Across vast areas of the world, human activity has degraded once fertile and productive land. Deforestation, overgrazing, continuous farming and poor irrigation practices have affected almost 2 billion hectares worldwide, threatening the health and livelihoods of over one billion people. In this…
In context of the recent emergence of the debate on rights-based approaches (RBA) to conservation, this paper provides a collaborative piece of work on the constitution of RBA’s and some of the key issues surrounding them. It also looks at some examples from countries where there is a need for…
Since Independence, India’s states have employed several land reform ‘tools,’ including reforming tenancy, imposing land ceilings, distributing government wasteland, and allocating house sites and homestead plots. This article briefly summarises some of these past efforts and attempts to draw…
Debate over the potential of NTFPs for achieving ecosystem conservation and poverty alleviation has grown in the past decade. Concern has been raised that NTFP activities may not always provide the poor with the expected benefits, and could in some cases even act as a poverty trap (see…
The study relates village seed systems to biological diversity of millet crops grown by farmers in the semi-arid lands of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, India. In these subsistence-oriented, semi-arid production systems the environment is marginal for crop growth and often there is no substitute…
Hydrological processes in a mixed land use watershed are significantly influenced by land use (LU) and land cover (LC). In order to quantify the effect of LU/LC, topography, and morphology, runoff and sediment yield of a small multivegetated watershed in a sub-humid subtropical region in India…
New tools for land use analysis including detailed cost-benefit assessments are needed to integrate resource management for enhancing farmers' income and mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The paper comprises an assessment of GHG emissions and economic returns under different…