Successive New Zealand governments have failed to adopt effective climate change policies. A positive, albeit limited, step was taken with the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme in 2008, a scheme founded on a framework of comprehensive coverage, applying to all sectors of the economy and all Kyoto gases, addressing the challenge of creating an emissions trading scheme tailored for a country characterised by large forest sinks and substantial agricultural emissions. Amendments in 2009 created significant changes in the way the scheme operates.

Human-driven land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) is one of the most important causes for depletion of biodiversity. Few studies have been undertaken to spatially identify the natural areas prone to LULCC and hence biodiversity loss. This article describes a geospatial modelling technique using a combination of drivers of LULCC, spatial distribution
of LULCC and topographic impedances for change in hotspot. A study has been carried out to establish the model. The model has shown that the natural areas having high population density in the vicinity are highly prone to LULCC.

We study the regional variation of temperature trends (warming or cooling) over Western India and the contribution of land-use and land-cover (LULC) changes towards this warming or cooling based on temperature datasets of 37 years (1973–2009). The contribution of LULC to the warming or cooling is estimated based on deviation in temperature in the observation and reanalysis datasets. The observed temperature dataset indicates that Western India is getting warmer by 0.13°C per decade. This warming is the combined effect of increase in concentration of greenhouse gases and LULC changes.

A study was conducted to estimate soil organic pool (SOC) in three land uses viz. forests, horticulture and grasslands in Chamoli district.