The uplands are a crucial source of ecosystem services, such as water provision, carbon retention, maintenance of biodiversity, provision of recreation value and cultural heritage. This puts them in the focus of both environmental and social scientists as well as practitioners and land managers.. This volume brings together a wealth of knowledge of the British uplands from diverse but interrelated fields of study, clearly demonstrating their importance in 21st Century Britain, and indicating how we may through interdisciplinary approaches meet the challenges provided by past and future drivers of environmental change. The upland environments are subject to change. They face imminent threats as well as opportunities from pressures such as climate change, changes in land management and related changes in fire risk, increases in erosion and water colour, degradation of habitats, altered wildlife and recreational value, as well as significant changes in the economy of these marginal areas. This book presents up-to-date scientific background information, addresses policy related issues and lays out pressing land management questions. A number of world-class experts provide a review of cutting-edge natural and social science and an assessment of past, current and potential future management strategies, policies and other drivers of change. After appraisal of key concepts and principles, chapters provide specific examples and applications by focussing on UK upland areas and specifically the Peak District National Park as a key example for other highly valuable upland regions.

Scotland is at the heart of modern sustainable upland management. This collection of cutting edge studies is a first-to-press synthesis of studies carried out by the Centre for Mountain Studies at Perth College, which will be both enlightening and relevan

In recent decades agricultural commodity surpluses in the developed world have contributed to a mantra of 'land surplus' in which set-aside, extensification, alternative land uses and 'wilding' have been key terms in debates over land. Quite suddenly all this has changed as a consequence of rapidly shifting commodity markets. Prices for cereals, oil seeds and other globally traded commodities have risen sharply. A contributor to this has been the shift to bioenergy cropping, fuelled by concerns over post-peak oil and climate change. Agricultural supply chain interests have embraced the 'new environmentalism' of climate change with enthusiasm, proudly proclaiming the readiness of the industry to produce both food and energy crops, and to do so with a neo-liberal confidence in markets to determine the balance between food and non-food crops in land use. But policy and politics have not necessarily caught up with these market and industry-led changes and some environmentalists are beginning to challenge the assumptions of the new 'productivism'. Is it necessarily the case, they ask, that agriculture's best contribution to tackling climate change is to grow bioenergy crops or invest in anaerobic-digesters or make land over for windfarms? Might not there be an equally important role in maximising the carbon sequestration or water-holding properties of biodiverse land? What is Land For? tackles these key cutting-edge issues of this new debate by setting out a baseline of evidence and ideas.

Addressing policy related issues, providing up-to-date scientific background information and laying out pressing land management questions, this interdisciplinary volume identifies and discusses key directions of environmental change in uplands, as well as providing an outlook into future management and conservation options responding to these changes.

All over Southeast Asia, rural communities are in transition to a sustainable status. This book explores how an environmentally fragile upland community in rural Philippines coped with and responded to economic and environmental tensions brought about by a globalized economy and decentralization. This in turn gave rise to local power especially in the management of natural resources.

"TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 741: Evaluation of Methodologies for Visual Impact Assessments evaluates visual impact assessment (VIA) procedures, methods, and practices that satisfy or exceed National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and other requirements. The report documents VIA methodologies and approaches used in the United States and other countries, describes the decision making framework used to select specific VIA techniques for a given project, includes VIA best practice case studies from state departments of transportation, and highlights promising new developments in the field."--pub. desc.

The SAGE Handbook of Environmental Change is an extensive survey of the interdisciplinary science of environmental change, including recent debates on climate change and the full range of other natural and anthropogenic changes affecting the Earth-ocean-atmosphere system in the past, present and future. It examines the historic importance, present status and future prospects of the field over two volumes. With more than 40 chapters, the books situate the defining characteristics and key paradigms within a state-of-the-art review of the field, including its changing nature and diversity of approaches, evidence base, key theoretical arguments, resonances with other disciplines and relationships between theory, research and practice. Opening with a detailed, contextualizing essay by the editors, the work is arranged into six parts: Part One: Approaches to Understanding Environmental Change Part Two: Evidence of Environmental Change and the Geo-ecological Response Part Three: Causes, Mechanisms and Dynamics of Environmental Change Part Four: Key Issues of Human-induced Environmental Changes and Their Impacts Part Five: Patterns, Processes and Impacts of Environmental Change at the Regional Scale Part Six: Responses of People to Environmental Change and Implications for Society Global in its coverage, scientific and theoretical in its approach, the books bring together an international set of respected editors and contributors to provide an exciting, timely addition to the literature on climate change. With the subjects′ interdisciplinary framework, this book will appeal to academics, researchers, postgraduates and practitioners in a variety of disciplines including, geography, geology, ecology, environmental science, archaeology, anthropology, politics and sociology.

Two perspectives have dominated the social science discourse on climate change adaptation. Firstly, an international narrative among UN and donor agencies of technical and financial support for planned climate change adaptation. Secondly, a significant volume of studies discuss how local communities can undertake their own autonomous adaptation. Effective and sustainable climate adaptation requires a third focus: understanding of the political processes within sub-national institutions that mediate between national and local practices. This book address the knowledge gap that currently exists about the role of district-level institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa in providing an enabling institutional environment for rural climate change adaptation.