To combat land degradation and deterioration issues, the Grain to Green project (GGP) was implemented on the Chinese Loess Plateau in 1999 and substantially altered the land cover by converting slope farmland into forest and grassland. To effectively achieve sustainable land restoration management and avoid stakeholder conflicts, this study aimed to understand how local stakeholders perceived the current land restoration process and expectations for future land restoration policy, as well as how stakeholders assessed the GGP impacts on local ecosystem service changes.

This article employs moral geographies in analysing the land restitution process and outcome. Moral geographies investigate how abstract values, deliberations and judgements are translated into everyday life and, consequently, to landscape. The dynamics of moral geographies are analysed by transdisciplinary research methods using mainly qualitative data, such as documents, media and literature, but also spatial and statistical data. Land restitution in Estonia had its start in 1991, instigated by the heat of national reawakening, aiming to reverse the past 50 years of Soviet ‘wrongdoings’.

Rural settlements in Northeast China have undergone significant changes in the process of rapid urbanization, which has profoundly affected food production and the process of sustainable rural development. Based on multi-period remote sensing interpretation data of land use and economic statistics, this study quantitatively analyzes the temporal and spatial pattern change characteristics and influential factors of rural settlements in Northeast China from 2000 to 2020.