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1.
Several international initiatives, including the World Economic Forum (WEF), aim to constitute biodiversity loss as a material risk to the ‘bottom line’ calculations of investors and insurers. The WEF claims that while no sector ‘escapes untouched by some form of biodiversity risk’, such risks can be transformed into opportunities, and ideally, profit. I trace the key actors, reports, and methodologies producing ‘biodiversity loss as risk’, and outline some of the challenges, paradoxes and implications of this transformation. In particular, I show how biodiversity loss is a difficult to transform into an individuated risk that can cause firms to act otherwise. However, new calculative devices are emerging to help individuate and calculate biodiversity risks for firms. In this paper I focus on two of such devices, the Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool (IBAT) and the Corporate Ecosystem Service Review (CESR). Both tools aim to render biodiversity loss legible in the language and metrics of financial risk. These tools devised to produce biodiversity risk, I argue, have effects. They are changing the way that conservation knowledge is produced, producing new spaces for investment and disinvestment, and are also re-defining the very subject of conservation.  相似文献   

2.
In the context of contemporary concerns about climate change and food security, Conservation Agriculture (CA) has emerged as a well-supported and central component of the agricultural sector development strategy across sub-Saharan Africa, including in Zambia, which is the focus of this paper. A variety of narratives about the benefits of CA over conventional agricultural systems underpin endeavours towards ‘scaling up’ CA and increasing rates of adoption amongst smallholder farmers nationwide. However, there is a knowledge politics underlying the translation of a weak evidence base around CA into persuasive narratives and financial and political support. In this paper, we trace the evolution of five narratives around CA in Zambia in relation to changing political agendas and the involvement of new public and private sector actors, and review the development of evidence bases and knowledge that support and challenge each of these narratives. We discuss the potential to open up space within this knowledge politics to alternative narratives and the contestation of the pervasive CA scaling up agenda. Critical reflection is essential to ensure that national and local evidence is more effectively used to guide national climate and agricultural policy developments and international donor initiatives.  相似文献   

3.
Private sector actors are playing an increasingly significant role in the definition and governance of ‘sustainable’ agri-food practices. Yet, to date little attention has been paid by social scientists to how greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are addressed as part of private agri-food governance arrangements. This paper examines how private actors within agri-food supply chains respond to emerging pressure for measures to reduce GHG emissions from agriculture. Drawing upon the Anglo-Foucauldian governmentality literature, we introduce the notion of the corporate carbon economy to conceptualise the practical techniques that enable private agri-food actors to make GHG emissions thinkable and governable in the context of existing market, regulatory, and supply chain pressures. Using a case study of the Australian dairy industry, we argue that private agri-food actors utilise a range of techniques that enable them to respond to existing government environmental regulations, balance current market pressures with future supply chain requirements, and demonstrate improved eco-efficiency along food supply chains. These techniques – which include environmental self-assessment instruments, tools for measuring GHG emissions, and sustainability reporting – have little direct relevance to the ‘international climate regime’ of carbon trading, and carbon markets more broadly, yet individually and in combination they are crucial in enacting an alternative regime of GHG governance. In concluding, we contend that the growing use of sustainability metrics by international food companies is likely to have the most powerful implications for GHG governance in the agri-food sector, with potentially far-reaching consequences for how future action on climate change is rendered thinkable and practicable.  相似文献   

4.
Tessema  Israel  Simane  Belay 《GeoJournal》2021,86(4):1767-1783
GeoJournal - Climate variability and change make agricultural sector a risky venture for smallholders’ farmers. This paper presents an assessment of smallholder farmers’ perceptions of...  相似文献   

5.
Adaptation to climate change in agricultural settings depends on understanding farmers’ perceptions of the nature of climate change, their agency in adapting and the efficacy of adaptive measures themselves. Such knowledge can improve mitigation and adaptation strategies. This study addresses the limited understanding of how farmers appraise their private adaptive measures and influential factors. It uses data from structured interviews with 598 rice farmers in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Based on protection motivation theory, farmers’ assessments of private adaptive measures were measured by perceived self-efficacy, perceived adaptation efficacy and perceived adaptation cost. Multiple regressions were used to understand significant factors affecting those assessments. Some demographic and socio-economic factors, belief in climate change, information and objective resources were found to influence farmers’ adaptation assessments. It is shown that the sources and quality of information are particularly important. The improvement of both the accessibility and usefulness of local services (e.g. irrigation, agricultural extension, credit and health care) is deemed a necessity for successful adaptation strategies in the Mekong Delta. The paper also shows the application of PMT in measuring farmers’ appraisals of private adaptive measures to climate change, thereby opening this area for further research.  相似文献   

6.
The Reduction of Deforestation and Forest Degradation initiative (REDD+) was initially hailed widely as a smart and cost-effective way to mitigate climate change and has moved quickly compared to other strands of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations. Much of the initiative’s original appeal – and a good deal of subsequent controversy around it – relates to framing the world’s tropical forests as carbon sinks and compensating developing countries that manage to reverse or avoid deforestation. REDD+ negotiations can thus be seen a site where the standard divisions between Annex 1 and non-Annex 1 (‘developed’ and ‘developing’) were being challenged and interrogated by the negotiating parties and the broader network of actors around the climate regime. This article suggests that such complex and changing global governance policy fields need to be analysed as ‘places’ in their own right, populated by actors engaged in field-specific power relations that may not reflect international hierarchies or power relations manifested in other international settings. Based in a unique set of interviews supplemented by primary data analysis, this article unpacks the power relations of REDD+ negotiations by examining how those involved seek to assume competence, designate and recognize leadership, and shape outcomes. In tracing the dynamics of claiming competence, the ‘competition’ between two disciplinary milieus around forests as an international policy object and also delegates’ shifting between reliance on expert knowledge and political ‘know-how’ in the negotiations themselves are identified. To understand the politics of recognition – that is to have a claim to competence or position acknowledged by others – the perceived qualities and resources of recognized leadership are examined and the absence of global superpowers amongst REDD+ leadership is problematized and discussed. Finally, in terms of wielding influence over outcomes, the fate of two quite similar ideas – one that has become incorporated into REDD+ methodology and another that is failing to be – further illustrate how the field is marked by internal power practices and that not all actors are equally well-positioned to achieve desired outcomes.  相似文献   

7.
The global sourcing of services from developing countries has made human capital a key local asset for attracting foreign direct investment. This paper analyses to what extent individual companies engage in linkages and collaborations with universities and how the education sector responds to the new demands of the knowledge economy. Offshore services are generally recognised as ‘footloose’ investments with limited local linkages. A case study of industry-academe linkages in the growing business process outsourcing sector in the Philippines finds that foreign investors engage in active embedding and develop linkages with human resource providers, leading to increased territorial embeddedness. This paper investigates the kind of linkages created, which actors engage in them and their motivations, to understand the resulting implications for local economic development. Interviews with foreign investors and higher education institutions reveal that most collaboration is initiated by large call centre companies and focuses on entry-level skills development for their operations. I argue that multinational corporations have been able to capture local institutions and introduce changes in the education system to supply mainly lower-end skills. While increasing the available talent pool and raising the competitiveness for further investments, this presents challenges for upgrading into higher value-added services and potentially transforms the country into a dependent market economy.  相似文献   

8.
Climate change adds another dimension of challenges to the growth and sustainability of Indian agriculture. The growing exposure to livelihood shocks from climate variability/change and limited resource base of the rural community to adapt has reinforced the need to mainstream climate adaptation planning into developmental landscape. However, a better understanding of micro-level perceptions is imperative for effective and informed planning at the macro-level. In this paper, the grass-root level perspectives on climate change impacts and adaptation decisions were elicited at farm level in the Moga district of Punjab and Mahbubnagar district of Telangana, India. The farmers opined that the climatic variability impacts more than the long-term climate change. They observed change in the quantum, onset and distribution of rainfall, rise in minimum as well as maximum temperature levels, decline in crop yield and ground water depletion. The key socio-economic effects of climate change included decline in farm income, farm unemployment, rural migration and increased indebtedness among farmers. In order to cope with climate variability and change thereon, farmers resorted to adaptation strategies such as use of crop varieties of suitable duration, water conservation techniques, crop insurance and participation in non-farm activities and employment guarantee schemes. Farmers’ adaptation to changing climate was constrained by several technological, socio-economic and institutional barriers. These include limited knowledge on the costs–benefits of adaptation, lack of access to and knowledge of adaptation technologies, lack of financial resources and limited information on weather. Besides, lack of access to input markets, inadequate farm labour and smaller farm size were the other constraints. Further, on the basis of the grass-root elicitation a ‘Need-Based Adaptation’ planning incorporating farmers’ perceptions on climate change impacts, constraints in the adoption of adaptation strategies and plausible adaptation options were linked with the most suitable ongoing programmatic interventions of the Government of India. The study concluded that micro-level needs and constraints for various adaptation strategies and interventions should be an integral part of the programme development, implementation and evaluation in the entire developmental paradigm.  相似文献   

9.
This paper critically examines the role of farmers’ markets in Australian agriculture. A case study is undertaken in South Australia, where all stallholders at three farmers’ markets situated in Adelaide, Willunga and Berri were surveyed regarding their production and marketing techniques. Overall responses supported literature highlighting the importance of farmers’ markets to the producers who chose to exploit this marketing niche. A strong co-reliance on ‘wholesale sales’ was also recognised, suggesting an important integration of productivist and post-productivist approaches to agricultural development. Of most promise for long-term agricultural sustainability was evidence that certain groups of farmers were found to be realising the potential of these and other alternative markets, in terms of their risk reducing capacity, and diversifying to include various conservation values into their agricultural enterprises. These groups were less concerned about market fluctuations and more concerned with issues of social equity, environmental health and having fun, which meant they unwittingly epitomised the goals of political ecology, by challenging the dominant agricultural methods of production and marketing. It seems these groups also recognised that the direct nature of their transactions would sow beneficial social, environmental and economic ‘seeds’ for change. Finally, it is argued that policies to improve access to farmers’ markets and reduce the cost of participation would assist small scale Australian agricultural producers to evolve smoothly into a multifunctional era.  相似文献   

10.
The ‘5.12’ earthquake in 2008 and the ‘8.13’ debris flow in 2010 brought huge losses of life and property to Qingping Township. Farmers’ livelihoods assets were also seriously affected and damaged. These led to a change in farmers’ livelihood styles and reduction in their income. A study of the impact of natural disasters on farmers’ livelihoods in mountainous areas would have significant importance for policy making. Based on field survey data from sample households, this study comparatively analyzed the assets, livelihood styles and income of farmers over three periods—2007, 2009 after the ‘5.12’ earthquake, and 2 months after ‘8.13’ debris flows. It presents the following findings: (1) livelihood assets suffered heavy losses; (2) livelihood styles were significantly changed; and (3) the sustainability of farmer income was adversely influenced. These results suggest that, during the process of post-disaster reconstruction work, affected farmers’ security, the carrying capacity of livelihood assets, and the enhancement of employment and livelihood choice are worthy of much attention from policy makers.  相似文献   

11.
The conventional method of risk analysis (with risk as a product of probability and consequences) does not allow for a pluralistic approach that includes the various risk perceptions of stakeholders or lay people within a given social system. This article introduces a methodology that combines the virtues of three different methods: the quantifiable conventional approach to risk; the taxonomic analysis of perceived risk; and the analytical framework of a spatial multi-criteria analysis. This combination of methods is applied to the case study ‘Ebro Delta’ in Spain as part of the European sixth framework project ‘Floodsite’. First, a typology for flood hazards is developed based on individual and/or stakeholders’ judgements. Awareness, worry and preparedness are the three characteristics that typify a community to reflect various levels of ignorance, perceived security, perceived control or desired risk reduction. Applying ‘worry’ as the central characteristic, a trade-off is hypothesized between Worry and the benefits groups in society receive from a risky situation. Second, this trade-off is applied in Spatial Multi-Criteria Analysis (SMCA). MCA is the vehicle that often accompanies participatory processes, where governmental bodies have to decide on issues in which local stakeholders have a say. By using risk perception-scores as weights in a standard MCA procedure a new decision framework for risk assessment is developed. Finally, the case of sea-level rise in the Ebro Delta in Spain serves as an illustration of the applied methodology. Risk perception information has been collected with help of an on-site survey. Risk perception enters the multi-criteria analysis as complementary weights for the criteria risk and benefit. The results of the survey are applied to a set of scenarios representing both sea-level rise and land subsidence for a time span of 50 years. Land use alternatives have been presented to stakeholders in order to provide the regional decision maker with societal preferences for handling risk. Even with limited resources a characteristic ‘risk profile’ could be drawn that enables the decision maker to develop a suitable land use policy.  相似文献   

12.
通过选取甘肃省80个气象站点1961—2010年的气象要素值计算和分析,结果表明,暖干化是甘肃现代气候变化的基本特征。甘肃年平均气温气候倾向率均为正值,年平均气温每10年增温0.29℃;年降水量自1961年以来呈持续下降趋势,降水距平百分率以每10年1.7%的速率递减。揭示了气候变化对马铃薯晩疫病、麦蚜虫、小麦条锈病、玉米棉铃虫、红蜘蛛等5种主要农作物病虫害的影响。总结气候暖干化对主要农作物病虫害的主要危害特征：病虫种类增多、地域范围扩大;越冬界线北移、时间提早发生、受害程度加重;害虫生长季节延长、繁殖代数增加、种群增长加快;病毒病增多,易发大流行;寄主、害虫、天敌种群的生态系统发生了变化,使害虫得到迅速繁殖。提出完善农作物病虫害监测评估预警体系建设,提高精准优质预报服务;建立防治农作物病虫害管理生产新模式和配套技术适应气候变化;根据未来气候预测和针对不同气候类型以及不同气候年型调整作物种植结构和比例;制定精细化农作物病虫害综合农业自然资源区划,确定精准的高危病区范围重点防治等4个方面的措施和技术应对气候暖干化。  相似文献   

13.
In order to address the impacts of climate change, global multilateral institutions, development organizations, and national and regional science organizations are creating climate services – packages of useful climate information intended to help decision makers. This diffuse collection of actors and institutions suggest that producing climate services will help bridge gaps between climate scientists and decision-makers and will therefore help vulnerable countries and people manage the risks and optimize the impacts of climate change. This article examines this global science-policy ecosystem using the case of climate services produced by Australian science agencies for consumption in adaptation programming in the Pacific Island countries of Kiribati and Solomon Islands. Linking research on geographies of marketization and the neoliberalization of science, I demonstrate that within the climate service movement a focus on usefulness is paired with an emphasis on commercialization. As a result, this case shows the inherent tensions in the climate service model: first, a focus on competition and circulating service products at the expense of collaborative relationships; second, difficulties in negotiating uncertainty; and third contradictions between ‘objective’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ science. In each of these instances, the commercialized mechanisms through which climate services are governed, and the political economic circumstances within which they are produced, magnify rather than ameliorate gaps between science and policy.  相似文献   

14.
Understanding climate variability and change is essential for designing adaptation policies and strategies to deal with the impacts of climate change on the agricultural sector. This Paper aims at assessing climate variability/change, the perception of rural farmers on climate change and preferred  adaptation strategies among the farmers in some selected farming communities in Nigeria. The study thus used both meteorology data and social survey, to examine variability/change in climate and factors determining the adaptation techniques adopts by rural farmers. The results show a relatively uniform temperatures and some seasonal variations in recent years (diurnal range of temperature is about 10 °C) but the rainfall shows much more seasonal variations. The rainfall has relatively undeviating trend from 1981 to 1996 but the trend appears to be upwards from the year 1997 to 2010. About 72.8% participants responded in the affirmative that climate is changing but there appears to be a significant relationship between the length of farming experiences and farmers’ perceptions of climate change adaptation techniques. Water-related (about 53%) and nutrient related (about 52%) technologies appear to have a high preference among the farmers. The major driver that determines farmers’ preference for climate change adaptation techniques is their incomes and experiences.  相似文献   

15.
Climate change increases the complexity and uncertainty of regional natural resource management (NRM), calling into question the appropriateness of linear knowledge-transfer approaches. In this paper we reflect on knowledge practices among a partnership of researchers and NRM planners, under a federal program of NRM investment intended to ‘deliver information’ to regional NRM planners to support planning for climate change. We unpack ‘container’ and ‘conduit’ metaphors of linear, one-way communication invoked by the starting conditions, and explore whether more relational ways of communicating were achieved. A key theme emerged early in the research that NRM planners felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available and discouraged by the irrelevance of much of it to their climate change planning. Our research-practice collaboration unfolded in this context and through ongoing face-to-face and virtual engagement over a period of two years. The collaborative approach featured joint identification of priority activities, co-design of planning approaches, and the iterative co-development of an online ‘information portal’, which acted as a boundary object. We report the emergence of a ‘knowing system’, resulting from these efforts to foster relationships and co-produce boundary objects in a particular geographic context. Our findings highlight the potential benefits of investing in the capacity of researchers and NRM practitioners to engage in collaborative research partnerships premised on the emergence of knowing systems.  相似文献   

16.
Singh  Naveen P.  Anand  Bhawna  Srivastava  S. K.  Kumar  N. R.  Sharma  Shirish  Bal  S. K.  Rao  K. V.  Prabhakar  M. 《Natural Hazards》2022,112(2):1015-1037

The paper contributes to the growing literature highlighting the significance of assessing risk and vulnerability, micro-level perceptions and adaptation decision-making in building resilience of farm communities to climate change in dryland region of India. To select a region for grassroots enquiry, spatial differential in risk to climate change was assessed in Rajasthan, using IPCC AR5 framework. Among the highly vulnerable and risky districts, Bikaner district was selected for elicitation of micro-level imperatives. Rising atmospheric temperature, inter-seasonal displacements of rainfall and recurrence of extreme events were perceived by the farmers resulting in resource degradation, production risks and erosion of households’ socio-economic dynamics. As risk preventive measures, suitable adjustment in agricultural practices, natural resource management, shift to off-farm activities and other relief measures were adopted by the farmers. Farmer’s choice of adaptation was influenced by several climatic, socio-economic and infrastructural & institutional factors in varying degree. Moreover, several financial, economic, infrastructural and informational bottlenecks to adaptations were reported during household survey and FGDs. The results suggest that capturing grassroots evidence is crucial for directing locally tailored adaptation strategies, along with the improving deficiencies in the developmental pathways for climate-resilient agriculture.

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17.
Understanding spatial conceptions is critical to the analysis of local protest strategy formation. Spatialities provoke inquiry into the drivers that may prompt local actors to adhere to particular strategies, and the implications this has on forms of contestation and the way protest is organized. It is argued that local protest can ‘respatialize’ when actors are embedded in social movements and translocal assemblages associated with controversy over development, and that this warrants reconsidering the role of ‘place’. A case study of a proposed megaproject framed in the national interest – a high-speed rail network called HS2, in the United Kingdom – is used to investigate local protest respatialization. Fieldwork was conducted in the Chilterns, an area of high scenic beauty which will be adversely impacted by HS2. The results show how the perceived need to respatialize protest away from the local to the national domain reconfigures debate to focus primarily on economic issues. Respatialization also has implications for the dynamics of protest assemblages with unlikely alliances developing around a need to engage with or engender debate in the national polity. It is concluded that local actors may opt to respatialize their protest in response to their interaction with social movements and protest assemblages that disengage from specific place-based interests. The paper recommends that future research on the geographies of social action take forward spatialization as a powerful lens for investigating protest strategy formation.  相似文献   

18.
This paper explores how the implementation of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and agri-environment measures in particular have been used to increase state oversight into rural affairs and land use in Hungary. The governmentalities of the agricultural sector through Europeanisation include stringent inspections and controls as part and parcel of accountability drives around the disbursement of subsidies. Agricultural surveillance mechanisms and processes are recounted here as holistic, perpetual and immediate, composed of the remote, administrative, as well as embodied physical encounters. Through ethnographic engagement with the Hungarian state’s interactions with its farmers during inspections, the forms and consequences of neoliberal governmentality are given life in a post-socialist context. I elucidate the numerous subjectivities involved in these encounters, and how bureaucratic and administrative requirements underlie the rise of private consultants, where social capital and informal networks are of great importance for the successful navigation of the agricultural system. On the part of farmers, subsidies’ accountability systems were lived as unjust, giving rise to speculation around the ‘real’ intended purposes of agri-environment legislation, which in turn undermines the expert authority of the state and heightens skepticism towards the European ‘project’.  相似文献   

19.
Assessment of physical vulnerability to agricultural drought in China   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  
Food security has drawn great attention from both researchers and practitioners in recent years. Global warming and its resultant extreme drought events have become a great challenge to crop production and food price stability. This study aimed to establish a preliminary theoretical methodology and an operational approach for assessing the physical vulnerability of two wheat varieties (“Yongliang #4” and “Wenmai #6”) to agricultural drought using Environmental Policy Integrated Climate model (EPIC). Drought hazard index was set up based on output variables of the EPIC water stress (WS), including the magnitude and duration of WS during the crop-growing period. The physical vulnerability curves of two wheat varieties to drought were calculated by the simulated drought hazard indexes and loss ratios. And the curve’s effect on drought disaster risk was defined as A, B and C sections, respectively. Our analysis results showed that (a) physical vulnerability curves varied between two wheat varieties, which were determined by genetic parameters of crops; (b) compared with spring wheat “Yongliang 4#” winter wheat “Wenmai 6#” was less vulnerable to drought under the same drought hazard intensity scenario; (c) the wheat physical vulnerability curve to drought hazard displayed a S shape, suggesting a drought intensity–dependent magnifying or reducing effect of the physical vulnerability on drought disasters; (d) the reducing effect was mainly in the low-value area of vulnerability curve, whereas the magnifying effect was in the middle-value area, and the farming-pastoral zone and the Qinling Mountain–Huaihe River zone formed important spatial division belts.  相似文献   

20.
Farmers are not commonly included in studies of transnational actors, but with the globalization of agricultural markets, and the neoliberal reform of national agricultural sectors, an increasing number of family farm-entrepreneurs have become engaged in transnational activities. Drawing on interviews with ‘globally-engaged’ farmers in Australia – a country in which expansion into transnational activities has been encouraged by the radical deregulation of domestic markets – this paper explores the transnational mobilities of farmers who have sought to capitalize on the advantages of globalization by directly trading with international partners, establishing international business contacts, and learning international best practice in farm efficiency and environmental performance. In particular, the paper examines the varying spatialities and forms of mobility executed by farmers and observes how different patterns of mobility are executed in response to the particular exigencies of their respective industries as well as the ongoing imperatives of maintaining a farm business. By analyzing the farmers’ own narratives of these different spatialities, the paper develops a more critical and reflexive perspective on globalization and its impact on rural producers, with travel becoming both an opportunity to be enjoyed and a compulsion to be endured by those forced to operate in a climate where state-based support structures are absent.  相似文献   

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