Belarus has preserved its third position in Registering Property in the World Bank’s Doing Business 2014 report. Constant improvement of property registration procedures has allowed Belarus to achieve that. The Registering Property indicator takes into account three factors: the number of procedures required to transfer rights to property, the time spent on completing all the necessary procedures and the cost of procedures. From ”The Earth Summit“ in Brazil 1992 sustainable development recognized by almost all societies as one of the major global goals.

Telecoupling refers to socioeconomic and environmental interactions between distant places. Telecoupling is becoming even more significant in the increasingly globalized world and it plays a key role in the emergence of major global environmental problems. In particular, it contributes to land degradation and the achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, there is a lack of systematic examination of the impacts of telecoupling on land system change, and how to respond to the undesirable impacts.

This study assesses the global mountain population, population change over the 1975–2015 time-range, and urbanisation for 2015. The work uses the World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) definition of mountain areas combined with that of mountain range outlines generated by the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA). We estimated population change from the Global Human Settlement Layer Population spatial grids, a set of population density layers used to measure human presence and urbanisation on planet Earth.

This opinion paper discusses some of the challenges and opportunities that earth scientists face today in connection with environmental problems. It focuses on aspects that are related to the role of geocomputational approaches and new technologies for geoenvironmental analysis in the context of sustainable development. The paper also points out a “data imbalance” effect, a key issue in the analysis of environmental evolution and of geosphere-anthroposphere interactions in the long-term.

The Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) is an analytical framework developed to explain transitions towards sustainability. This article aims to contribute to enhancing the use of the MLP to understand the transitions towards sustainability in agriculture. We propose that MLP is an insightful framework to capture particular micro-level trajectories of adopting innovations. The Douro wine region in Northern Portugal, known worldwide for the wines that are produced there, was the study area of our empirical research.

About two-thirds of the developing world’s 3 billion rural people live in about 475 million small farm households, working on land plots smaller than 2 hectares. 1 Many are poor and food insecure and have limited access to markets and services. Their choices are constrained, but they farm their land and produce food for a substantial proportion of the world’s population. Besides farming they have multiple economic activities, often in the informal economy, to contribute towards their small incomes.

Sustainable land governance requires that all members of a community, both women and men, have equal rights and say in decisions that affect their collectively-held lands. Unfortunately, women around the world have less land ownership and weaker land rights than men – but this can change, and this report shows ways how that can be done.

The Global Land Indicators Initiative (GLII) platform was established in 2012 through the joint effort of United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), the World Bank and Millennium Challenge Corporation with the aim of making global-scale monitoring of land governance a reality by 2021.

The articles in this Bulletin are written by the following organizations and individuals: National Coordinator for the Defense of the Mangrove Ecosystem (C-CONDEM), Ecuador; Yayasan Pusaka Bentala Rakya (Bentala Raya Heritage Foundation), Indonesia; Venezuelan Observatory of Political Ecology and members of the WRM international secretariat in close collaboration with several allies who are part of grassroots groups in different countries.