Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation: Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

This Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) has been jointly coordinated by Working Groups I (WGI) and II (WGII) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report focuses on the relationship between climate change and extreme weather and climate events, the impacts of such events, and the strategies to manage the associated risks. The IPCC was jointly established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), in particular to assess in a comprehensive, objective, and transparent manner all the relevant scientific, technical, and socioeconomic information to contribute in understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, the potential impacts, and the adaptation and mitigation options. Beginning in 1990, the IPCC has produced a series of Assessment Reports, Special Reports, Technical Papers, methodologies, and other key documents which have since become the standard references for policymakers and scientists.This Special Report, in particular, contributes to frame the challenge of dealing with extreme weather and climate events as an issue in decisionmaking under uncertainty, analyzing response in the context of risk management. The report consists of nine chapters, covering risk management; observed and projected changes in extreme weather and climate events; exposure and vulnerability to as well as losses resulting from such events; adaptation options from the local to the international scale; the role of sustainable development in modulating risks; and insights from specific case studies

Socio-Ecological Implications of Soy in the Brazilian Cerrado

This paper summarizes the critical importance of the Cerrado savannah biome in Brazil and examines key ways in which large-scale agriculture, in particular large-scale soy farming, threatens water security and increases socio-ecological stress. It connects agribusiness expansion to the globalized meat industry by defining how complex economic relationships result in deforestation on a massive scale. It describes how this radical change in land cover has led to changes in rainfall patterns that are associated with extended drought periods and analyzes how these critical water shortages jeopardize socio-economic health beyond the immediate region. Further, it explicates how intensified transgenic soy farming and other pesticide-heavy crop production contributes to rising public health crises associated with carcinogen-contaminated water and food sources. Lastly, it identifies emerging trends that suggest how agribusiness corporations and governments may be legally ascribed moral responsibilities for maintaining socio-ecological health of the biome. The paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the human dimensions of environmental issues and their impacts and reframe conservation social science discourse in regard to protection of land and water resources in the region

Uneven Spatial Development: a review of theories and methods

publishedVersio

The Age of the Soybean

The soybean is far more than just a versatile crop whose derivates serve the protein needs of a meatless diet. One of the world’s most important commodities, soy represents the embodiment of mechanised industrial agriculture and is one of the main actors behind the socioeconomic, political and ecological transformations of industrial farming in several world regions. Despite the crop’s potential as a cheap source of vegetal protein for human consumers, most industrial soybean production has fuelled the global meat industrial complex, as animal feed. Soybean is thus, paradoxically, still a relatively ‘invisible’ crop to the public at large, although its global yields continue to increase at stupendous rates, lining the pockets of agribusiness and to the detriment of traditional agriculture. The transnational socio-ecological and economic entanglements characterising this versatile legume’s global expansion have prompted scholarly attention as researchers around the world have begun to unveil the main historical drivers behind the rise of the soybean in the global food chain. This book aims to expand the analysis, offering the most significant effort so far at an environmental history of soybeans. Interrogating the socioeconomic and ecological transformations determined by (and determining) the rise of soy in international food chains during the Great Acceleration, the volume gathers contributions from an international cast of researchers, working in numerous geographical contexts, from Japan and China, to India, African nations, the Southern Cone of Latin America, Northern Europe and the United States. Soybean farming, breeding, processing and marketing have bound together the histories of these diverse regions and altered beyond recognition their ecological and socio-economic contexts

Translating “Under the Sign of Invention”: Gilberto Gil’s Song Lyric Translation

The translation of song lyrics shares in the difficulties of constrained translation, as well as in the impossibilities of poetic translation. In Gilberto Gil’s adaptation of the song “I just called to say I love you” by Stevie Wonder, two translation procedures stand out: (1) to take broad semantic fields as translation units, and (2) to opt for cultural adaptation in terms of the translation’s poles of domesticating/foreignizing. The way Gil faces up to the challenges of the translation of the song is consistent with Haroldo de Campos ideas on transcreation.La traduction de chansons partage avec la traduction subordonnée les mêmes difficultés et, avec la traduction poétique, les mêmes impossibilités. Dans sa version de “I just called to say I love you” de Stevie Wonder, Gilberto Gil fait appel à deux procédés : d’une part, le découpage de larges champs sémantiques comme unités de traduction, et d’autre part, le choix délibéré d’une adaptation culturelle de la traduction. La manière dont Gilberto Gil traite les difficultés de la traduction de la chanson n’est pas sans évoquer les principes de la transcréation de Haroldo de Campos

"When We Came There Was Nothing": Land, Work, and Value among Transnational Soybean Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado

This dissertation is a comparative ethnography of two groups of transnational soybean farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado. In this exploration of migration and industrial crop production for global markets, the new capacity for highly flexible farming is examined in relation to the fixity of family tradition, religious practices, landscapes, and expertise born of working the land. In 1968, Holdeman Mennonites embarked on a tour of rural Brazil. In search of autonomy from an encroaching cultural crisis, they found cheap farm land in Rio Verde, Goiás and encountered a government eager for their migration. Decades later, a group of Midwestern family farmers toured rural Brazil and found cheap, expansive land to occupy. They courted investors (mostly neighboring farmers), bought massive tracts of land, and settled in Luis Eduardo Magalhães, Bahia. The two groups’ migrations began with experiences of crisis: for the Mennonites a cultural crisis in the United States that threatened their family and community reproduction and for the Midwestern family farmers a farm crisis which threatened their livelihoods. In Brazil they adopted common farming techniques related to soil fertilization and tillage, yet differed in crop rotations, use of technology, and most starkly in their perceptions of what counted as “good farming.” Each community internally contested identity and value as they made meaning out of transnational lives and industrial farming. These cases problematize how we understand large-scale processes of the South American soy boom, the massive expansion of soy production in South America, the global land grab, and the proliferation of global land deals. This dissertation identifies difference and generativity of farming in two communities of transnational soybean farmers while also recognizing the power and domination behind such massive economic processes. The Holdeman Mennonite community pursues an alternative to soybean development in their use of family labor, avoidance of capital and technology, and diversified farming practices. The community of Midwestern family farmers adopts capitalist managerial and farming practices, yet reconcile this with their values of good farming. Together they reveal areas of convergence and divergence that make industrial, transnational soybean production possible.Doctor of Philosoph

The Age of the Soybean

The soybean is far more than just a versatile crop whose derivates serve the protein needs of a meatless diet. One of the world’s most important commodities, soy represents the embodiment of mechanised industrial agriculture and is one of the main actors behind the socioeconomic, political and ecological transformations of industrial farming in several world regions. Despite the crop’s potential as a cheap source of vegetal protein for human consumers, most industrial soybean production has fuelled the global meat industrial complex, as animal feed. Soybean is thus, paradoxically, still a relatively ‘invisible’ crop to the public at large, although its global yields continue to increase at stupendous rates, lining the pockets of agribusiness and to the detriment of traditional agriculture. The transnational socio-ecological and economic entanglements characterising this versatile legume’s global expansion have prompted scholarly attention as researchers around the world have begun to unveil the main historical drivers behind the rise of the soybean in the global food chain. This book aims to expand the analysis, offering the most significant effort so far at an environmental history of soybeans. Interrogating the socioeconomic and ecological transformations determined by (and determining) the rise of soy in international food chains during the Great Acceleration, the volume gathers contributions from an international cast of researchers, working in numerous geographical contexts, from Japan and China, to India, African nations, the Southern Cone of Latin America, Northern Europe and the United States. Soybean farming, breeding, processing and marketing have bound together the histories of these diverse regions and altered beyond recognition their ecological and socio-economic contexts