projects’ four work packages: i) the Network and Secretariat; ii) Short courses for land professionals; iii) Education and iv) Research. Processes, achievements, innovations, challenges and opportunities along each work package is reported.
Industrial land is under transition globally. Insights into this transition are important to plan a sustainable future. Since industrial land follows parcel shapes and the transition process requires multi-year data to observe the impacts of such changes, multi-year vector data should be used to analyse industrial land transition. This paper presents a framework to analyse path-dependent regional industrial land transition processes using vector data. A step by step instruction is presented.
Due to current crises, large-scale land acquisition is becoming a topic of growing concern. Public data from the ‘Land Matrix Global Observatory’ project demonstrates that since 2000, 1,622 large-scale land transactions in low- and middle-income countries were reported, covering an area of nearly 69 million hectares. The majority of these land deals, also referred to as ‘land grabs’, took place between 2008 and 2010, peaking in 2009.
The upward land grabbing trend in Eastern Europe has remained understudied, as well as its strong interlinkages with political narratives - more specifically with the ones proposed by Euroskepticism and populism. The current paper looks at how land grabbing has emerged as a topic that fits the Euroskeptic populist discourse in Romania, despite the high levels of trust in the European Union that has characterized the country ever since its EU accession in 2007.
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