100 results match your criteria: "Institute for Global Environmental Strategies[Affiliation]"

Landscape products link to low-input practices and traditional ecological knowledge, and have multiple functions supporting human well-being and sustainability. Here we explore seven landscape products worldwide to identify these multiple functions in the context of food commodification and landscape sustainability. We show that a landscape products lens can improve food systems by fostering sustainability strategies and standards that are place-sensitive, and as such can mitigate conflicts related to food production, social justice and the environment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Contributions of the voluntary local review process to policy integration: evidence from frontrunner cities.

NPJ Urban Sustain

April 2023

University of Strathclyde, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, James Weir Building, Level 5, 75 Montrose Street, Glasgow, G1 1XJ Scotland UK.

The implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) relies on effective policy integration at all levels of government. However, integration across policy domains remains challenging for local authorities, particularly when it comes to articulating policies that recognise trade-offs and interactions between different SDGs. This study explores how the Voluntary Local Review (VLR) process-a tool to localise the 2030 Agenda-contributes to policy integration by thematically analysing interviews with city officials in 12 frontrunner cities that conducted a VLR between 2019 and 2020.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study evaluates the resilience of the Gurage socio-ecological production landscape in Ethiopia, highlighting that despite its diverse land-use, sustainability is currently at risk.
  • It uses a community-based scoring system to assess various indicators, finding that aspects like landscape diversity and local governance rank high in resilience, while areas like knowledge and well-being lag behind.
  • The overall resilience is deemed below average, prompting the need for strategies to enhance sustainability and attract the attention of policymakers and natural resource managers for better management practices.*
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The importance of forests in providing a healthy environment and good quality of life for people is crucial. Sacred forests, in particular, play a significant role in the social and ecological aspects of life. Despite numerous studies and reports on the subject, there is a lack of an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of research on sacred forests and their ecosystem services.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Unlabelled: Coastal cities are under severe threat from the impacts of climate change, such as sea-level rise, extreme weather events, coastal inundation, and ecosystem degradation. It is well known that the ocean, and in particular coastal environments, have been changing at an unprecedented rate, which poses increasing risks to people in small island developing states, such as Fiji. The Greater Suva Urban Area, the capital and largest metropolitan area of Fiji, is expected to be largely impacted by climate-related risks to its socio-economic, cultural, and political positions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In general, it is known that extreme climatic conditions such as El Niño and positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD+) cause prolonged drought in Indonesia's tropical peatlands so that groundwater levels (GWL) drop and peat is prone to fire. However, 27 years of GWL measurements in Central Kalimantan peat forests show the opposite condition, where the lowest GWL occurs several weeks before El Niño and after IOD+ reaches its peaks. We show that the dropped sea surface temperature anomaly induced by anomalously easterly winds along the southern Java-Sumatra occurs several weeks before the GWL drop to the lowest value.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Understanding how biophysical and biochemical variables contribute to the spectral characteristics of vegetation canopies is critical for their monitoring. Quantifying these contributions, however, remains difficult due to extraneous factors such as the spectral variability of canopy background materials, including soil/crop-residue moisture, soil-type, and non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV). This study focused on exploring the spectral response of two important agronomic variables (1) leaf chlorophyll content ( ) and (2) leaf area index (LAI) under various canopy backgrounds through a global sensitivity analysis of wheat-like canopy spectra simulated using the physically-based PROSAIL radiative transfer model.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Even as novel technologies emerge and medicines advance, pathogen-transmitting mosquitoes pose a deadly and accelerating public health threat. Detecting and mitigating the spread of in Africa is now critical to the fight against malaria, as this invasive mosquito poses urgent and unprecedented risks to the continent. Unlike typical African vectors of malaria, breeds in both natural and artificial water reservoirs, and flourishes in urban environments.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

NO emission factors for organic amendments in Japan from measurement campaign and systematic review.

Sci Total Environ

March 2023

Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences, National Agriculture and Food Research Organization, 3-1-3 Kannondai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8604, Japan; Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), 2108-11, Kamiyamaguchi, Hayama, Kanagawa 240-0115, Japan.

Organic amendments are important sources of nitrous oxide (NO) emissions from agricultural soils. In 2020, the total amount of N in organic amendments applied to Japanese agricultural soils (440 ktN) was larger than that of synthetic fertilizer (374 ktN). However, NO emissions from organic amendments were estimated by using the country-specific NO emission factor (EF) for synthetic fertilizer (0.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Despite Bangladesh being one of the leading countries in aquaculture food production worldwide, there is a considerable lack of updated scientific information about aquaculture activities in remote sites, making it difficult to manage sustainably. This study explored the use of geospatial and field data to monitor spatio-temporal changes in aquaculture production sites in the Satkhira district from 2017-2019. We used Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission digital elevation model (SRTM DEM) to locate aquaculture ponds based on the terrain elevation and slope.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A comprehensive analysis of the crop effect on the urban-rural differences in land surface phenology.

Sci Total Environ

February 2023

College of Land Science and Technology, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100083, China; Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing for Agri-Hazards, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Beijing 100083, China.

The response of land surface phenology (LSP) to the urban heat island effect (UHI) is a useful biological indicator for understanding how vegetated ecosystems will be affected by future climate warming. However, vegetation cover in rural areas is often dominated by cultivated land, whose phenological timing is considerably influenced by agricultural managements (e.g.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Detailed Land-Use and Land-Cover (LULC) information is of pivotal importance in, e.g., urban/rural planning, disaster management, and climate change adaptation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Satellite remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) have revolutionalized the mapping, quantifying, and assessing the land surface processes, particularly analyzing the past and future land use-land cover (LULC) change patterns. Worldwide river basins have observed enormous changes in the land system dynamics as a result of anthropogenic factors such as population, urbanization, development, and agriculture. As is the scenario of various other river basins, the Brahmaputra basin, which falls in China, Bhutan, India, and Bangladesh, is also witnessing the same environmental issues.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The last 12 months have provided further evidence of the potential for cascading ecological and socio-political crises that were warned of 12 months ago. Then a consensus statement from the Regional Action on Climate Change Symposium warned: "the Earth's climatic, ecological, and human systems are converging towards a crisis that threatens to engulf global civilization within the lifetimes of children now living." Since then, the consequences of a broad set of extreme climate events (notably droughts, floods, and fires) have been compounded by interaction with impacts from multiple pandemics (including COVID-19 and cholera) and the Russia-Ukraine war.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The study examines the effects of land use and land cover (LULC) changes on habitat quality in the ecologically fragile Loess Plateau, revealing significant urban expansion from 2000 to 2050 that decreases cropland and grassland areas.
  • - An integrated assessment method was developed to evaluate habitat quality changes, predicting a general decline by 2050, with urban expansion identified as the primary threat to habitat quality, especially under different future scenarios.
  • - Recommendations include implementing high-level socio-ecological protection policies, establishing national nature reserves, and continuous monitoring to improve habitat conservation strategies in sensitive ecological regions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Effective policies to halt biodiversity loss must identify the most significant human-caused drivers, with a focus on recent empirical data.
  • Land and sea use changes are the leading causes of this biodiversity loss globally, followed by direct exploitation of natural resources and pollution.
  • It's essential to address all major drivers and their interactions, as their impact varies across different ecosystems and biodiversity indicators.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A hallmark of the media publicity surrounding COVID-19 has been the message that land change causes zoonotic diseases to spill over from wild animals to humans. The secondary peer-reviewed literature sends a similar message. However, as indicated in the primary peer-reviewed literature, the complexity of interacting variables involved in zoonotic disease spillover makes it unlikely for such a claim to be universally applicable.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

As the backbone of Vietnam's economy, the country has recently established a number of policies for promoting and investing in smart agriculture in the Mekong Delta, the country's largest agricultural hub, to foster overall socio-economic development. However, water remains a critical constraint for crop production, with progress being hindered by water scarcity and quality issues, and compounded by socio-economic transformation and climate change. Considering these challenges, this study used the CROPWAT model and a wide spectrum of climate change scenarios to investigate future total water demands in the 2030s and 2050s as well as drought levels in two underdeveloped semi-mountainous reservoir catchments, i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Mosquito-borne diseases continue to ravage humankind with >700 million infections and nearly one million deaths every year. Yet only a small percentage of the >3500 mosquito species transmit diseases, necessitating both extensive surveillance and precise identification. Unfortunately, such efforts are costly, time-consuming, and require entomological expertise.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Unlabelled: This study's objective is to examine how ASEAN countries reported their environment-related policies for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs), and a dataset of their environmental policies was developed. This is a necessary first step in analyzing the reasons for insufficient progress on the environmental dimension of the SDGs, since policies are key means of implementation. Previous studies of SDG progress and VNRs examined many aspects such as achievement levels, indicators, data, governance, and VNR preparation procedures, but surprisingly, there has been little discussion of countries' actual policy efforts.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The GLOBE Program's GLOBE Observer Mosquito Habitat Mapper is a no-cost citizen scientist data collection tool compatible with Android and iOS devices. Available in 14 languages and 126 countries, it supports mosquito vector surveillance, mitigation, and education by interested individuals and as part of participatory community surveillance programs. For low-resource communities where mosquito control services are inadequate, the Mosquito Habitat Mapper supports local health action, empowerment, and environmental justice.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A common phenomenon associated with alluvial rivers is their meander evolution, eventually forming cutoffs. Point bar deposits and ox-bow lakes are the products of lateral bend migration and meander cutoff. The present study focuses on identifying the meanders of River Manu and their cutoffs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF