Outcome-Based Assessment of the Payment for Mountain Agriculture: A Community-Based Approach to Countering Land Abandonment in Japan.

Agricultural land accounts for 37% of the world's terrestrial area, and the multiple functions of agroecosystems-providing food, soil and water retention, and various cultural services-are of great importance for sustainable land management. To ensure that multifunctionality, payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes have been developed for heterogeneous agroecosystems. However, the effects of the schemes have not been fully measured because, in most cases, they have been implemented as action-oriented programs rather than outcome-based payments. This study examines the effect of a community-based PES (CB-PES) program on the prevention of farmland abandonment to assess the agricultural outcomes of PES implementation in hilly and mountainous areas in Japan. We interviewed farmers in enrolled communities, mapped enrolled plots, and analyzed agricultural census data on the socioeconomic characteristics and farmland management conditions of 12,261 farmers in 960 agricultural communities in a typical hilly and mountainous area of Noto Peninsula in northern Japan. The results confirm that direct payments are effective in enhancing community management and in preventing additional farmland abandonment. In addition, we found that several socioeconomic and environmental factors at both the community and farmer levels-including geographical conditions, collective management activities, absence of successors, farm scale, and off-farm income dependency-simultaneously affected the farmland abandonment process. Specifically, collective practices within and between communities is a significant factor in preventing farmland abandonment more than collaboration with outsiders. Considering the depopulation and aging of rural communities throughout Japan, intercommunity enrollment could improve the effectiveness of CB-PES by upscaling the current payment scheme to maintain community functions.

Emergency flood detection using multiple information sources: Integrated analysis of natural hazard monitoring and social media data.

Extreme weather events are occurring more frequently as a result of climate change. In October 2019, eastern Japan was hit by Hagibis, a large and high-speed typhoon. This unprecedented typhoon caused the evacuation of over 4000 people, injured more than 300 people, and damaged more than 98,000 dwellings throughout the affected area. Because floods are one of the most devastating natural disasters in Asia, providing an effective early warning system (EWS) is critical to reducing disaster impacts. However, warnings based only on natural hazard monitoring do not offer sufficient protection. Integrating natural hazard monitoring and social media data could improve warning systems to enhance the awareness of disaster managers and citizens about emergency events. We analyzed time-series data including rainfall intensity, 90-min-effective rainfall, and river water level as well as Twitter data related to disaster events during the 5-day period from 11 to 15 October, focusing on the most affected areas in Japan. The analysis included more than 60,000 tweets. Our analysis confirmed the utility of the statistical approach of outbreak detection with social media data in the early detection and local identification of multiple-flood events, and the results from the municipality-level analyses show that tweet frequencies related to the flood disaster ontological categories were significantly correlated to temporal variations in the hazard monitoring data. Thus, flood detection at the administrative level using social media data combined with current hazard monitoring data can enable a decision-driven EWS design. Interactive approaches for decision-making and knowledge production should continue to be considered in the face of climate-change-induced disasters.

Impact assessment of land use functions on the sustainable regional development of representative Asian countries - A comparative study in Bangladesh, China and Japan.

Sustainable land use is a fundamental research field for land use planning. However, regional policymakers often lack access to the theoretical impacts that a land use policy might have on local development, especially in remote agricultural areas. Furthermore, knowledge exchange is important, especially in the context of globalization. This research employed the Framework of Participatory Impact Assessment and household surveys to combine multilevel stakeholders and comprehensively assessed the impacts of different land management scenarios on land use functions (LUFs) and local sustainable development. We completed this comparative study in typical remote agricultural areas in Godagari upazila of Bangladesh, Guyuan of China and Noto of Japan, which all have gradient differences in terms of their economic and social aspects, natural conditions and main land use issues. The selected scenarios were business as usual, increase in agricultural input and reform of rural development mode. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) the farmers at the three study sites all showed a decreasing dependence on their land and a relevant level of stress on environmental LUFs, but the rooted reasons were different and even opposing; (2) scenarios with a high aggregate impact on LUFs might not enable a sustainable development model, and the assessment of land management measures should consider the balance among environmental, economic and social dimensions; and (3) land use and management practices should be conducted with consideration of local conditions, and protecting agricultural development and enacting appropriate agricultural reforms could revitalize local agricultural development. The results revealed the demand for location-specific land management practices and underlined the knowledge of agricultural management on an international scale.

Land Transition and Intensity Analysis of Cropland Expansion in Northern Ghana.

Cropland expansion to meet the growing demand for food and fuel is a driving factor in forest degradation. Over the next few decades, increases in the area of agricultural land are expected to be concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, which still has large tracts of unexploited land suitable for agricultural production. We analyzed land-cover change in northern Ghana between 1984 and 2015 and compared it with background social factors associated with land change. Maps from three points in time were analyzed to identify the impact of cropland expansion on the distribution of natural vegetation. Three-level intensity analysis revealed that the overall rate of change for the 31-year period was less than that of the first time interval (1984-1999); however, the overall impact on natural vegetation was substantial, and grassland in particular was reduced to a very small proportion of the area over the period. Cropland replaced only grassland during the first time interval, but also began to replace open woodland during the second interval (1999-2015). The in-depth assessment revealed that cropland expansion continued at a steady rate, but the impact on natural vegetation was not uniform across vegetation types; grassland was more vulnerable than woodland, and woodland became increasingly targeted with continual expansion of the agricultural frontier as population increased. Further validation of the socio-cultural factors associated with the observed transitions will help to identify the explicit implications and assist in developing strategies to minimize the impacts of land-use change on regional livelihoods.