Land Governance Technology and Institutional Reform for Achieving Sustainable Development Goals with Environmental and Social Aspects

Dear Colleagues,

As a key carrier of the interaction between humans and nature, the land use system is in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs) proposed by the United Nations to improve agricultural land production capacity, promote industrial land intensive and transformational use, build safe and inclusive towns, and prevent land pollution. The seven goals, namely restoration of ecosystems and prevention of land degradation, poverty eradication and realization of land property rights security, are closely related. These goals can be summarized into three goals: efficient and intensive use of land, protection and improvement of land ecological environment, and social acceptance. The ability to predict and manage current and future opportunities and risks across economic, environmental, and societal dimensions, while prioritizing environmental conservation and efficiency optimization, aligns with the public governance strategies put forth by sovereign nations in areas such as energy conservation, technological innovation, and rural revitalization. These strategies resonate with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by the United Nations, which emphasize intensive production, human rights protection, and ecological environmental optimization. Achieving carbon neutrality and peak carbon emissions are integral aspects of these strategies.

Under the complex international background that human beings continue to face climate change and energy crisis, there are still many challenges in terms of cultivated land protection, land management in flood risk areas, transformation and upgrading of industrial land, and land ecological restoration. It is worth noting that when solving this series of major issues, we need to divide the land environment into ecological environment and social environment for analysis. On the one hand, improper human activities destroy land resources, water resources, and ecosystem services as ecological public goods, bringing about a series of problems such as flood disasters, extreme weather, land salinization and desertification, and fossil energy pollution. The resulting negative externalities urgently need to be eliminated through technological transformation, forward-looking planning, and ecological restoration. On the other hand, issues related to the provision of social public goods such as labor rights, healthcare, income inequality, and data security are also significant points of concern. Promoting the optimization of the social environment also urgently demands effective utilization of social resources, including credit resources, human rights protection, and the business environment, by individuals, businesses, and governments.

Based on the analysis above, there is a need to increase investment in research and development of sustainable land use technologies, fostering technological innovation, and developing technologies and models with independent intellectual property rights. Relevant institutions should strengthen land use planning and management, establish more stringent land use policies, restrict unsustainable land use practices, and guide and incentivize sustainable land use. Greater emphasis should be placed on environmental impact assessments of sustainable land use, quantitatively evaluating its environmental effects to provide a scientific basis for improving and optimizing technologies. Efforts should also be intensified in the ecological restoration of damaged lands to promote the regeneration and optimal allocation of land resources, thereby enhancing the stability and resilience of ecosystems. We call upon researchers to analyze and simulate the supply of public goods such as land governance technologies and related systems from the perspectives of disaster prevention, green innovation, social governance, and international collaborative regulation.

The focal point of this Special Issue is the realization of environmental governance objectives under the backdrop of climate change. This encompasses aspects such as flood hazard defense, land planning, hydrological modeling, remote sensing positioning, carbon emission reduction technologies, and the technological and institutional transformations resulting from multiple stakeholders involved in the development of standards and regulatory frameworks for the provision of public goods related to land, energy, and carbon emission trading. Indeed, the inclusive development of man, nature, and society is one of the key issues of common concern in the fields of environmental science, geographical science, economic science, public management science, and legal science. We look forward to, through academic discourse and environmental governance, particularly in the realm of land environmental governance, synthesizing guiding experiences in technology and governance models across different countries, regions, and cultural contexts. This Special Issue therefore welcomes relevant and interdisciplinary original research articles and review articles. While the emphasis will be on empirical articles, articles with editorial style or those proposing methodological innovations will also be considered.

Prof. Dr. Pingping Luo
Dr. Jiqiang Lyu
Prof. Dr. Van-Thanh-Van Nguyen
Dr. Mohd Remy Rozainy Mohd Arif Zainol
Guest Editors

Assoc. Prof. Lili Liu
Guest Editor Assistant

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