THE MINING ACT No. 12 of 2016

Date of Assent: 6th May, 2016

Date of Commencement: 27th May, 2016

This event, hosted at ODI in London, was convened to discuss the use of new technologies to map and document land rights, and their impact on land registration and administration, and provide updates on recent activities of Forum membe

This paper reviews the legislation relating to ownership of feral camels in Australia. We find that, as a general proposition, a feral camel is owned by neither the landowner nor the Government (the Crown), unless State or Territory legislation provides otherwise. This occurs in two limited situations and only for New South Wales and South Australia. Relevant State and Territory legislation can prescribe that feral camels cannot be taken or used without a relevant licence or permit, but only Western Australia and Queensland appear to do this.

Agriculture must expand production for a growing population while simultaneously reducing its environmental impacts. These goals need not be in tension with one another. Here we outline a vision for improving both the productivity and environmental performance of agriculture in the US Corn Belt. Mean annual precipitation has increased throughout the region over the past 50 years, consistent with climate models that attribute it to a warming troposphere.

Whereas climate change mitigation involving payments to forest landowners for accumulating carbon on their land may increase carbon stored in forests, it will also affect timber supply and prices. This study estimated the effect on US timber and primary forest product markets of hypothetical timber set-aside scenarios where US forest landowners would be paid to forego timber harvests for 100 years to increase carbon storage on US timberland.

Policy tools are employed to effect changes in the behaviors of citizens. Policy tools, such as incentives and regulation, act as the medium through which the target population may comply with policy objectives; however, policymakers must choose carefully which policy tools to adopt. Given the predominance of privately-owned forestland in Indiana and the United States, this research explores forest policy tool preferences of family forest owners in southern Indiana. The research is based on data from 309 respondents to a mail survey of landowners in 32 southern Indiana counties.

Cholinesterase (ChE) enzyme activity measurements are widely applied in aquatic organisms for water quality monitoring, especially for pesticide contamination in agricultural watersheds. These biomarkers are amenable to measurement in a variety of species, and are therefore useful for examining effects in model organisms relevant to the ecosystem of interest. However, extensive variation in ChE biochemistry exists among tissues and species. This variation is rarely characterized and may lead to biases in the interpretation of activity determinations.

This paper presents a bioeconomic analysis of a red deer population within a Norwegian institutional context. This population is managed by a well-defined manager, typically consisting of many landowners operating in a cooperative manner, with the goal of maximizing the present-value hunting related income while taking browsing and grazing damages into account. The red deer population is structured in five categories of animals (calves, female and male yearlings, adult females and adult males).

Because most of Texas consists of privately owned land and the amount of brush cover on rangelands may affect off-site water yields, there has been increasing interest in publicly funded brush clearing programs aimed at increasing water yield. The Pedernales River was selected as 1 of 8 watersheds to determine the feasibility of implementing such a program.

This paper examines how people mobilize around notions of distributive justice, or ‘moral economies’, to make claims to resources, using the process of post‐socialist land privatization in the Mekong Delta region of southern Vietnam as a case study. First, I argue that the region's history of settlement, production and political struggle helped to entrench certain normative beliefs around landownership, most notably in its population of semi‐commercial upper peasants.

In New Zealand and Australia, rural landowners believe that local predator control to protect indigenous biota exacerbates European rabbit Oryctolagus cuniculus problems on their land. We assess the validity of their concerns by reviewing the published literature on effects of predators on rabbit abundance. In New Zealand, where rabbits and their predators are introduced, predators appear to have relatively little effect on rabbit numbers compared with other factors leading to mortality, such as disease, flooding of burrows and burrow collapse.

Protection of private lands through conservation easements has garnered recent attention from scientists and conservation practitioners. Questions remain, however, about the specific characteristics and activities driving landowners’ interest in conservation easements and their willingness to consider granting them. Resolving these questions could improve prospects for private land conservation by helping land conservation organizations identify and better understand potential easement grantors.