Urban agriculture is said to be increasing with global urbanization. However, there is little examination of the temporal or spatial dynamics of urban agriculture. We investigated the benefits and challenges experienced by community gardeners in four towns in South Africa, along with GIS analysis of the number, area, and location of urban food community gardens over the last three decades.

Innovative, pragmatic approaches are needed to support sustainable livelihoods and landscape management in complex social-ecological systems (CSES) such as river catchments. In the Tsitsa River Catchment, South Africa, researchers and natural resource managers have come together to apply such innovative approaches.

Revisiting South Africa's land and agrarian questions / Grasian Mkodzongi and Femke Brandt -- Broadening conceptions of democracy and citizenship : the subaltern histories of rural resistance in Mpondoland and Marikana / Sarah Bruchhausen and Camalita Naicker -- From material to cultural : historiographic approaches to the Eastern Cape's agrarian past / Elene Cloete -- South Africa's dangerous

Although advances in remote sensing have enhanced mapping and monitoring of irrigated areas, producing accurate cropping information through satellite image classification remains elusive due to the complexity of landscapes, changes in reflectance of different land-covers, the remote sensing data selected, and image processing methods used, among others.

Bush encroachment is a matter of growing concern in the semi-arid regions of Namibia. Locally adapted, long-term solutions for land restoration must be elaborated. It is crucial that local scientists are empowered to map and monitor the degradation process themselves, our authors maintain.

Agriculture influences and shapes the world’s ecosystems, but not always in a positive way. More than 2.5 billion people are globally involved as stewards of land and water ecosystems that constitute the natural resource base for feeding the current and future world population.

As of 2017, SGP has awarded over 3,800 small grants to land degradation projects in over 120 countries, many of which are in regions with extreme levels of poverty and food insecurity across Africa and Latin America. Africa, in particular, is experiencing the highest population growth of the developing world, while being exposed and vulnerable to the rising impact from climate change.

Climate change is a complex and cross-cutting problem that needs an integrated and transformative systems approach to respond to the challenge. Current sectoral approaches to climate change adaptation initiatives often create imbalances and retard sustainable development.