Rural decline has inevitably accompanied the increasing global levels of urban development. Issues such as rural depopulation, industrial recession, problems of agricultural security and abandoned land have swept both developing and developed countries. As a result, the development capacity of villages has fallen and threatened their sustainability and resilience. Changing socioeconomic and climate conditions pose great challenges to global food security, rural sustainability and poverty reduction. 

The transformation of human socio-economic activities associated with rural decline also exert further impacts on land use changes in these areas, such as farmland loss, land use inefficiency and abandoned residential land. Thus, the enhancement of land capacity plays an important role in coordinating the human-land relationship and sustaininging rural development and food security globally. The conference "Global Rural Development and Land Capacity Building" aims to analyse rural decline and investigate the relationship between rural transformation and land use with a view to contributing to sustainable agriculture and rural development. This conference is the inaugural conference of the IGU Commission onAgricultural Geography and Land Engineering which was formally estabilished in late 2016.