Protected areas are a cornerstone of forest conservation in developing countries. Yet we know little about their effects on forest cover change or the socioeconomic status of local communities, and even less about the relationship between these effects. This paper assesses whether 'win-win'...

The increasing demand for agricultural commodities for food and energy purposes has led to intensified agricultural production. This trend may manifest in agricultural compositions and landscape configurations that can have mixed and adverse impacts on the provision of ecosystem services. We...

Exclusion zones, like protected areas or setback distances, are the most common policy instrument to mitigate environmental impacts of human land-use, including the deployment of renewable energy sources. While exclusion zones may provide environmental benefits, they may also bring about...

Land is an essential but limited natural resource. We employ the concept of stocks to analyse driving forces for land-use conversion and to assess, whether the German political "30- hectares-goal" is feasible given the current institutional setting. In this paper major driving forces for...

This paper reviews 70 recent empirical and theoretical studies that analyse land-use change at the farm-household level. The review builds on a conceptual framework of land-use change drivers and conducts a meta-analysis. It turns out that the most frequently analysed scenario is the conversion...

The use of Markov processes (or Markov chains) has become widespread in dynamic stochastic modeling. For example, its use is ubiquitous in macroeconomics (dynamic stochastic general equilibrium), finance (dynamic asset pricing), and areas of microeconomics (dynamic programming). As we discuss...

We estimate the relationship between urban spatial expansion and its socio-economic determinants in Lombardy, the most urbanised region of Italy (and one of the most urbanized of the European Union), at the municipality level. Test results suggest that this relationship varies significantly...

Land use policy is administered at the local level in the U.S. However, many of the benefits and costs have broader spatial impacts. Thus, a lack of coordination across local jurisdictions may lead to unintended spillovers. Using historical data from the Baltimore, Maryland metro, we examine the...

Biologically important but dangerous wildlife creatures encroach into cities, which causes human-wildlife conflicts. To explore the effect of the encroachment of wildlife into cities on equilibrium land use and its efficiency, we develop an equilibrium theory of land used for humans and wildlife...