A large amount of cultivated lands in China is occupied by vacant residential areas, thereby wasting land resources and placing local food security at risk. Therefore, transforming vacant rural residential land back to its previous form is urgently required to maintain the amount of cultivated land and guarantee food security.

This paper examines the spatial and temporal trajectories of Seattle’s industrial land use restructuring and the shifting riskscape in Seattle, WA, a commonly recognized urban model of sustainability. Drawing on the perspective of sustainability as a conflicted process, this research explored the intersections of urban industrial and nonindustrial land use planning, gentrification, and environmental injustice.

This paper presents the results of a sustainability impact assessment (SIA) of policy induced land use changes in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The regional problems include rapid expansions of urban areas, due to high population pressure, and the conversion of paddy fields and forests into settlements. The objective of this study was to assess the impacts of two land use policies on social, economic, and environmental Land Use Functions (LUFs) in Yogyakarta.

Due to the multiple impacts of landform effects, spatial heterogeneity and land use policies, farmland dynamics in mountainous areas are complicated. This study investigated farmland dynamics based on land use data from a typical mountainous area, Panxi, in China for 1990, 2000 and 2010, discussed the relationship between altitude, slope and farmland changes and presented an analysis of the driving forces of farmland change. Our findings are as follows: (1) from 1990 to 2010, the area of converted farmland was relatively small (313 km2), accounting for only 2.6% of the region’s farmland.

Shenzhen is a city that is highly representative of China’s rapid urbanization process. As the city rapidly expands, there are enormous challenges to the sustainable use of land resources. This paper introduces the evolution of urban land expansion and the sustainable land use policy of the Shenzhen Government since 2005. The policy covers the reduction in rural-to-urban land conversion, the delineation of urban growth boundaries, arable land reclamation and the establishment of farmland protection areas, urban redevelopment, and the investigation and prosecution of illegal construction.

Global climate change, especially the phenomena of global warming, is expected to increase the intensity of land-falling hurricanes. Societal adaptation is needed to reduce vulnerability from increasingly intense hurricanes. This study quantifies the adaptation effects of potentially policy driven caps on housing densities and agricultural cover in coastal (and adjacent inland) areas vulnerable to hurricane damages in the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal regions of the U.S.

Forests are under pressure from land use change due to anthropogenic activities. Land use change and harvest are the main disturbances of forest landscape changes. Few studies have focused on the relative contributions of different disturbances. In this study, we used the CA-Markov model, a land-use change model, coupled with a forest landscape model, LANDIS-II, to simulate dynamic change in Taihe County, China, from 2010 to 2050. Scenarios analysis was conducted to quantify the relative contributions of land use change and harvest.

Malaysia deforested 6.3 million hectares since independence; 91% of which occurred before Malaysia pledged, at the Earth Summit in 1992, to maintain a minimum 50% of its terrestrial area under forest cover. However, under economic and population pressure, Sarawak—the largest contributing state to the country’s current forest cover of 54.8%—shows continuing deforestation even after 1992.

Land use change (LUC) is the most dynamic force in terrestrial carbon stock change, and it is imperative to account for the dynamics of LUC in carbon stock change when forming land use policies. This paper explored the impacts of LUCs on carbon (C) stocks at a county scale and detected changes of soil C stocks within a county-scale land use planning policy. The LUCs within 1979–2006 in Fuyang County (eastern China) and Fuyang Land Use Master Planning (FLUMP) (2006–2020) were selected for this pilot study.

This research provides analysis of the case of the Jackson Farm development application, embedded within the particular dynamics of the municipal, regional, and provincial sustainability land use policy culture of the Metro Vancouver region, in Canada.

When developing land to meet various human needs, conducting assessments of different alternatives regarding their sustainability is critical. Among different alternatives of land-use, devoting land to bioenergy is relatively novel, in high demand, and important for addressing the energy crisis and mitigating carbon emissions. Furthermore, the competition and disputes among limited land-use for bioenergy and the combination of food production and housing are tense. Thus, which alternative of land-use is more sustainable is an important question, yet it is still under-investigated.

The Mekong Delta region has been seriously affected by climate change, with increasing temperatures, sea-level rise, and salinization strongly impacting agricultural activities of the region. Recent studies have shown that groundwater exploitation also contributes significantly to land subsidence throughout the delta. Thus, combating climate change now makes it necessary to design strategies and policies for adapting to and mitigating climate change and subsidence, not only at the individual level (mainly farmers), but also at the institutional level (province and region).