Land degradation is a global challenge that affects lives and livelihoods in many communities. Since 1950, about 65% of Africa's cropland, on which millions of people depend, has been affected by land degradation caused by mining, poor farming practices and illegal logging. One-quarter of the land area of Ethiopia is severely degraded. As part of interventions to restore ecosystem services, exclosures have been implemented in Ethiopia since the 1980s. But the lack of tools to support prioritization and more efficient targeting of areas for large-scale exclosure-based interventions remains a challenge. Within that perspective, the overarching objectives of the current study were: (i) to develop a Geographic Information System-based multicriteria decision-support tool that would help in the identification of suitable areas for exclosure initiatives; (ii) to provide spatially explicit information, aggregated by river basin and agroecology, on potential areas for exclosure interventions and (iii) to conduct ex-ante analysis of the potential of exclosure areas for improving ecosystem services in terms of increase in above-ground biomass (AGB) production and carbon storage. The results of this study demonstrated that as much as 10% of Ethiopia's land area is suitable for establishing exclosures. This amounts to 11 million hectares (ha) of land depending on the criteria used to define suitability for exclosure. Of this total, a significant proportion (0.5–0.6 million ha) is currently under agricultural land-use systems. In terms of propriety river basins, we found that the largest amount of suitable area for exclosures falls in the Abay (2.6 million ha) and Tekeze (2.2 million ha) river basins, which are hosts to water infrastructure such as hydropower dams and are threatened by siltation. Ex-ante analysis of ecosystem services indicated that about 418 million tons of carbon can be stored in the AGB through exclosure land use. Ethiopia has voluntarily committed to the Bonn Challenge to restore 15 million ha of degraded land by 2025. The decision-support tool developed by the current study and the information so generated go toward supporting the planning, implementation and monitoring of these kinds of local and regional initiatives.

The extent of political fragmentation of metropolitan areas impedes effective land use planning in many countries, and thus contributes to the phenomenon of urban sprawl. For some metropolises in the United States and Europe, strategic interaction between local policymakers codetermines the implementation of local planning policies. However, previous empirical analyses of this phenomenon have usually assumed interdependence in planning decisions to be confined to neighbouring jurisdictions. This is a common simplification in research on diffusion in public policies. Proceeding on the assumption that municipal zoning decisions are subject to competition between municipal authorities trying to attract new residents, I suggest an alternative conceptualisation of location-choice competition in Tiebout-like economies: the correlations of out-commuting patterns serve as a proxy for the degree to which municipalities are competitors for mobile residents, irrespective of their contiguity. Spatial autoregressive models, estimated on the basis of a large panel of fine-grained zoning data, reveal that zoning decisions in the Canton of Zurich, Switzerland’s most dynamic metropolitan area, are indeed subject to such interdependence.

The forests of the Cameroon-Nigeria transboundary region have been highlighted as a high conservation priority, yet many of the extant forest remnants remain relatively unknown, particularly with regard to the occurrence of large mammals. Between 2002 and 2004 we surveyed the large mammal fauna of the Mone and Ejagham Forest Reserves and the Upper Banyang, Nkwende Hills and Etinde forests of south-west Cameroon. Our objective was to document the extant large mammal species as an important step in the review of government priorities to identify key sites within the region for conservation and management. We reviewed the available literature on mammal distribution and then surveyed the forests for mammal and human signs. Despite a growing illegal commercial trade in wildlife, particularly for bushmeat, many sites retain populations of one or more threatened and locally rare large mammal species of significant conservation importance. Moreover, the sites collectively complement each other in terms of their representation of the threatened large mammal fauna. An emphasis on the enforcement of wildlife legislation and minimizing logging impact are of primary importance for the conservation of large mammals in these and other forest remnants in south-west Cameroon. In addition, at some sites, there already exists community interest in active wildlife management.

In the north-western Peruvian Amazon, a new road has recently been constructed to link the city of Iquitos with the town of Nauta. The road crosses lands that are remarkably heterogeneous in terms of ecological conditions, comprising distinctive soil types from extremely poor to relatively fertile. Although this reality contributes to the land use potential and human carrying capacity of each place, deforestation of road margins appears equally intensive on all types of land. In the mid-1990s, two dead-end roads starting from both urban centres were characterized by distinctive zones of resource exploitation, with a road-free section of primary forest in between. A few years later, the separate road ends were linked by a dirt road that served only occasional traffic, but introduced significant new settlement. Various developmental trends evidence incoherent resource management and momentary public support in the region. By promoting diverse economic activities that reflect environmental conditions in the initial land use planning and land allocation, most sections along this road could be considered economically valuable for purposes such as sustainable forestry, tourism, agroforestry and, in suitable sites, intensive agriculture. To promote the more sustainable uses, thorough environmental legislation, administrative guidelines and follow-up based on an implicit mechanism of learning from previous experiences should be implemented. At the local level, there are some important initiatives to support such development, including ecological and economic zoning. However, these measures might be too late to prevent the destructive practices so common in many parts of Amazonia.