Hyperarid, arid, semiarid, and dry subhumid areas cover approximately 41% of the global land area. The human population in drylands, currently estimated at 2.7 billion, faces limited access to sufficient, affordable, and nutritious food. We discuss the interlinkages among water security, environmental security, energy security, economic security, health security, and food security governance, and how they affect food security in drylands. Reliable and adequate water supply, and the prevention of water contamination, increase the potential for ample food, fodder, and fiber production. Protecting woodlands and rangelands increases food security by buffering the slow onset effects of climate change, including biodiversity loss, desertification, salinization, and land degradation. The protection of natural lands is expected to decrease environmental contamination, and simultaneously, reduce the transfer of diseases from wildlife to humans. Biofuel production and hydroelectric power plants increase energy security but generate land-use conflicts, deforestation, and ecosystem degradation. Economic security generally positively correlates with food security. However, economic growth often degrades the environment, changes tenure rights over natural resources, and stimulates migration to urban areas, resulting in lower food and health security. Moreover, civil unrest, political instability, and armed conflicts disrupt local economies in drylands. Maintaining food security is crucial for health security; conversely, malnourished populations and unresponsive health systems decrease economic security, and adversely affect environmental, energy, and food security. Climate change is expected to deteriorate health security by spreading vector-borne diseases. Effective governance and timely interventions can substantially shorten periods of food insecurity, lower their intensities, and accelerate recovery from inevitable crises, and are therefore crucial in preventing humanitarian crises. Since global drylands population will nearly double by 2050, and since drylands are among the most susceptible areas to climate change, integrated multi-hazard approaches to food security are needed.

This paper presents the Environmental Concern Kuznets Curve (ECKC) theory about decreasing environmental concern in the most developed and protected area-rich countries. We analyzed the relationship between the protected area (PA) coverage, environmental concern and GDP per capita in the 42 most developed countries in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. Our conclusion is that 1) as countries develop, environmental protection becomes less dependent on economic development; 2) at high levels of economic development, environmental concern decreases; 3) environmental concern reaches a maximum at 20-30% of PA coverage and decreases beyond this point. The influence of human values and factors at the local level was determined by a national survey (n = 999) on public attitudes toward greater conservation of forests in Slovenia. The results comply with the ECKC theory; the higher the naturalness of forests in the surroundings of a respondent's home, the lower the support for greater conservation. However, the study suggests that human values play a prominent role. Support for conservation largely depended on the respondents' general attitude toward forest cover and growing stock, harvesting intensities, satisfaction with the level of control in forests and concern for the population of protected brown bears. The general belief that ecosystems are fragile and there are limits to growth increased support for conservation by 33%. We conclude that the environment in the most developed countries is likely to experience increasing pressure due to decreasing environmental concern and its decoupling from objective problems.

Chronic browsing and inappropriate stand management are often discussed as causes for recruitment failure of tree species in temperate mixed uneven-aged forests. Continuous cover forestry is thought to produce conditions that are conducive to the recruitment of native shade-tolerant and browse-sensitive tree species such as silver fir (Abies alba Mill.). This study used density-dependent matrix population models parameterized for three main types of fir forests in Europe (53 048 measured trees from 3183 permanent sample plots) to project the effects of Business-As-Usual uneven-aged management (BAU) and three alternative management scenarios (Non-Intervention (NON), Profit Maximization (MAX) and stand management optimized for increasing recruitment (CONS)) on fir population dynamics over 100 years. BAU, MAX and, particularly, CONS improved the population parameters if natural recruitment was sufficient regardless of site, current and historical logging and transient and equilibrium growth rates under NON. In chronically browsed and recruitment-limited fir populations with transient and equilibrium growth rates <1 under NON, the demographic ageing of fir can only be halted temporarily if silviculture is optimized for conservation, but none of the scenarios can prevent fir from decline. Our results suggest that a number of uneven-aged silvicultural systems, including more profit-oriented, can improve the demography of fir in central European mountain forests. However, they are not a pragmatic method to conserve fir when a population suffers from limited recruitment that causes an unmanaged population to decline.

Although several private forest owner studies have dealt with how private forest owners understand forest management, little is known about the determinants of specific forest management concepts. The study expands previous latent variable models of the perception of forest management by European private forest owners by looking at how age, income, education, annual cut, and holding size and type influence specific understandings of forest management. We applied a multiple indicators multiple causes (MIMIC) structural equation model on a representative sample of 754 private forest owners from Slovenia. The MIMIC model confirmed the influence of six covariates on three concepts of forest management: the maintenance concept, the ecosystem-centered concept, and the economics-centered concept. The strongest determinants of perception were education and holding type. The maintenance concept was predominantly associated with less educated older full-time or part-time farmers working on smaller family farms and doing regular cuts. The perception of forest management as an economics-centered activity increased with increased education and dependence on income from intensive cuts. The ecosystem-centered concept was most strongly associated with younger, better-educated owners with smaller holdings and, surprisingly, not to non-farmers but to small-scale family farmers. However, the proportion of the variance of latent variables explained by the six covariates was low, ranging from 2.4% to 5.1%. Taking into account the influence of education and holding type on private forest owners’ perception of forest management, by increasing the level of education and raising the proportion of absentee owners in Europe, we expect a shift from the maintenance concept toward either an economics-centered or ecosystem-oriented concept for forest management. Despite the weak influence of private forest owners’ social economic profiles on forest management conceptualizations, governments should be aware of the trend and actively seek to prevent the polarization of forest management concepts.