Enabling knowledge exchange between scientists and decision-makers is becoming increasingly necessary to promote the development of effective decision-support tools (DSTs) for environmental management. Participation of stakeholders in the design process beyond a basic level of consultation is essential for promoting trust in modelled outputs and accelerating eventual uptake of resulting tools and models by end-user communities. This study outlines the development of a DST to visualise and communicate the spatial and temporal patterns of E.

The western Corn Belt region of the United States has become a hotspot for agricultural extensification and consequent land use and land cover changes. The goals of this research were to characterize geographic patterns of grassland loss resulting from cropland expansion in the eastern Dakotas, and to understand how these changes were associated with characteristics of individual farms and farm operators. We collected data on grassland conversion and other land use decisions through a mail survey of farm operators in North and South Dakota.

Support for large scale agricultural investments in Africa has been mainly premised on their employment prospects for local populations. However, despite earlier calls by Tania Li to centre labour in the land grabs debate, labour is generally invisible in both mainstream policy and academic research. This paper, through a governance lens, draws attention to the implications of the global land rush on wage labour.

This paper explores the potential of climate finance to support developing country efforts to shift away from unsustainable land use patterns in the context of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. We pursue two research objectives here. Through a meta-analysis of 40 developing country Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), we provide, first, a comprehensive qualitative overview of developing country perspectives on climate financing needs for mitigation and adaptation activities in the land use, land-use change and forestry sectors (LULUCF).

Understanding factors that motivate conservation behavior among farmers is crucial to addressing societal, soil, water, and wildlife conservation goals. Farmers employ soil conservation practices to maintain agricultural productivity while minimizing impacts to water and wildlife in the long-term. The majority of conservation programs are voluntary in nature and some farmers are more willing and/or able to implement conservation practices than others.

The construction of consistent time series of land use presents a key challenge when accounting for elective land use-based activities under the Kyoto Protocol (wetland drainage and rewetting (WDR), cropland management (CM) and grazing land management (GM)), in which current land use-driven greenhouse gas emissions are compared to a reference situation in 1990. This case study is the first to demonstrate the feasibility of using high-resolution land-use proxies from different datasets for Kyoto accounting in a data-rich case study region in Germany.

This article synthesises the challenges faced by the English (urban) spatial planning system to become an enabler of urban health and explores some keys features of the evidence base, policy tools and policy implementation issues that urban planners need to be aware of to become health enablers. It draws on good practice identified in an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) seminar series involving over 500 academic researchers and practitioners between 2015 and 2017. A number of key recommendations emerged out of the project.

This research develops the novel concept of an economic ecosystem service sustainability index from the perspective of total income theory, and presents its empirical application at the spatial unit scale of the agroforestry farm. This paper compares the results accrued from applying the refined standard System of National Accounts (rSNA) and the authors’ Agroforestry Accounting System (AAS).

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of irrigation delivery services and agricultural extension services on crop choice in southern Tajikistan. This analysis is motivated by the government’s recent efforts to address the country’s severe malnutrition problem by supporting changes in irrigation service delivery and agronomy to increase diversity in agricultural production and consumption, in an environment where the cultivation of cotton had, until recently, been mandatory.

There is growing interest in the role that natural capital plays in underpinning ecosystem services. Yet, there remain differences and inconsistencies in the conceptualisation of capital and ecosystem services and the role that humans play in their delivery. Using worked examples in a stocks and flows systems approach, we show that both natural capital (NC) and human-derived (produced, human, social, cultural, financial) capital (HDC) are necessary to create ecosystem services at many levels. HDC plays a role at three stages of ecosystem service delivery.

Land use and land cover change (LULCC) affects the climate through both biogeochemical (BGC) and biophysical (BPH) mechanisms. While BGC effects are assessed at global scale and are at the heart of climate treaties such as the Paris Agreement, BPH effects are totally absent despite their increasingly recognized impact, especially at local scale. This stems from the complexity in characterizing their climate impacts both at local and global scale, which makes it impractical to offer clear advices for the development of climate policies.

Grasslands are among the most endangered ecosystems in the world. They supply vital resources for society, support an abundance of wildlife species, and store rich carbon reserves beneath their surfaces. Despite this, only a fraction of original grasslands in the United States now remains, and their rate of conversion to cropland has recently reaccelerated. This paper discusses opportunities that are immediately available to reduce the loss of U.S. native grasslands (i.e., prairie) and advance toward collective goals in grassland conservation.