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Over the past decade, biofuels production in the European Union and the United States has boomed – much of this due to government mandates and subsidies. The United States has now surpassed Brazil as the world's leading producer of ethanol. The economic and environmental impact of these biofuel programs has become an important question of public policy. Due to the complex intersectoral linkages between biofuels and crops, livestock as well as energy activities, CGE modeling has become an important tool for their analysis. This chapter reviews recent developments in this area of economic analysis and suggests directions for future research.

The Portuguese montado is a particular land use system, characterized by the combination, in the same area, of the forestry and the grazing components interrelating with each other, in large-scale farm units. Mostly, this system is acknowledged due to its specific landscape character, in a savanna-like phisionomy, with changing densities along a continuous tree cover of holm and cork oaks and grazing in the under cover. The montado is a production system, and its extensive character and particular pattern makes it possible to support a multitude of ecosystem goods and services nowadays valued by society. Nevertheless the system is threatened and the resulting landscape is under strong reduction in the last decades. This paper shows the dimension of the ongoing reduction, for the whole region of Alentejo, since 1960 and up to now. And furthermore, based on a survey to land managers of montado in a Natura 2000 site, it shows how the land management options for the most are still focusing on production and productivist ideals, even when keeping a multifunctional system. These orientations do not result in a radical replacement of the system, and therefore the illusion is kept that the multifunctionality is mantained – but progressively the system loses its balance and the tree cover decays in such a way that the montado disappears. This unique landscape is thus under severe threat. The paper ends with a discussion on the urgent need for integrated policy goals and tools for the montado as a system, and for much more colaboration with the land managers in order to strength the multifunctionalty relevance and support a novel attitude replacing the productivist concept of farming, misleading in the context of this system.

The objective of this chapter is to provide an approach to the farmland abandonment problem in Galicia, the Spain’s north-western region. We describe the land use pattern that characterized the traditional agricultural system, and analyze the process of structural adjustment and changes in land use recorded in the last 50 years. The empirical basis is provided mainly by an original elaboration of agricultural census data for the period 1982–2009. The results show that in the last five decades the area devoted to crops and pastures was constrained to a small portion of the territory (just over 20%), while the agro-livestock uses of hill land which were very important up to the mid-twentieth century disappeared. All this led to a remarkable expansion of abandoned land, which currently occupies at least 20% of the regional area. The drivers of this farmland abandonment are diverse and vary from one zone to another. But among them the conditioners derived from the structure of land ownership must be emphasized, coupled with the poor functioning of the land market and leasing. Land abandonment has had a major impact on the dynamics of the agricultural sector, limiting the size of farms and causing an increasing intensification in a small portion of the territory. This has also led to severe environmental problems, especially forest fires. Consequently, improving mobility and land use should be a priority of agricultural and rural development policies in this region.

Arid ecosystem covers one third of the Earth's surface and is the home town of majority of the population of the world. This ecosystem is also important because it has significant roles in land and water resources management. However, due to anthropogenic land use activities or shifting climate conditions, the features of the ecosystem change and cause diminished vegetative cover, reduced productivity, increased soil erosion, invasion of exotics, and loss of native species. Moreover, in the recent years, earth's vegetative cover may exceed the ecosystem's capacity to adapt, which happens through the consequence of rapid land degradation along with desertification. Therefore, this chapter provides how different regions endeavor with this arid ecosystem by performing various adaptation practices.