Guaranteeing households’ equal access to land has long been advocated as paramount to implement development policies in Rural China. Given the chronic land scarcity in densely populated regions of China, finding a compromise between private and collective land rights has been important to protect livelihood safety nets and to address poverty issues in rural areas, especially in the initial stages of reform.

Failure to recognize land administration systems as infrastructure creates potential funding and maintenance problems. Wider economic, social, and environmental benefits of effective land administration are consequently put at risk. Land administration must be recognized as critical, public good infrastructure. An evaluation method for testing land administration as an infrastructure is developed and applied. The method utilizes tools for defining and classifying infrastructure, public goods, and critical infrastructures.

Preserving large tracts of natural habitats is essential to maintain biodiversity. Nevertheless, even large areas may still suffer from less “visible” impacts such as loss of ecological processes. Because mapping ecological processes over large scales is not practical, an alternative is to map surrogate species that are key for those processes.