Resources
Displaying 1866 - 1870 of 2258Land Grabbing in Europe? Socio-Cultural Externalities of Large-Scale Land Acquisitions in East Germany
Recently, we witnessed an immense increase in international land transactions in the Global South, a phenomenon slowly expanding in northern industrialized countries, too. Even though in Europe agriculture plays a decreasing economic role for rural livelihoods, the increases in land transactions by non-local, non-agricultural investors pervades rural life. Nevertheless, the underlying processes are not yet well understood. Large-scale land acquisitions describe such purchases and leases in a neutral way, while ‘land grabbing’ expresses negative consequences for rural people.
Livelihoods on the Edge without a Safety Net: The Case of Smallholder Crop Farming in North-Central Namibia
Semi-arid Namibia is marginal for agricultural production. Low soil fertility combined with low and variable rainfall restrict the livelihoods of smallholder farmers who often struggle to produce enough food. Although historically, communities have adopted a number of coping mechanisms, climate change threatens to further reduce agricultural production. There are many additional options available to smallholder farmers to adapt to climate change, but they are not necessarily adopting these measures despite having noticed increasing temperatures and declining rainfall.
An Overview of the Impacts of Land Use Land Cover Changes (1980–2014) on Urban Water Security of Kolkata
Urban Water Security is essential in urban planning to manage cities’ water infrastructures and strengthen their water stress resilience and adaptive capacities. Decision making, governance and socio-economic factors play important roles in achieving Urban Water Security. Kolkata is a growing megacity in a developing country, which is facing rising pressures on water-environmental provisions due to the rapid population growth and urbanization and resultant governance and infrastructural issues. This review focusses on Kolkata, which is facing critical water issues, as a case study.
Watery Entanglements in the Cypriot Hinterland
This paper examines how water shaped people’s interaction with the landscape in Cyprus during the Bronze Age. The theoretical approach is drawn from the new materialisms, effectively a ‘turn to matter’, which emphasises the very materiality of the world and challenges the privileged position of human agents over the rest of the environment.
A Differentiated Spatial Assessment of Urban Ecosystem Services Based on Land Use Data in Halle, Germany
Urban ecosystem services (ES) contribute to the compensation of negative effects caused by cities by means of, for example, reducing air pollution and providing cooling effects during the summer time. In this study, an approach is described that combines the regional biotope and land use data set, hemeroby and the accessibility of open space in order to assess the provision of urban ES. Hemeroby expresses the degree of naturalness of land use types and, therefore, provides a differentiated assessment of urban ES.