Land Use Policy最新文献

Forest carbon sinks can play an important role in mitigating climate change, but currently only a few policies exist globally where economic incentives are created for forest owners to maintain and strengthen sinks. This article aims to facilitate the design and implementation of governmental payment schemes for forest carbon uptake services by presenting a multidisciplinary analysis of the many challenges involved in such schemes and by proposing potential solutions. We assess the consequences, opportunities, and risks of carbon payment schemes from economic, ecological, social, and legal points of view based on existing literature. Our analysis is set in the context of the European Union (EU), but many of the central findings have relevance for a broader geographical area. The main economic challenges of implementing carbon payment schemes relate to potential leakage, the question of additionality, and uncertain forest-owner behavior. The most important ecological considerations include effects on soil carbon dynamics and biodiversity as well as issues of non-permanence and forest resilience. Our exploration of the social acceptance of carbon payments among the general public, key market actors such as forest owners and forest industry, and other stakeholders suggest that both the process of developing the scheme and its details are significant. Further, our legal analysis indicates that central challenges for carbon payment schemes within the EU rise from the requirement to comply with competition and state aid regulations. Finally, we synthesize our findings and suggest a two-step approach for introducing public carbon payments in an EU member state. Initially, the scheme could be launched via De minimis aid or the new aid scheme (GAFSRA). A low carbon price could be applied to moderate market effects, and the payments could be limited to additional carbon storage only. Peatlands, where tradeoffs exist between tree biomass carbon and soil carbon, should initially be excluded from the standard payment scheme, and regulated with command-and-control instruments and measure-based payments instead. In the future, an improved knowledge base and institutional changes may enable schemes that encompass all ecosystem carbon pools on all relevant soil types and create optimal incentives for both forest management and land-use choices by pricing all land-based sinks and emissions. Such schemes could utilize, e.g., cap-and-trade instruments and be complemented by import tariffs to control carbon leakage.

To promote the healthy development of cities, previous studies have long investigated the relationships between urban functions and crime. However, the use of either land use data or point of interest (POI) data to represent urban functions can yield inconsistent findings, potentially misguiding urban planners in crime prevention efforts. To address this issue, we systematically compare the effectiveness of land use and POI data in theft crime modeling with a case study of Beijing, China. Urban function features are constructed from both data sources by three measures, i.e., density, fraction, and diversity. Their global strengths are evaluated through negative binomial regression (NBR). Additionally, geographically weighted negative binomial regression (GWNBR) is employed to uncover their local strengths. Results indicate that POI data generally outperform land use data, with POI densities being the most effective. Nevertheless, optimal data sources and measures vary for urban functions and spatial context. Land use fractions could effectively capture large-scale functional areas, while POI fractions and POI densities are fit for small-scale facilities with distinct properties. This study advocates the complementary use of land use and POI data, offering valuable insights for urban planners and researchers to construct precise urban function indicators for crime modeling.

Governments are legally formalizing an increasing number of community forests by sharing and transferring tenure rights over state-owned forestland in an effort to reduce deforestation. However, there has been little evidence on whether their conservation effectiveness could be further strengthened through formalization. In Thailand, the Royal Forest Department began to register community forests in 2000. The objective of this study was to assess the effectiveness of community forests in moderating the impact of deforestation pressures, highlighting the intrinsic ability of communities to protect their forests, and the effects of a legal formalization. In a spatial evaluation approach, statistical matching and fixed-effects models were used to analyze the effect of community-based forest conservation and its formalization on deforestation rates. Each analysis was conducted in provincial areas sampled from northern, north-eastern, and southern Thailand (680 community forests) to compare the impact of varying levels of deforestation pressure over a 14-year period from 2000 to 2014. The large majority of sampled communities protected their forests against substantial deforestation during the entire observation period, with 82 % experiencing less than 1 ha of deforestation and 60.15 % experiencing no deforestation at all. The median relative deforestation rate over this period was 0.21 %, with an interquartile range of 1.82 %. Their efforts reduced the likelihood of forest loss in regions of high deforestation pressure from approximately 30 % to almost zero. In contrast, the threat of deforestation did not significantly change after a formal registration. These findings were similar across different regions despite their biophysical and socio-economic differences. These findings suggest that while community efforts are central to forest conservation, the benefits of formalization in enhancing communal efforts appear to be subtle and thus remain inconclusive in the current context. Registered community forests are still affected by forest encroachment despite their successful conservation efforts. Thus, communities require stronger support from forest officials and local law enforcement agencies in both legal and technical capacities.

Spatially explicit priority optimization based on the tradeoffs and synergies between multiple ecosystem services (ESs) is greatly responsible for improving sustainable land use management and human well-being in ecologically fragile regions (EFRs). Here, Inner Mongolia, a typical EFR in China, was taken as the study area. Its five prominent ESs, i.e., soil retention (SR), carbon storage (CS), habitat quality (HQ), water yield (WY), and windbreak and sand-fixing (WS), were firstly evaluated. The local bivariate Moran's I and the sensitivity analysis were adopted to identify the spatial relationships between them, and the key social-ecological variables affecting ESs, respectively. To simulate the spatially explicit priority optimization areas, four scenarios were designed using the Bayesian belief network. Results showed the five ESs had heterogeneous spatial distributions and temporal dynamics. Variations in relationships between paired ESs were found across space and time. Regional factors, including both natural and human influence, influenced the ESs. The spatially explicit priority optimization areas for forest and grassland were showed in different areas by the scenario analysis. Besides, diverse sustainable land use policies from the perspectives of protection, planning, and management were also suggested. These findings could provide valuable references for EFR sustainable development worldwide.

The results of existing research predict that the area of abandoned land will increase in many European regions. One of the countries that are the most prone to this process is Poland where agriculture, after many transformations, is still an important sector of the economy. It is essential to determine drivers of the abandonment of agricultural land use in order to effectively counteract this process. Through the Common Agricultural Policy, the European Union financially supports farmers who use agricultural land in accordance with the environmental protection requirements. This study investigated to what extent the land use, the characteristics of agricultural holdings, the demographics as well as economic factors impacted the process of land abandonment in Poland during the period 2002–2020. The analysis was carried out using statistical and spatial data pertaining to the period before and after Poland’s accession to the European Union. Our results demonstrate that the share of abandoned land within the country's agricultural area has decreased from 9.7 % to 1.2 %. Direct payments to farmers and the agrarian structure of farms were the most significant factors affecting this process. Spearman’s rank order correlations between the share of abandoned arable land and the two mentioned variables are close to or higher than 0.5 in each analysed year. The obtained results did not confirm the common conviction that environmental factors play a decisive role in the process of cultivation abandonment.

While urbanization has been a core feature of global urban development for centuries, it does not always lead to sustainable development outcomes, especially in global South cities where the phenomenon is rapid and often unplanned. Framed around sustainable development thinking, this paper intends to provide critical analysis of sustainable urbanization by examining the barriers, drivers, processes, and outcomes associated with urban planning-led development. A case study research approach was applied in three major cities in Saudi Arabia to present convergence and divergence of urbanization-induced growth and development outcomes as well as urban planning limitations in a region that scholarly research on urbanization is recently emerging. Our findings show the critical relevance of an engaging urban planning practice across different scales of cities, and to the critical strategy of public participation for the promotion of urban planning-led development to addressing infrastructure inadequacies, inequalities, and environmental deterioration.

Social inequality resulting from war, exploitation, and land property is very evident in Ethiopia, which has a significant influence on the economic, social, and political situation of various groups of people. As a result, the primary objective of this study was to assess the significance of the Credibility Thesis in resolving land conflicts via the Formal, Actual, and Targeted (FAT) Institutional Framework. Moreover, this study was conducted to identify the key features and the role of credibility analysis in mitigating land conflicts by employing the Credibility Scales and Intervention (CSI) Checklist. To achieve this goal, a comprehensive literature review including land tenure studies from 1979 to 2020 was conducted. This review used original databases to ensure a comprehensive and extensive exploration of relevant scientific works. The results showed that the land problem in Ethiopia is not only related to the dynamics of social change and inequality at different global, regional, national, and transnational levels, but also provides access to land resources, the foundations of authority, livelihood, property, and citizenship. Furthermore, the lack of land security for non-indigenous minorities contributes to substantial ambiguity for land rights. Therefore, measures to increase land security and transfer land tenure can have an important influence on productivity and should be prioritized by policymakers. These measures may include elements from active land certification initiatives, but they should also specify the legal credit of certifications issued in the system and how to execute them.

Rural population in China has undergone dramatic changes driven by large-scale industrialization and urbanization. However, under the current land system, it is difficult to adjust rural land resource allocation according to population changes, resulting in an imbalance in the human-land relationship of rural China and restricting the sustainable development of agriculture and rural areas. Therefore, there is an urgent need to further promote land system reform to cope with rural demographic transition and the challenges it brings to rural human-land relationship and provide institutional support for rural revitalization in the new era. The results show that population contraction, population aging, and below-replacement fertility are the main features of China's rural population transition in 1990–2020, which brings about problems such as the aging and weaking of social actors and non-grain farming. Meanwhile, the disconnect between land-use transition and demographic transition determines that inefficient land use, mainly characterized by cropland abandonment and homestead idle, is prevalent in rural China. Focusing on the trend of demographic transition in rural China, deepening the reform of contracted land, steadily advancing the reform of homesteads, and strengthening the provision of supporting policies are needed. These measures aim to promote the capitalization and assetization of land resources through the introduction of market mechanisms and empowerment, thus enhancing land resource allocation efficiency and optimizing rural human-land relationship.

In many densely populated countries in Europe, land suitable for agriculture, forest and protected areas is becoming scarcer with expanding settlement area. One way to mitigate this pressure is to abstain from the in-kind replacement of forest clearances and to allow for their compensation by nature conservation projects on areas other than agricultural land, including the forest itself. It is particularly the latter that implies a difficult trade-off for forest owners who adhere to the forest area preservation principle but at the same time support biodiversity offsetting in the forest as a potential new source of income.

This paper analyses the stated preferences of forest owners in the Swiss canton of Berne with a discrete choice survey experiment that allows examining how forest owners reconcile this trade-off and whether the requirement to spatially coordinate offsets affects their willingness to participate in such a scheme. The results show that while biodiversity offsetting in the forest is disputed and support is generally low, those forest owners that participate do not exclusively offer low-effectivity measures on marginal forest land. However, they also demand substantial financial compensation. A spatial coordination of biodiversity offsets is certainly not their main concern and thus needs to be secured by respective regulation.

The expeditious trajectory of urbanization has profound ramifications on the configuration and functioning of the natural milieu. Given the constrained opulence of natural capital and its indispensable bestowal of ecosystem services in different regions, meticulous contemplation of the relationship between urbanization and the ecosystem service scarcity value (ESSV) while formulating decisions is imperative. This study focuses on the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB), where ESSV is quantified by combining the dynamic changes in market supply and demand factors. The influence of supply and demand changes on the ESSV is discussed and analyzed in four scenarios. Subsequently, a multidimensional urbanization comprehensive evaluation index system was established to explore the spatiotemporal interactive response mode between ESSV and urbanization. Our findings manifest a notably augmented ESSV in the YREB from 1990 to 2020, particularly prominent between 2000 and 2010. Moreover, the growth in public goods services outpaced that in private goods services within the same period. Demand-driven scarcity has emerged as the foremost determinant of ESSV. Urbanization levels gradually increased from 1990 to 2020, with a uniform allocation of heightened ESSV and urbanization throughout the region. The urbanization level of YREB, as a whole, exhibited conspicuous spatial heterogeneity, with the downstream region significantly surpassing the middle and upper reaches, and the downstream Yangtze River Delta city cluster and the middle reaches of the Chengdu-Chongqing city cluster notably outpacing that in the surrounding region. The coupling coordination degree (CCD) between the ESSV and urbanization in the YREB develops in a harmonious direction during the study period, accompanied by palpable spatial disparities. The area of unbalanced development gradually decreased, and the area proportion of the coordinated development type of ESSV and urbanization increased continuously. Overall, this study elucidates regional disparities in the reciprocal relationship between the ESSV and urbanization in the YREB, thereby unveiling the extent of incongruity between regional urbanization and the ecosystem. It serves to identify the juncture at which ecological sustainability and urbanization converge harmoniously, thus offering novel insights in achieving comprehensive, high-caliber, and synchronized development in the YREB.