The originality of the REDD proposal is its incentives-based mechanism designed to reward the governments of developing countries for their performance in reducing deforestation as measured against a baseline. This mechanism is founded on the hypothesis that developing countries ‘pay’ an opportunity cost to conserve their forests and would prefer other choices and convert their wooden lands to other uses. The basic idea is, therefore, to pay rents to these countries to compensate for the anticipated foregone revenues.

The role of land registration in reducing rural poverty has been debated for several decades. This article analyses the impacts of land registration on land rentals, security of land tenure, disputes over land, use of credit facilities from formal financial institutions and gender access and control over land. Our findings are based on data collected between April and December 2011 in irrigation systems in three regional states of Ethiopia using in‐depth interviews and field surveys.

Recent research on land deals reports gigantic quantities of hectares seized, with relatively little regard for the solidity of the evidence or for considerations of scale other than area. This commentary questions the usefulness of aggregating data of uneven quality and transforming it into ‘facts’. Making claims on the basis of problematic evidence does not serve agrarian and human rights activists well, since it may undercut their legitimacy and make it difficult for them to identify their adversaries.

Close to one billion people worldwide depend directly upon the drylands for theirlivelihoods. Because of their climatic conditions and political and economicmarginalization drylands also have some of the highest incidents of poverty. Pastoral andsedentary production systems coexist in these areas and both very often use commonproperty arrangements to manage access and use of natural resources. Despite theirhistory of complementary interactions, pastoralists and sedentary farmers are increasinglyfaced with conflicting claims over land and other natural resources.

Based on survey data on Bulgarian and Hungarian crop and dairy farms, a double-peaked distribution of technical efficiency is observed. Several factors explain differences in efficiency. Human capital matters not only through age and education, but also through gender as farms with a higher share of women are more efficient. Contracting with upstream processors increased efficiency through facilitating the adoption of technology and the access to credits. The superiority of family farms over corporate farms is confirmed for crops but not for dairy.

To estimate the potential population size of the Eurasian lynx Lynx lynx in the Jura Mountains and to assess possible corridors between this population and adjacent areas (the Vosges Mountains, the Black Forest and the Alps), we adapted a previously developed Geographic Information system (GIS) probability model for lynx distribution and extrapolated it over the entire mountain range. The model was based on knowledge of the habitat use and land tenure system of resident animals from the central part of the Jura Mountains, where lynx were followed by means of radio-telemetry.

Little is known about the effects of mud crabs population patterns on their exploitation. We used complementary approaches (experimental, fisher-based) to investigate how small-scale variations in density, size and sex-ratio related to the ecology of S. serrata may impact fishing practices in New Caledonia. Crabs were measured/sexed across 9 stations in contrasted mangrove systems between 2007 and 2009. Stations were described and classified in different kinds of mangrove forests (coastal, riverine, and estuarine); vegetation cover was qualitatively described at station scale.

SUMMARYThe reform era around the turn of the century in Indonesia has been followed by a revitalization of local claims to political authority and natural resources on the basis of adat and indigeneity. In May of 2013, the Constitutional Court acknowledged indigenous ownership of forest territories and declassified them from State-owned forest zones without further conceptualizing the notion of indigeneity and its relation to land tenure and territorial conflicts.