The Role of Human Development on Deforestation in Africa: A Modelling-Based Approach

The rate of deforestation in Africa is of paramount concern not only to the future of Africa, but also to the world. This study uses country-level data to model changes in forest area over an 18 year period (1990-2007) in 35 African countries and investigates the role played by important development indicators of human development. The results reveal that the net loss of forests was 0.19% every year between 1990 and 2007. This implies a total of 3.42% of forest was lost in the 18 year period. This is more in line with estimates obtained by the Food and Agricultural Organization (0.56% between1990-2000 and 0.49% between 2000-2010). Human development which involves life expectancy, education and income is found to have a positive effect on forest growth and conservation, while cutting down trees for wood fuel is a significant cause of deforestation. Using generalized linear mixed models and generalised estimating equations, we were able to calculate expected estimates of forest area for 2010, 2020 and 2030 under the assumption that nothing is done to change observed trends. In many countries, progress has been made in reforestation, forest protection and conservation. However, if indiscriminate cutting down of trees is not checked, many countries will lose most or all of their forests by 2030.Deforestation; Environment; Human development index; Agriculture; Data modelling; Africa

Numerical analysis of distribution patterns in the British and European floras

Imperial Users onl

The vulnerability of the low-skilled

The low-skilled are a critical category for analyses of labour market marginalization. Class analysis has tended to depict low-skilled employees as sharing a broadly similar position with respect to both employment and labour market conditions. Their employment relationship is defined by a specific type of contract – the labour contract – characterized by precarious pay, low asset specificity and high job insecurity. This contrasts with employees who benefit from a service relationship which is designed to bind employees to the organization on a longer term basis. Recent neo-institutional theories however have emphasized the diversity of employment conditions between advanced capitalist societies, depending in particular on the nature of their production, employment and welfare regimes. An important issue is whether such divergences apply only to more skilled categories of the workforce (and hence lead to accentuated polarization) or also affect the employment conditions of the low-skilled. Are the low-skilled significantly more integrated into the labour market in some countries than in others and hence less vulnerable in times of economic restructuring? The paper will examine this by comparing a number of EU-15 countries that have been regarded as reflecting contrasting institutional regimes. It will focus in particular on the position of the low-skilled with respect to pay, training and job security

Extending the automated zoning procedure to reconcile incompatible zoning systems

This paper concerns the problem of matching incompatible zonal geographies, for example in the context of comparing census outputs over time. The automated zoning procedure (AZP) proposed by Openshaw (1977) is reviewed and extended to permit its application to the intersection of two zonal systems. A population stress statistic is proposed which may be used in the extended AZP algorithm in order to maximise the match between two zonal geographies. An implementation of this approach is described, and illustrated by reference to UK Census dat

Rural labor migration, characteristics, and employment patterns

Continued industrialization in China and increase in its agricultural productivity imply that surplus rural workers will to be attracted into non-agricultural production activities and, consequently, will have the opportunity to increase their off-farm income. Studying the structure of the rural labor force and its characteristics is important for evaluating its migration potential into non-agricultural sectors. This study examines the rural labor market in China exclusively based on China's first national agricultural census. We analyzed the demographic characteristics of the rural labor force and their association with the type of employment, place of work, and labor migration. Furthermore, we investigated demographic distributions of rural labor force and attempted to capture their relation with the distribution of other resources especially land availability or land constraints. We finally applied a generalized polytomous logit technique to analyze the patterns of rural labor employment and forecast rural migration. In this framework, we related rural labor migration with demographic characteristics, types of occupation, place of work, geographic characteristics, and various economic development indicators.Migration, Internal. ,Employment (Economic theory). ,Industrialization. ,China Economic conditions. ,Agricultural biotechnology. ,Demography Economic models. ,

New and improved demonstrations, each illustrating a single scientific paper

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Towards a common standard: comparing European and American cities

This paper assesses to what extent it is possible to construct standardised geographical definitions of cities that will allow American and European cities to be compared in a consistent manner. It reproduces, in citable form and, for scholarly purposes, the report of the same name produced by the author for the Greater London Authority.Keywords: City; global city; Functional Urban Region; Larger Urban Zone; Territorial Indicators; Metropolitan Region; pluralism