It is common to see urban land expansion worldwide, and its characteristics, mechanisms, and effects are widely known. As socio-economic transition and the change of land use policies may reverse the trend of urban expansion, in-depth research on the process of urban land use change is required. Through a process perspective, this paper reveals the change paths, development stages, and spatial patterns of urban residential land use with data from 323 cities in China from 2009 to 2016.

Ensuring compliance with China’s “1.8 billion mu” (120 million hectares) cultivated land preservation policy is a fundamental goal of land policy. Northeast China has experienced significant cultivated land expansion due to rigorous compensation policies over the past two decades, resulting in sustainable increases in grain output. This research employs remote sensing data to examine the spatial–temporal pattern and vulnerability of newly increased cultivated land expansion in Northeast China and its potential impact on food security.

Land expropriation has always been a hot spot of social conflicts. The land expropriation policy of Merging Villages and Living Together (MVLT) in rural areas has intensified conflicts due to insufficient financial compensation and “demolishing old houses before building new ones”.

It is common to see urban land expansion worldwide, and its characteristics, mechanisms, and effects are widely known. As socio-economic transition and the change of land use policies may reverse the trend of urban expansion, in-depth research on the process of urban land use change is required. Through a process perspective, this paper reveals the change paths, development stages, and spatial patterns of urban residential land use with data from 323 cities in China from 2009 to 2016.

North Korea experienced a catastrophic famine in the mid-1990s that resulted in millions of deaths. This study aims to build an agent-based model to understand the risk of land degradation and famine in North Korea and explore potential solutions to mitigate this risk. The model concept reflects the general information of collective farms in North Korea, which was set in 1960, and the abstract of the social–ecological system of North Korean agriculture. The model comprises the agent, environment, and external factors.

Agent-based models (ABMs) are particularly suited for simulating the behaviour of agricultural agents in response to land use (LU) policy. However, there is no evidence of their widespread use by policymakers. Here, we carry out a review of LU ABMs to understand how farmers’ decision-making has been modelled. We found that LU ABMs mainly rely on pre-defined behavioural rules at the individual farmers’ level. They prioritise explanatory over predictive purposes, thus limiting the use of ABM for policy assessment.

A landslide is a type of geological disaster that poses a threat to human lives and property. Landslide susceptibility assessment (LSA) is a crucial tool for landslide prevention. This paper’s primary objective is to compare the performances of conventional shallow machine learning methods and deep learning methods in LSA based on imbalanced data to evaluate the applicability of the two types of LSA models when class-weighted strategies are applied.

Requisition–compensation balance is a type of cultivated land protection system in China. The implementation of hydraulic projects has changed the natural conditions unfavorable to the development of agricultural production and effectively improved the quality of cultivated land. This means that the requisition–compensation balance of cultivated land policies for hydraulic projects should be treated differently.

One of the world’s major issues is climate change, which has a significant impact on ecosystems, human beings, agricultural productivity, water resources, and environmental management. The General Circulation Models (GCMs), specially the recently released (coupled model intercomparison project six) CMIP6 are very indispensable to understand and support decision makers to identify adaptation strategies in response to future climate change in a basin. However, proper selection of skillful GCMs and future climate assessment is a prior task to climate impact studies.

This paper empirically investigates the heterogeneous impacts of the media sentiment about policies with different themes on the real estate market in China. Based on the policy texts collected from both official and unofficial sources, we construct sentiment indices to capture the sentiment about policies with different themes, including real estate policies, fiscal policies, monetary policies, land policies, healthcare policies, household registration policies, and education policies, using text mining methods.

The traditional livestock industry in Inner Mongolia has evolved rapidly in response to social and economic transformations during recent decades, resulting in substantial impacts on the rural economy and livelihoods of pastoralists. Improved understanding of these changes and potential drivers may help foster strategies to sustain the pastoral system of this region.

Land policies are commonly used to contribute to the implementation of the public policy of land-use planning (or spatial planning). In this sense, a spatially efficient land policy must allow the planning systems to achieve the land uses promoted by strategic planning. In addition to their role in land-use planning, land policies also contribute to public finance policies. From this perspective, a socioeconomically efficient land policy must allow public authorities to capture land value.