Over the past centuries, cities have undergone major transformations that led to global urbanization. One of the phenomena emerging from urbanization is urban sprawl, defined as the uncontrolled spread of cities into undeveloped areas. The decrease in housing prices and commuting costs as well as the failure to internalize the real costs associated with natural land, led to households moving-out into the urban fringe – resulting in fragmented, low-density residential development patterns that has multiple negative impacts.

Employing a linkage between a biophysical and an economic model, this study estimates the economic impact of soil erosion by water on the world economy. The global biophysical model estimates soil erosion rates, which are converted into land productivity losses and subsequently inserted into a global market simulation model. The headline result is that soil erosion by water is estimated to incur a global annual cost of eight billion US dollars to global GDP.

The move towards sustainable agriculture requires a more detailed understanding of farmers’ knowledge(s) and knowledge practices. Increasingly, it is important to understand not only what farmers understand, but how their knowledge practices incorporate others – especially given the emerging call for environmentally-orientated policy measures to move beyond an individual farmer focus. This paper considers how farmers engage with, utilise and share knowledge through a focus on the Catchment Sensitive Farming (CSF) initiative in the UK.

Current Tanzanian land law offers registration of private interests in land in the form of Certificates of Customary Rights of Occupancy (CCROs) within a broader community lands approach. We conducted qualitative research on the issuance of CCROs along a mountain slope transect in Meru district in northeast Tanzania. This area features intensified smallholder agriculture that evolutionary theory suggests is well adapted for registration of private interests in land.

Notwithstanding their crucial role in ecosystem functionality, large carnivores generally entail economic costs to hunters due to competition for the same prey. This cost could potentially vary depending on carnivore density and the game hunting values at stake. We estimate a hedonic price model applying the unconditional quantile regression method in order to investigate the impact of large carnivores along the distribution of hunting lease prices in Sweden.

Continued overexploitation of natural resources and the associated impacts of climate change threaten the sustainability and biodiversity of our global social-ecological systems. ‘Integrated landscape approaches’ are governance strategies that attempt to reconcile multiple and conflicting land-use claims to harmonize the needs of people and the environment and establish more sustainable and equitable multi-functional landscapes.

This paper offers solutions to some of the challenges around maintaining productive agricultural land close to cities in countries facing a decline in urban populations. In such circumstances, some farmers have been observed to convert their land into real estate and leave farming before land prices decline, therefore decreasing the area of agricultural land close to large cities. In contrast, many suburban farmers in developed countries remain in farming even when land prices decline and suburbs shrink.

Credibility is the measure of how institutions are perceived as a result of autonomous endogenous patterns of interaction and power differences. It is not the tenure security in the sense of neo-classical economics that matters but the perceived security and whether developers have the assurance to retain the fruits of their investment. What matters in performance of institutions is not their form but their functions as it is determined temporally and spatially in terms of economic efficiency, stability and growth.

In developing countries, cities are rapidly expanding and urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) has an important role in feeding these growing urban populations; however such agriculture also carries public health risks such as zoonotic disease transmission. It is important to assess the role of UPA in food security and public health risks to make evidence-based decisions on policies. Describing and mapping the peri-urban interface (PUI) are the essential first steps for such an assessment.

This paper identifies the relationship between an active use of EU investment support programs by Polish farmers, on one side, and the local conditions for socioeconomic development and natural and structural characteristics of agriculture, on the other. The research was illustrated by the example of Poland, a country with a remarkably fragmented and territorially heterogeneous agrarian structure.

Weather variability is an important source of production risk for rainfed agriculture in developing countries. This paper evaluates the impacts of the adoption of drought-tolerant maize varieties on average maize yield, yield stability, risk exposure and resource use in rainfed smallholder maize farming. The study uses cross-sectional farm household-level data, collected from a sample of 840 farm households in Uganda. The adoption of drought-tolerant maize varieties increased yield by 15% and reduced the probability of crop failure by 30%.

The article starts from the premise that agricultural bioenergy crop production has massive influence in changing the land use paradigm in Romania, due the fact that important land surface areas are cultivated with such crops because of the increasing demand of biofuels. The main aim of the paper is to answer a research question: are there any changes in arable land use patterns determined by the increasing of the agricultural bioenergy crop production and what is the pressure on food consumption? The results show that the competition agricultural vs.