Showing papers in "Environmental Science & Policy in 2009"

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the adaptation strategies used by farmers in South Africa and Ethiopia and analyzes the factors influencing the decision to adapt using data from a survey of 1800 farm households.

TL;DR: In this article, a review of the life cycle analysis (LCA) approach to quantifying greenhouse gas emissions of livestock is presented, arguing that given the dynamic complexity of our food system, it offers a limited understanding of livestock's GHG impacts.

TL;DR: Palm oil is an important source of edible oil, and also a potential biofuel raw material as discussed by the authors, but the distinction between these uses is rarely made, and the importance of subsidies for biodiesel, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil and the roles of banks and NGOs are briefly discussed.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine three interlinked drivers of adaptation: climate change, desertification and drought, assessing the extent to which international and national policy supports local adaptive strategies in three countries in southern Africa.

TL;DR: A recent international conference on environmental change and food security as mentioned in this paper included a range of papers that embraced the multiple dimensions of the food systems that underpin food security, and the major conclusion from the conference was that technical fixes alone will not solve the food security challenge.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors carried out some analysis to identify areas in sub-Saharan Africa where such transitions might occur and found that those likely to be more affected are already more poor, on average.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue for a normative focus on poverty reduction and concern for the distributional consequences of dynamic changes in agri-food systems, rather than aggregates and averages.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the tradeoffs concerning welfare and food security related to biofuel development and suggest a typology that can be applied across countries to characterize their energy needs and better target the types of bioenergy uses that might be best suited for them.

TL;DR: Turnhout et al. as mentioned in this paper examined how six different knowledge brokering strategies; informing, consulting, matchmaking, engaging, collaborating and building capacity might be employed in responding to different types of environmental policy problems or policy settings identified in decision-aiding frameworks.

TL;DR: The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has successfully demonstrated that market-based mechanisms can achieve some cost effective emissions reductions in developing countries, but the distribution of CDM projects has been extremely uneven across countries and regions, and a few technologies and sectors have dominated the early stages of the CDM experience as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify socio-economic indicators associated with sensitivity and resilience to drought for each of China's main grain crops (rice, wheat and corn) and calculate an annual crop-drought vulnerability index.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors look at how collaborative networks work to produce innovation, and more importantly reflect also on their inherent contradictions, limitations and "dark sides" and reveal that collaborative governance enhances mutual understandings and can be a source of innovation.

TL;DR: In this article, a synthesis paper bringing together literature from the fields of political science, geography, sociology and science and technology studies is presented to better conceptualise the evidence-policy relationship.

TL;DR: The Alaska case is used to illustrate that if food security is to be understood as a matter of human health, then the definitions of and designs for food security must recognize food's multifaceted and often regionally nuanced role in creating positive health outcomes.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors presented an attempt in that direction, validating the conjecture that AFS can contribute to soil carbon sequestration, and presented indicative ranges of SCS under different AFS in the major agroecological regions of the tropics.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present an analysis of the carbon footprint (CF) of municipal services provided by the city of Trondheim, and show that approximately 93 percent of the total CF of the municipal services is indirect emissions, located in upstream paths.

TL;DR: A variant of the Delphi technique is used to elicit expert opinion on a definition of successful adaptation to climate change, and expert respondents coalesced around a definition based on risk and vulnerability.

TL;DR: In this article, concepts and approaches from the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) were applied in a study of ecosystem service tradeoffs, synergies and traps in two of the river basins that flow into Lake Victoria from Kenya (Yala and Nyando).

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate the ways in which climate stressors and economic changes related to liberalisation alter the local vulnerability context and investigate how people related to the market while coping with the 2002-2003 drought.

TL;DR: In this article, a literature survey was undertaken to provide an overview of the different ecological benefits arising from alley cropping systems within temperate Europe, and the results showed that alley croppers may be an ecologically advantageous land use system for sustainable food and biomass production in comparison with conventional agricultural practices.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors draw from recent case studies of farm-level vulnerability and livelihood security in Mexico and Vietnam to demonstrate that coffee smallholders' independent responses to the risks and opportunities associated with global scale economic and environmental change, are teleconnected and thus can create feedbacks which in turn affect the present and future vulnerabilities of other smallholders around the globe.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe an initiative to develop a model for understanding the multi-faceted nature and effects of vulnerability, a concept that is widely used across disciplines and in development planning in Africa, particularly in southern Africa.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyzed the evolution of the structure, description, process development and context of the IPCC's emissions scenarios, identifying the most important changes and their scientific and political causes.

TL;DR: In this article, a set of considerations such as food demand response, resource efficiency, GHG emission limits and provisions to reduce vulnerability are discussed to develop sustainable food systems in the long term.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors apply a novel analytical framework to a primarily documentary analysis of three cases they argue are wicked, i.e., Canadian regulatory review of health products and food, European union (EU) environmental thematic strategies, and United Kingdom (UK) energy and climate change policy.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compare the design and action of two boundary objects created by CALFED, namely the Environmental Water Account (EWA) and the Water Use Efficiency (WUE) programs, and find that the presence of the boundary object does not explain the success of each policy experiment.

TL;DR: It is shown that improving the flexibility of IAM requires flexibility in model linking but also a generic set up of all IA steps, and that the proposed framework significantly advances flexibility in IAM and is a good basis to further improve integrated modelling for policy impact assessment in agriculture.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that fundamental to water management and adaptation planning is the integration of people's cultural values attached to the assets/resources they control and utilise in their efforts to adapt to various stresses on water resources.

TL;DR: Markov chain models are identified as the only generally suitable method for a broadly scoped modelling approach across European regions and a differentiated farm typology and their impact seems testable in more ambitious cross-regional and cross-farm type setups.

TL;DR: In this paper, the impact of different policy scenarios on structural change, land abandonment and cropping pattern of typical farms has been assessed based on linked agent-based (ABM) and linear programming (LP) models at regional and farm scale for two study areas.