Momentum is building to include agriculture in carbon nancing initiatives, and the stakes are large – for climate change mitigation, for food security and poverty alleviation. For many smallholder farmers, insecure land and resource rights are a barrier to participation in mitigation programmes, but there are ways forward

This guide addresses the recording of tenure rights with the particular focus on creating a new system to record rights and recording rights in a system for the first time. It addresses the cases where the most appropriate approach is to create a new system to record those rights, and it provides practical advice on how rights can be recorded for the first time. This guide is accompanied by another guide that focuses on a different aspect of recording tenure rights: improving existing ways to record rights (Improving ways to record tenure rights).

This study emerged out of an identified need to document social processes leading to land insecurity, and those leading to investment and sustainable use of lands by rural populations. Focusing on the Delta and Dry Zone, the main paddy producing regions of Myanmar, this analysis unravels the powers at play in shaping rural households’ relationship to land.

This study examines the socioeconomic features that underpin the expansion of groundwater-dependent irrigation in Northern State, Sudan. Groundwater development in the region serves as an economic lifeline given the poor Nile-based irrigation infrastructure and future changes in Nile hydrology. Groundwater-dependent irrigation is found to be expanding in previously uncultivated regions increasingly distant from the Nile.

Groundwater irrigation for smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa is growing in extent and importance. This growth is primarily driven spontaneously by the farmers themselves, spurred by improved access to low-cost technologies for pumps and drilling services as well as market opportunities for produce. This paper presents a review of the current status and knowledge of the prospects and constraints for sustainable and pro-poor groundwater irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This article highlights the continued significance of pre-capitalist formations in shaping the trajectory of economic transition in peripheral regions, even in an era of neo-liberal globalisation. There is a tendency for Marxist scholars to assume the inevitable “dominance” of capitalism over older modes of production. Using a case study from Nepal's far eastern Tarai, this paper seeks to understand the reproduction of feudal social relations in a region which is both accessible and integrated into regional and global markets.

This paper takes the move from the uncertainty surrounding ecosystem thresholds and addresses the issue of ecosystem-state assessment by means of ecological integrity indicators and ‘ecological risk‘. The concept of ‘ecological risk‘ gives a measure of the likelihood of ecosystem failure to provide the level of natural ecological goods and services expected/desired by human societies. As a consequence of human pressures (use of resources and discharge into the environment), ecosystem thresholds can be breached thus resulting in major threats to human health, safety and well-being.

Climate warming during the past century has imposed recession of glaciers and perennial snow/ice patches along the entire Swedish Scandes. On the newly exposed forefields, subfossil wood remnants are being outwashed from beneath ice and snow bodies. In Scandinavia, this kind of detrital wood is a previously unused source of postglacial vegetation and climate history. The present study reports radiocarbon dates of a set of 78 wood samples, retrieved from three main sites, high above modern treelines and stretching along the Swedish Scandes.

Sacred sites are of conservation value because of their spiritual meaning, as cultural heritage and as remnants of
near-natural biotopes in landscapes strongly transformed by man. The vegetation of sacred sites in Morocco was
studied recently. Information about their number, spatial pattern or relief position is fragmentary. However, these
parameters are important to evaluate their role as refuge for organisms and their representativeness of potential
natural vegetation.

Operationalization of the ecosystem services (ES) concept for improved natural resource management and decision support
cannot, thus far, be rated as satisfactory. Participation of stakeholders is still a major methodical and conceptual challenge for implementing ES. Therefore, we conducted an online survey and a literature analysis to identify benefits and challenges of the
application of ES in participatory processes. The results show that the purpose of stakeholder engagement is very diverse as a