Land consolidation – an important stage of agricultural and rural development. This is a significant land use planning process, when private, municipal and state land parcels located in rural areas are redistributed in a complex way, their boundaries and location are changed by the prepared land consolidation project of a certain area. Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the benefits of land consolidation to farm structure and productivity, restructuring of rural areas and development, but there is not enough emphasis on the benefits of our environment, landscape and biodiversity. Experience of European countries shows that the land consolidation projects can be useful not only for farmers, but also for our environment and its individual components. The article gives an overview of not only the positive aspects of environmental preservation. The fact that the land consolidation projects can bring negative results (i.e. that they are implemented without regard to the sustainable transformation of the territory) is noted as well.

The article discusses the current state of forest land, the history of formation of large tracts of forest in the Samara region and analyses some of the results of implementation of target programs to improve the forest cover in the region under the Kyoto Protocol. This program was designed for the period from 2006 to 2015, but in 2009 was discontinued. However, large segment of assets was allocated and a number of works was carried out. Currently the objectives of the programme to increase the forest cover in the territory of Samara region through the creation of tracts of forest are not achieved. Tree and shrub plantations play an important role in reducing the activity of processes of erosion, prevent degradation and desertification. Therefore, the problem of increasing forest cover, especially in the steppe zone of the region, to the level of the preindustrial era remains relevant and requires science-based measures for their solution.

Spatial sustainable development planning and providing is a very responsible process. During the process, many spatial development planning documents for specific different time periods on different planning levels are being developed. However, there are only slight differences between the spatial development planning in many European countries where few of them can notice more than the others. Latvia and England, two European Union countries, which had some significant changes in legislation regarding spatial development planning in 2011, were selected for the comparison. The research aims to evaluate similar and different aspects of spatial development planning in Latvia and England. To achieve the aim, the information on spatial development planning tendencies in both countries, legislation, development order of planning documents and other aspects. The result is a comparison of different and similar aspects of spatial development planning in Latvia and England.