Mountainous rural communities have traditionally managed their land extensively, resulting in land uses that provide important ecosystem services for both rural and urban areas. Over recent decades, these communities have undergone drastic changes in economic structure, population size and land use. Our understanding of the exact mechanisms that drive these changes is limited, and there is also a lack of integrative approaches to enable decision makers to steer rural development towards a more sustainable path.

Ownership of agricultural land is very fragmented in Turkey, as is the case in countries within central Europe. This prevents agricultural efficiency from reaching desired levels. Land consolidation involves redistributing land ownership so that individual farmers own fewer, larger, more compact and more contiguous land parcels. In Turkey, generally voluntary land consolidation projects are performed, while some financial limitations and political conditions prevent land consolidation reach to its desired level.

A good deal of research has highlighted the surge and development of rural land sales and tenancy contracts in West Africa. However, the commoditization of land, especially through sales, does not appear to be obvious, as land transactions appear to be a major source of tenure insecurity and land conflicts. This issue is linked with the broader issue of identification and recognition of both the land rights that are being transferred and people holding them.

Este artículo pretende poner en discusión el tema del crecimiento económico, la demanda energética que este requiere, y los impactos territoriales que provocan las infraestructuras necesarias para suplir esta demanda. Esto desde la óptica del caso chileno, que por sus características energéticas la mayoría de estas se localizan en entornos rurales, sin embargo es en los territorios urbanos donde esta es mayormente consumida.

Regarding increasing pressures by global societal and climate change, the assessment of the impact of land use and land management practices on land degradation and the related decrease in sustainable provision of ecosystem services gains increasing interest. Existing approaches to assess agricultural practices focus on the assessment of single crops or statistical data because spatially explicit information on practically applied crop rotations is mostly not available.

Desertification is the most disturbing and detrimental cause of rural vulnerability in Cape Verde, affecting families' material and environmental resources. Combating desertification in Cape Verde is complex because it involves addressing a mixture of endogenous (manual agriculture, fuel wood and fodder extraction, land tenure and steep slopes) and exogenous drivers (high rainfall variability, climate change, prolonged drought or heavy rainfall).

In Mongolia, nomadic herders have successfully been grazing livestock for more than a millennium. However, in recent years, concerns have increased that changes in management and higher livestock stocking rates may negatively affect vegetation and increase soil erosion, overland flow and sediment load of rivers. In addition, ambitious agricultural policies increase the intensity of agricultural land use thus enforcing a conversion of grassland to agricultural land which is far more susceptible to erosion.

Land cover identification and monitoring agricultural resources using remote sensing imagery are of great significance for agricultural management and subsidies. Particularly, permanent crops are important in terms of economy (mainly rural development) and environmental protection.

Any activities aimed at rural area development should not disregard the inhabitants who are "the tools" that implement given mechanisms. To a large extent, the effectiveness of social activities is determined by the participants’ expectations towards the projects and their knowledge of the subject. Land consolidation projects are the ideal tools for rural development. Land consolidation may be described as the planned readjustment of land ownership patterns with the aim of creating larger and more rational land holdings.

The design of public policy related to irrigation sectors in North Africa was often based on the state view. Local farmers' organizations, made up of family farms, did not contribute to building the legal framework, which was in turn unable to propose specific solutions for family farming. Legal reforms currently underway in Morocco and Algeria show how difficult it is to integrate field realities. Access to land and water resources is often obtained through informal local coordination modes.

During the last decade 80% of municipalities in Pest county recorded population growth – of whicha significant part is as a result of people moving out from Budapest (KSH, 2009). Accordingly, areas in thevicinity of Budapest face high levels of urban sprawl. This has significantly contributed to the transition of farmsystems in this periurban area, which in the Hungarian post communism context was and still is a challengingissue and has led to several socio-economic and environmental problems.