Humanity has made enormous progress in the past 50 years toward eliminating hunger and malnutrition. Some five billion people--more than 80 percent of the world's population--have enough food to live healthy, productive lives. Agricultural development has contributed significantly to these gains, while also fostering economic growth and poverty reduction in some of the world's poorest countries.

The world has made enormous progress in the past 50 years toward eliminating hunger and malnutrition. While, in 1960, roughly 30 percent of the world's population suffered from hunger and malnutrition, today less than 20 percent doessome five billion people now have enough food to live healthy, productive lives. Agricultural development has contributed significantly to these gains by increasing food supplies, reducing food prices, and creating new income and employment opportunities for some of the world's poorest people.This book examines where, why, and how past interventions in agricultural development have succeeded. It carefully reviews the policies, programs, and investments in agricultural development that have reduced hunger and poverty across Africa, Asia, and Latin America over the past half century. The 19 successes included here are described in in-depth case studies that synthesize the evidence on the intervention's impact on agricultural productivity and food security, evaluate the rigor with which the evidence was collected, and assess the tradeoffs inherent in each success. Together, these chapters provide evidence of "what works" in agricultural development.

Forest tenure reforms are occurring in many developing countries around the world. These reforms typically include devolution of forest lands to local people and communities, which has attracted a great deal of attention and interest. While the nature and level of devolution vary by country, all have potentially important implications for resource allocation, local ecosystem services, livelihoods and climate change. This book helps students, researchers and professionals to understand the importance and implications of these reforms for local environmental quality, climate change, and the livelihoods of villagers, who are often poor. It is shown that local forest management can often be more successful than top-down management of common pool forest resources. The relationship of local forest tenure reform to the important climate change initiative REDD+ is also considered. The work includes a number of generic chapters and also detailed case studies from China, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, Tanzania and Uganda. Using specific examples and a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives, including quantitative and qualitative analytical methods, the book provides an authoritative and critical picture of local forest reforms in light of the key challenges humanity faces today.

Authored by world-class scientists and scholars, The Handbook of Natural Resources, Second Edition, is an excellent reference for understanding the consequences of changing natural resources to the degradation of ecological integrity and the sustainability of life. Based on the content of the bestselling and CHOICE-awarded Encyclopedia of Natural Resources, this new edition demonstrates the major challenges that the society is facing for the sustainability of all well-being on the planet Earth. The experience, evidence, methods, and models used in studying natural resources are presented in six stand-alone volumes, arranged along the main systems of land, water, and air. It reviews state-of-the-art knowledge, highlights advances made in different areas, and provides guidance for the appropriate use of remote sensing and geospatial data with field-based measurements in the study of natural resources. Volume 1, Terrestrial Ecosystems and Biodiversity, provides fundamental information on terrestrial ecosystems, approaches to monitoring, and impacts of climate change on natural vegetation and forests. New to this edition are discussions on biodiversity conservation, gross and net primary production, soil microbiology, land surface phenology, and decision support systems. This volume demonstrates the key processes, methods, and models used through many case studies from around the world. Written in an easy-to-reference manner, The Handbook of Natural Resources, Second Edition, as individual volumes or as a complete set, is an essential reading for anyone looking for a deeper understanding of the science and management of natural resources. Public and private libraries, educational and research institutions, scientists, scholars, and resource managers will benefit enormously from this set. Individual volumes and chapters can also be used in a wide variety of both graduate and undergraduate courses in environmental science and natural science at different levels and disciplines, such as biology, geography, earth system science, and ecology.

Through the prism of a Nepali remittance village, this book critically examines poverty and livelihood dynamics remade through transnational labour migration and remittances, and their interrelationships with land, rural labour and agriculture. The concept of The Remittance Village emphasises rural people’s transnational mobilities as a key feature of contemporary dynamics in many parts of the Global South, which are reconfiguring rural social, economic and ecological textures. Sunam challenges complacent linear narratives that assume new opportunities such as transnational migration, and remittances provide better pathways for the rural poor to come out of poverty, as well as narratives that understate the importance of land and farming for the rural poor. He demonstrates both that new opportunities are inaccessible for many poor people and that accessing these opportunities often engenders increased precarity and vulnerability. In The Remittance Village, he finds that even those accessing new opportunities are successful only when their household member(s) are simultaneously engaged in in-situ (non-)agricultural activities. This book is a valuable resource for scholars and students from a range of interdisciplinary backgrounds, including human geography, anthropology of development, and sociology. It is also recommended reading for policy makers, international development agencies and I/NGOs working on rural development in the Global South. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Authored by world-class scientists and scholars, the Handbook of Natural Resources, Second Edition, is an excellent reference for understanding the consequences of changing natural resources to the degradation of ecological integrity and the sustainability of life. Based on the content of the bestselling and CHOICE awarded Encyclopedia of Natural Resources, this new edition demonstrates the major challenges that the society is facing for the sustainability of all wellbeing on planet Earth. The experience, evidence, methods, and models used in studying natural resources are presented in six stand-alone volumes, arranged along the main systems: land, water, and air. It reviews state-of-the-art knowledge, highlights advances made in different areas, and provides guidance for the appropriate use of remote sensing data in the study of natural resources on a global scale. The six volumes in this set cover: Terrestrial Ecosystems and Biodiversity; Landscape and Land Capacity; Wetlands and Habitats; Fresh Water and Watersheds; Coastal and Marine Environments; and finally Atmosphere and Climate. Written in an easy-to-reference manner, the Handbook of Natural Resources, Second Edition, as a complete set, is essential for anyone looking for a deeper understanding of the science and management of natural resources. Public and private libraries, educational and research institutions, scientists, scholars, and resource managers will benefit enormously from this set. Individual volumes and chapters can also be used in a wide variety of both graduate and undergraduate courses in environmental science and natural science courses at different levels and disciplines, such as biology, geography, Earth system science, ecology, etc.

The sustainable management of forest resources became an indispensable prerequisite for any policy addressing the actual and future challenges of globabl development. Forests and other tree resources are essential for the provision of ecosystem services and contribute largely to future food security, livelihoods and ecosystem stability. Forests and any other trees outside the forest play a relevant role all three great UN conventions (on Climate Change, on Biodiversity, and on Combatting Desertification). The policy processes to implement the measures in these conventions on sub-national, national, regional and international level are extremely complex. This complexity comes, among other factors, from a blend of different sectoral and national interests, from a large number of scientifically not yet entirely resolved issues and a wide range of different biophysical, social, cultural and political conditions all over the world.

Large numbers of tropical trees from natural forests or plantation forest are available for human consumption and management. This book focuses on the prospects and utilization of tropical plantation trees in context of economic and business, planting, managing stocks, and uses of trees converted to various wood-based products. It provides information on key areas of tropical plantation trees including growth performance, nursery practices, soil properties, planting stock production, raw material cellulose, anatomy, pulping and papermaking, fiber modification, and properties of wood composites. Features: Comprehensive information on prospects and utilization of tropical plantation tree species. Features information on potential products derived from tropical plantation trees including cellulose-based wood products, particleboard with bioplastic binder, and laminated veneer lumber. Discusses species usage of economic importance other than wood production. Presents information on nursery practices, growth performance, and soil properties of tropical trees. Illustrates methodologies for repeating investigations on work that has been done previously in tropical tree research. This book introduces information for entrepreneurs or researchers before undertaking work with these tree species illustrating technical methodologies allowing for repetition or previous successful works. This information proves valuable to researchers if further work is needed for improvement on these plant-derived products.