Farmland abandonment, including perennial and seasonal abandonment, is an important process of land use change that matters most to food security. Although there is a great deal of studies on farmland abandonment, seasonal abandonment, which is as serious as perennial abandonment, has attracted little academic attention. This paper takes Hunan Province in central China as its study area and uses a spatial regression model to examine the driving factors of seasonal farmland abandonment at the county level.

The cultivation of bioenergy crops could be considered as sustainable; however, its use in fertile lands could conflict with food production. The general purpose of this study is to identify areas where traditional food crops are not economically sustainable, but where they could be substituted by energy crops without changing the land use in Spain. We studied the profit margin of the main crops of the country, which are wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and barley (Hordeum vulgare L.), the spatial location of the growing areas, and the biophysical constraints.

Plastic bag pollution in the marine environment is an urgent issue that has negatively impacted the sustainability of marine biodiversity. Studying effective ways to design advocacy messages that can promote individuals’ intentions to reduce, reuse, and recycle plastic bags in order to mitigate plastic bag pollution in the effort to help restore marine biodiversity is necessary. Utilizing emotional appeal messages, such as messages that are designed to elicit audiences’ feelings of empathy, can promote a variety of pro-environmental behaviors.

Cultivated land is an important carrier of grain production, and scientific assessing of cultivated land productivity is of great significance to ensure food security. This paper assessed the overall productivity of cultivated land in Yuanjiang city from the perspectives of quantitative structure, spatial distribution and correlation with national land use. We applied statistical and GIS (geographic information system) spatial analysis methods to 16 secondary indicators of productivity.

Vegetable extraction has been considered a new paradigm of adequate development for the Amazon Region by ecological movements, international organizations, and foreign governments. This study evaluates whether the supply of extractive products transformed into economic value can ensure the livelihood of families and prevent deforestation. The study was conducted at the extractive reserves Alto Juruá, Rio Ouro Preto, and Rio Cajari during two periods: January to March 2017 and January to March 2019. A total of 384 interviews were conducted—234 in 2017 and 150 in 2019.

Designing and implementing investment projects are activities that have a direct impact on the natural environment and pose a threat to sustainable development of rural areas. The issue of agricultural production space protection during the implementation of linear projects in Poland is often only mentioned at the design stage as the final element. The aim of the study is to propose a tool to enable an assessment and modelling of a motorway design variant in order to minimise the impact on the agricultural production space.

Land-based production provides societies with indispensable goods such as food, feed, fibre, and energy. Yet, with economic globalisation and global population growth, the environmental and social trade-offs of their production are ever more complex. This is particularly so since land use changes are increasingly embedded in networks of long-distance flows of, e.g., material, energy, and information.

Urbanization brings significant changes to the urban food system. There is growing attention to food self-sufficiency in metropolitan areas for the concern of greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation in food transportation. In China, grain self-sufficiency in metropolitan areas is also an important issue for grain security and involves coordination among contradictory policy goals. Based upon a comprehensive statistical analysis of 70 metropolitan areas in mainland China, we investigated the regional differences in the trends of grain self-sufficiency capacity in these areas from 1990 to 2015.

In this paper, we present a distributional impact analysis of climate change policies envisaged or implemented to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Senegal. We consider policies implemented in developed countries and their impact on a developing country. Moreover, we simulate the diminishing productivity of agricultural land as a potential result of climate change (CC) for Senegal. This country is exposed to the direct consequences of CC and is vulnerable to changes in world prices of energy, given its lack of substitution capacity.

Information communication technology (ICT) has changed the traditional agricultural extension service mode worldwide. This paper examines the effects of the Rural Distance Education Project (RDEP) on the household income, agricultural productivity, and off-farm employment of farmers in peri-urban areas in Beijing. Using the survey data of 783 randomly selected farm households from 54 villages in three Beijing peri-urban districts in 2014, and the propensity score matching method (PSM), we find that the RDEP has a significant and positive effect on agricultural productivity and input use.

Since the dawn of Brazilian trade, extensive cattle farming has predominated. Brazil’s extensive pasture-based system uses pasture plants adapted to climate and soil conditions with limited use of purchased inputs. However, new technologies such as integrated crop and livestock systems have recently been adopted, with government support and public policies that are intended to encourage increased agricultural production in Brazil.

Expansion of arid lands due to climate change, particularly in water stressed regions of the world can have severe implications on the economy and people’s livelihoods. The spatiotemporal trends in aridity, the shift of land from lower to higher arid classes and the effect of this shift on different land uses in Syria have been evaluated in this study for the period 1951–2010 using high-resolution monthly climate data of the Terrestrial Hydrology Research Group of Princeton University.