This book explores various approaches to reconstruct the spatial and temporal distribution of historical farmland in China. The book contains background information about political regimes, economic and social development, population changes and land resource utilization in the past 300 years in China. A literature review focuses on the assumptions, methodologies and models of reconstructing historical land-use datasets while addresses accuracy evaluation issues. Historical population size...

This book introduces state-of-the-art approaches, methods and research, focusing on smart management of rainwater. In addition, it provides an overview of projects from across the world, illustrating how rainwater-smart management has been implemented in drylands. Focusing on the scientific perspective it demonstrates how rural dryland agriculture can be improved. It also documents the wealth of rainwater-smart know-how available today, and replicates and transfers results to other countri...

This book has been initiated by the workshop on Cultural heritage in changing landscapes, held during the IALE (International Association for Landscape Ecology) European Conference that started in Stockholm, Sweden, in June 200 1 and continued across the Baltic to Tartu, Estonia, in JUly. The papers presented at the workshop have been supported by invited contributions that address a wider range of the cultural heritage management issues and research interfaces required to study cultural l...

This volume offers a new perspective to debates on local food and urban sustainability presenting the long silenced voices of the small-scale farmers from the productive green fringe of Sydney’s sprawling urban jungle. Providing fresh food for the city and local employment, these culturally and linguistically diverse farmers contribute not only to Sydney’s globalizing demographic and cultural fabric, but also play a critical role in the city’s environmental sustainability. In the battle fo...

This book delves into diverse local food systems and critically assesses their ecological and societal benefits and trade-offs, their limits and opportunities for improving sustainability of food production, and framework conditions which either hinder or promote their development.More and more people with gradually meat heavier diets will demand growth in food production, whilst our increasingly industrialized and globalized agri-food system has already caused serious sustainabili...

Sustainable development and rural policies have pursued strategies where farming has been often regarded as a factor deteriorating the ecosystem. But the current economic, social and environmental problems of the Earth probably call for examples of a positive integration between human society and nature. This research work presents more than a hundred case studies where the historical relationships between man and nature have generated, not deterioration, but cultural, environmental, socia...

This book explores the common language of politics, ecology and risk, and crosses their conceptual divides. It seeks to shed light on the underlying structural factors, processes, players and interactions in the risk scenario, all of which influence decision-making that both increases and reduces disaster risk.The first section explores risk governance under conditions of increasing complexity, diversity and change. The discussion includes chapters on The problem of governance in t...

This book examines social and natural environmental changes in present-day Laos and presents a new research framework for environmental studies from an interdisciplinary point of view. In Laos, after the Lao version of perestroika, Chintanakaan Mai, in 1986, for better or worse, rural development and urbanization have progressed, and people’s livelihoods are about to change significantly. Compared to those of the neighboring countries of mainland Southeast Asia, however, many trad...

This is a highly original account of the design and development of Pakistan's capital city; one of the most iconic and ambitious urban reconstruction projects of the twentieth century. Balancing archival research with fresh, theoretical insights, Markus Daechsel surveys the successes and failures of Greek urbanist Constantinos A. Doxiadis's most ambitious endeavour, Islamabad, analysing how the project not only changed the international order, but the way in which the Pakistani state opera...

Mitigation will not be sufficient for us to avoid climate change and we will need to adapt to its consequences. This book targets the development of adaptation policy in European countries with different relations between central and regional/local government.

In the era of big data, this book explores the new challenges of urban-rural planning and management from a practical perspective based on a multidisciplinary project. Researchers as contributors to this book have accomplished their projects by using big data and relevant data mining technologies for investigating the possibilities of big data, such as that obtained through cell phones, social network systems and smart cards instead of conventional survey data for urban planning support. T...

European rural landscapes as we experience them today are the result of ongoing processes and interactions between nature and society. These are changing fast: the future landscapes will be different from those we know currently. Written for academics, policy-makers and practitioners, this book is the first to explore the complex histories of rural landscapes in Europe as a basis for their sound governance in future. Tensions between the needs of agricultural spaces driven by economic ince...