Cause, conseguenze e strategie di mitigazione Proponiamo il primo di una serie di articoli in cui affronteremo l’attuale problema dei mutamenti climatici. Presentiamo il documento redatto, votato e pubblicato dall’Ipcc - Comitato intergovernativo sui cambiamenti climatici - che illustra la sintesi delle ricerche svolte su questo tema rilevante.

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Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis.

Nature And Properties Of Soils

Glacial melting in the Tibetan Plateau affects the water resources of millions of people. This study finds that—partly owing to changes in atmospheric circulations and precipitation patterns—the most intensive glacier shrinkage is in the Himalayan region, whereas glacial retreat in the Pamir Plateau region is less apparent.

Different glacier status with atmospheric circulations in Tibetan Plateau and surroundings

Positive ions that are available in soils absorb on grain surfaces. The total sum of cations that can be absorbed bij a soil/sediment at a certain PH is defined by the cation-exchange capacity (CEC, in meq g-1: mol equivalents per gram). The uptake of cations is an important parameter in agriculture and the larger the CEC, the more cations can be absorbed to the soil. The CEC depends highly on the pH of soil and sediments, where the CEC decreases with decreasing PH (increasing acidity). The exchange of ions on sediments occurs commonly fast on geological time scales, but the kinetics of adsorption in natural environments is still poorly understood. The strength of the bonding between the cations and the sediments varies from weak Van der Waals bondings (physical adsorption) to strong chemical bonds. The CEC is widely used for agricultural assessment because it is a measure of general soil fertility as well as an indicator of structural stability because CED is capabel of enhancing development of shrinkage cracks. The list below shows the CEC for different types of minerals. The data indicate that the CEC can vary over 2 orders of magnitude for various types of , minerals and can vary one order of magnitude within one soil type. Cation exchange capacity for different types of sediment (Eisma, 1992; Locher and de Bakker, 1990):

Cation exchange capacity.

When the red harvester ant is threatened, nestmates rush to its assistance. The message is a chemical one. Distress is communicated and help summoned by the potential victim ejecting a tiny cocktail of alkanes and terpenoids. Professor E 0 Wilson, who made this discovery, is a distinguished zoologist whose writings have twice been awarded Pulitzer Prizes. His interests extend far beyond entomology, however. Why should human communication be qualitatively different from that of the ant, in being achieved by definable, physicochemical processes? And, if this is the case, surely the same must be true of other social phenomena? Having conceded so much, on what grounds can we exclude other products of human activity such as the social sciences, arts, humanities and ethics? In a mechanistic universe, the whole of human civilization is the ultimate product of the interaction between genes and environment, incredibly complex, as Wilson admits, but susceptible to fundamentally the same analytic techniques as communication in the harvester ant. Consilience (literally, a 'jumping together') is the notion that a common groundwork of explanation applies not only to the sciences but also to the arts, ethics and religion. In his book Consiliencel Wilson applies a combination of broad learning and a style of baroque exuberance to put the case for such a unity of knowledge. Wilson is thus, as he makes clear, a child of the Enlightenment, paying homage to Bacon and Newton but most of all to Condorcet, who trod the same intellectual path (and who came to grief in the Revolution for reasons probably not unrelated to his philosophy). He mourns the triumph at the end of the eighteenth century of revelatory religion fearful of the outcomes of science, and most of all of Romanticism although regrettably overlooking the

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

A sustainable and pleasant environment is deemed to offer various positive externalities such as scenic, visual and behavioral archetypes and patterns exhibiting in various forms. Such a scenario can significantly relieve households from many psychological and personal complications such as depression. Depression has aroused great concerns in recent years due to its personal and social burdens and unforeseeable damage. Many studies have explored the effects of air pollution caused by traditional fuel consumption on depression. However, limited evidence is available on how household non-traditional fuel choices affect depression. Based on a nationally representative dataset collected from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) in 2012, this paper employs an endogenous switching regression (ESR) model and an endogenous switching probit (ESP) model to address the endogenous issue and to estimate the treatment effects of non-traditional fuel choices on depression in rural China. The empirical results show that non-traditional fuel users have significantly lower Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) scores, indicating non-traditional fuel users face a lower risk of depression. Compared to solid fuels, employing non-traditional fuels will lead to a 3.659 reduction in depression score or decrease the probability of depression by 8.2%. In addition, the results of the mechanism analysis show that household non-traditional fuel choices affect depression by reducing the probability of physical discomfort and chronic disease. This study provides new insight into understanding the impact of air pollution in the house on depression and how to avoid the risk of depression in rural China effectively.

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Ecological Sustainability and Households’ Wellbeing: Linking Households’ Non-Traditional Fuel Choices with Reduced Depression in Rural China

Concerns over the potential harmful impacts of changing climate are strongly echoing around the globe. With its wide range of hazards to human societies, climate change is posing serious threats to human survival and impacting every aspect of human life, including food production systems. It is, therefore, imperative to gauge the local knowledge, perceptions, and adaptation capacity for the effective mitigation of the ill impacts of climate change. In this backdrop, the present study has been designed to investigate the perceptions of farmers regarding causes and impacts of climate change on agriculture. Required data were collected from the Madinah region in Saudi Arabia and analyzed to answer the following study questions: How do farmers perceive impacts of climate change? What factors affect their perceived impacts of climate change? Additionally, what factors affect their perception about the causes of climate change? Individual logit models were used to assess the impacts of various factors on perceived causes and perceived impacts of climate change on agriculture. A multinomial logit model was also employed to figure out significant determinants of perceived causes of climate change on agriculture. Results indicated that the most dominant perceived impacts of climate change are its effects on crop production, followed by drying water sources. The results also revealed that the age of the farmers had a positive effect on their perception of natural processes being the cause of climate change. Similarly, farming experience had an inverse effect on their perceptions regarding causes of climate change. The majority of the farmers seemed clear about the possible drivers of climate change in the country. In particular, about 79 percent of the farmers believed that GHGs and pollution are causing climate change in the country. The findings provide useful insights into farmers’ perceptions about causes and impacts of climate change and may be used by policymakers to strategically design extension and agricultural development initiatives for helping the farmers to implement sustainable agricultural practices to adapt to and lower the adverse impacts of climate change in the Kingdom.

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Dynamics and Determinants of Farmers’ Perceptions about Causes and Impacts of Climate Change on Agriculture in Saudi Arabia: Implications for Adaptation, Mitigation, and Sustainability

Azhar Abbas

Papers

Ecological Sustainability and Households’ Wellbeing: Linking Households’ Non-Traditional Fuel Choices with Reduced Depression in Rural China

Dynamics and Determinants of Farmers’ Perceptions about Causes and Impacts of Climate Change on Agriculture in Saudi Arabia: Implications for Adaptation, Mitigation, and Sustainability