European legislation calls for a well-planned sustainable development. As such, it has to in‐ clude a social, economic as well as an environmental dimension. According to Agenda 21 (http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/), countries should undertake efforts to build up a comprehensive national inventory of their land resources in order to establish land informa‐ tion systems. The overall objective...

Land degradation impacts on several critical environmental issues such as food security, diminishing quality and quantity of fresh water resources, preservation of natural resources, loss of biodiversity, and global climate change. Land degradation is responsible for soil erosion and can eventually lead to desertification. The International Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD) defines des...

Introduction This paper is provided as a background essay for the international workshop on Fundamental Rights in the Balance, to be held at IDS 16 -18 October. It reflects on key events, processes and publications emerging from donor engagement and research on issues of land and property rights, and land reform, over a five to six year period from mid-1997 up to the present day. The idea is to...

Over the last decade, following the doi moi reforms, the Vietnamese government has formally recognised the household as the basic unit of production and allocated land use rights to households. Under the 1993 Land Law these rights can be transferred, exchanged, leased, inherited, and mortgaged. A ‘land market’ is emerging in Vietnam but is still constrained for various reasons. Additionally, la...

The quantity and distribution of land which is eligible for renewable energy sources is fundamental to the role these technologies will play in future energy systems. As it stands, however, the current state of land eligibility investigation is found to be insufficient to meet the demands of the future energy modelling community. Three key areas are identified as the predominate causes of this;...

China’s economic reforms and unprecedented growth have generated many fascinating issues for scholarly research. An understanding of urbanization and land use change in China is required for appropriate strategies and policies to facilitate future sustainable development. This paper reviews the literature on urbanization, land use and sustainable development in China with a focus on land use ch...

Land cover is a critical variable in epidemiology and can be characterized remotely. A framework is used to describe both the links between land cover and radiation recorded in a remotely sensed image, and the links between land cover and the disease carried by vectors. The framework is then used to explore the issues involved when moving from remotely sensed imagery to land cover and then to v...

Land surface radiation and energy budgets are critical to address a variety of scientific and application issues related to climate trends, weather predictions, hydrologic and biogeophysical modeling, and the monitoring of ecosystem health and agricultural crops. This is an introductory paper to the special issue of land surface radiation and energy budgets from an international conference on t...

We developed further an IPCC-based Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) to monitor soil C stocks and flows for New Zealand. Geo-referenced soil C data were extended from 340 to 1119 sites (0.3 m depth) and used to assign steady-state soil C stocks to various combinations of soil class, climate, and land use. Overall, CMS soil C stock estimates are consistent with detailed, stratified soil C measureme...

Ecosystems are under increasing pressure from human activities, with land use and land-use change at the forefront of the drivers that provoke global and regional biodiversity loss. The first step in addressing the challenge of how to reverse the negative outlook for the coming years starts with measuring environmental loss rates and assigning responsibilities. Pinpointing the global pressures ...