Dear Colleagues,

Environmental degradation and climate change threaten the vital mechanisms of our land system, challenging its capability to support food production, biodiversity, livelihoods and the wellbeing of the people. The land-based ecosystems, land use system and land management we adopted are also responsible for multiple environmental issues, such as pollution, soil and water degradation from chemical agriculture, desertification from climatic variation and human activities, biodiversity loss from monocropping, global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions due to deforestation and the resultant food security and loss of natural ecosystems (e.g., forests, savannahs, natural grasslands and wetlands). More than a quarter of the global GHG emissions, such as N₂O and CH₄, are from the land sector,  also playing a key role as a vessel for GHGs. Hence, land-based solutions play a critical role in mitigating and adapting to impacts of climate change and environmental sustainability, and while we need to continue to use land to meet food demands and other purposes, there is a need for solutions to appropriately trade-off and produce optimal benefits whilst meeting those demands, adopting proper land use practices for the mitigation and adaptation of climate change impacts for the long-term sustainability of our environment. Environmentally sustainable land management can contribute to reducing the negative impacts of multiple stressors, including climate change, on ecosystems and societies.

The current Special Issue of Sustainability titled Land, Climate Change, and Environmental Sustainability aims to present innovative and high-quality research findings at the intersection between land, climate change and sustainability, especially to enhance the understanding that land use practices can continue to succeed in meeting people’s needs, whilst enhancing biodiversity and contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome, areas of research able to include, but not limited to, the following:

• Land, climate change and environmental sustainability nexus;
• Advanced methods and analyses in land use land cover studies to better understand the causes of land use change and comprehensive consequences of land use change;
• Climate change mitigation potential of land use systems and best practices to enhance ecosystem services;
• Adaptation needs and options in land use sector that maximize climate benefits with the least impact on provisioning services from the land system.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Rajendra Prasad Shrestha
Prof. Dr. Pawan K Joshi
Guest Editors

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• land use land cover
• climate change
• environmental sustainability
• land-based solutions
• mitigation adaptation