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The repercussions of climate change will be felt in various ways throughout both natural and human systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. Climate change projections for this region point to a warming trend, particularly in the inland subtropics; frequent occurrence of extreme heat events; increasing aridity; and changes in rainfall—with a particularly pronounced decline in southern Africa and an increase in East Africa. The region could also experience as much as one meter of sea-level rise by the end of this century under a 4 °C warming scenario. Sub-Saharan Africa’s already high rates of undernutrition and infectious disease can be expected to increase compared to a scenario without climate change. Particularly vulnerable to these climatic changes are the rainfed agricultural systems on which the livelihoods of a large proportion of the region’s population currently depend. As agricultural livelihoods become more precarious, the rate of rural–urban migration may be expected to grow, adding to the already significant urbanization trend in the region. The movement of people into informal settlements may expose them to a variety of risks different but no less serious than those faced in their place of origin, including outbreaks of infectious disease, flash flooding and food price increases. Impacts across sectors are likely to amplify the overall effect but remain little understood.

This special issue is built around a series of impact assessments of land use policies and sustainable development in developing countries, carried out in the EU-funded project LUPIS (Sixth framework programme, Global Change and Ecosystems, Contract 36955). The project targeted at the development and testing of impact assessment tools of land-use-related policies in seven developing countries: Brazil, India, China, Indonesia, Kenya, Mali and Tunisia. This issue presents the current understanding of ex-ante assessment and includes contributions with comparative work across several countries, and case studies in individual countries, addressing important land-use related concerns.

As the climate change problem becomes more eminent, there is more pressure to increase efforts in all sectors and countries. The land-use sector is seen as an option to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and key in achieving a balance in GHG emissions and removals by sinks by 2050, as envisioned in the Paris Agreement. This article presents two comparative case studies within the climate change arena and aims to understand how and why: 1) tropical deforestation and forest degradation have secured a prominent place on the international climate change agenda, while 2) agriculture has not secured a prominent place. We use the agenda-setting multi-stream approach (MSA), while adding a framing layer. Based on primary data (including an international workshop with forest and agriculture experts, interviews, and participation in key international meetings), and secondary data, this article concludes that REDD + is an example of how a condition was framed as a problem, a viable proposal was developed, and political will and receptivity was shown, all of which placed REDD + high on the agenda, and generated its legal and methodological framework over the course of ten years. In these efforts, the role of policy entrepreneurs was key. Agriculture, on the other hand, is a more complex sector with multiple interests and millions of stakeholders. The consideration of agriculture, in particular its mitigation component, is therefore a highly contentious issue. The fear of new binding commitments and the potential threat to food security and production, and the lack of a convincing proposal that addresses the multiple values of agriculture has impeded substantive progress. Also, the absence of a committed policy entrepreneur limits the place of agriculture in the climate change agenda under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

China contributes 23 % of global carbon emissions, of which 26 % originate from the household sector. Due to vast variations in both climatic conditions and the affordability and accessibility of fuels, household carbon emissions (HCEs) differ significantly across China. This study compares HCEs (per person) from urban and rural regions in northern China with their counterparts in southern China. Annual macroeconomic data for the study period 2005 to 2012 were obtained from Chinese government sources, whereas the direct HCEs for different types of fossil fuels were obtained using the IPCC reference approach, and indirect HCEs were calculated by input-output analysis. Results suggest that HCEs from urban areas are higher than those from rural areas. Regardless of the regions, there is a similarity in per person HCEs in urban areas, but the rural areas of northern China had significantly higher HCEs than those from southern China. The reasons for the similarity between urban areas and differences between rural areas and the percentage share of direct and indirect HCEs from different sources are discussed. Similarly, the reasons and solutions to why decarbonising policies are working in urban areas but not in rural areas are discussed.

Dairy cattle farming in developing countries is mainly by resource poor smallholder farmers. Intensification of production within smallholder production systems is being driven by increasing demand for animal products. Current intensification is driven by importation of high-input high-output genotypes. This puts in question the sustainability of these resource constrained systems under harsh environmental conditions. Sustainability of production systems can be defined as long-term resilience and productivity. We use deterministic simulations to compare the impacts of three criteria to define breeding objectives i.e., economic, desired gains and non-market value, on annual genetic and monetary gains in production (market) and functional (non-market) traits for a small-sized nucleus genomic selection breeding program under developing country conditions. Market traits considered were milk yield (MY) and mature body weight (MBW). Non-market traits were calving interval (CI) and production lifetime (PLT). Fat yield (FY) was also considered a non-market trait as it had no market value. With the economic objective, traits were weighted on economic values. Weights for desired gains and non-market (NM) values were derived iteratively. Economic objectives placed highest emphasis on MY with very little gains in non-market traits but had the highest returns on investment. For desired gains objective, maximal achievable gains in PLT, CI and FY were lower than the indicated desired gains. The non-market value objective achieved the best compromise between gains in MY and other traits. We conclude that non-market value objectives can be applied to direct selection towards more robust genotypes but with loss in monetary gain. Breeding robust genotypes can contribute to sustainable intensification in developing small-holder dairy systems. However, for such objectives to be satisfactory, a sound criterion is required to determine declines in genetic gains for market traits that are acceptable by producers.

Biofuels have been criticized in academic and activist circles not only for their environmental consequences but also for their social impacts on food availability and on small-scale family farming. Meanwhile (global) initiatives and policies have been developed to stimulate "sustainable biofuels". Brazil a frontrunner in production and use of biofuels - aimed to combine biodiesel production with rural development. The biodiesel policy implemented in 2004 had two main objectives: to advance biodiesel as a transportation fuel and to foster the social inclusion of family farmers through participation in the biodiesel chain. Although participation of family farmers was low in the beginning, it increased substantially after a 2009 policy change that gave cooperatives a more prominent role. We analyze how, why and to what extent cooperatives are involved in integrating family farmers into the biodiesel chain and what this means for the social sustainability of biodiesel, taking the northeast state of Bahia as a case study area. The findings show that through the biodiesel policy, cooperatives until then a marginal phenomenon in northern Brazil increased their membership, were empowered and contributed to the economic development of a significant group of family farmers. However, these family farmers have not been substantially included in the biodiesel production chain itself. The biodiesel policy functions as a catalyst for rural (economic) development in which the cooperatives seem to achieve what governments were unable to achieve: the integration of specific categories of family farmers into agrarian development. Subsistence family farmers, in particular, have not been able to profit from this policy-driven, "market-oriented," rural development model. Hence, it can be questioned whether this policy has made biodiesel more socially sustainable. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Land degradation is affecting rural livelihoods across sub-Saharan Africa. Promoting sustainable land management requires a thorough understanding of land use change drivers, processes and effects. However, in most African countries reliable data for such investigations are missing. We therefore test an integrated approach to analyse land use dynamics, combining remote sensing images, an in-depth quantitative survey, stakeholder interviews and local statistics. We analyse land dynamics and agricultural production over a 25-year period in Vihiga District, Western Kenya. Specifically, we examine how land use has changed in this period, the main drivers for land use change, and the main effects of these changes on agricultural production. Vihiga District is one of the most densely populated rural areas in Africa. We find that the district has undergone rapid land use change in the past 25 years. In particular, there has been a major conversion of forest and bare land to agricultural land use. Often, it is stated that increasing population pressure triggers agricultural intensification; however, we find little evidence of such a process in Vihiga District. Productivity of tea and, to a lesser extent, vegetables increased but the yields of maize and beans, the most common crops, fluctuated around a ton per hectare. Overall, per capita food crop production dropped by 28% during the past two decades. Our study shows that high and increasing population pressures do not necessarily lead to agricultural intensification, and that there is a need to consider more explicitly off-farm income in development and land management policies and projects.

The rapid development of traditional agriculture in China was achieved at the expense of high energy consumption and investments. However, the global green development trend made it necessary for the country to transform its agricultural energy utilization. Energy efficiency changes are affected by many factors, particularly industrial agglomeration. In recent years, the Chinese government has introduced a series of policies, including setting major producing regions for grains and advantageous regions for characteristic agricultural product. These have caused significant changes to the spatial layout of the agriculture industry. However, there is still a lack of research on the impact of these changes on agricultural energy efficiency (AEE). In this study, panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2000 to 2016 were entered into stochastic frontier models to measure the country's AEE at the provincial level. A series of spatial econometric models were also used to analyze the impact of agricultural industrial agglomeration on China's AEE. The results indicated that the country's AEE exhibited obvious spatial gradients and correlations. After controlling the impacts of spatial correlation and other factors in the models, agricultural industrial agglomeration was found to have an overall positive impact on China's AEE. In the future, policies should be formulated to increase AEE by establishing agricultural functional areas, strengthening the innovation and sharing of green development technologies at the farm level, and promoting the optimization of energy structures in agricultural and rural areas.