China faces significant challenges in reconciling food security goals with the objective of becoming a low-carbon economy. Agriculture accounts for approximately 11 % of China’s national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions with cereal production representing a large proportion (about 32 %) of...

This paper describes an adaptive agent model of rangelands based on concepts of complex adaptive systems. The behavioural and biological processes of pastoralists, regulators, livestock, grass and shrubs are modelled as well as the interactions between these components. The evolution of the...

Sustainable agriculture has become an important policy orientation in the area of land use. It serves as an analysis framework to reconcile conflicting interests. In the paper the notion of sustainable agriculture will be operationalized by using the concept of environmental utilisation space....

In Vietnam, a quasi-private property regime has been established in 1993 with the issuance of exchangeable and mortgageable long-term land use right certificates. Using primary qualitative and quantitative data collected in a mountainous district of Northern Vietnam, this paper investigates the...

In this paper, we aim to reveal the monetary value of open space by using a hedonic pricing model of residential property values. The analysis is supported by the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). We present three local Dutch housing market case studies in the Randstad region. In all...

This paper investigates the cost of biomass co-firing in European coal power stations. We propose a tractable and original method, that enables us to get expressions of biomass and CO2 breakeven points for co-firing in different types of coal plants. We call them carbon switching price and...

We investigate the dynamic effect that the Tandroy's unsustainable practices have on the forest. The Tandroy people live in Androy, a region located in the southern part of Madagascar. They are mainly an agricultural and cattle herding society whose subsistence relies on the slash-and-burn...

Twenty years after Independence, the land question is still an urgent unresolved issue in Zimbabwe. The government launched the land reform after 1980 and led an active policy in favour of the rural areas. But the land reform programme slowed down considerably in the second half of the eighties,...

Sustainable development requires a mix of policies that can simultaneously address social, economic and environmental objectives. While the preceding chapters of this book have focused on agricultural, environmental and socio-economic aspects and related policies, this chapter looks at the...