Scoring and ranking farmland conservation activities to evaluate environmental performance and encourage sustainable farming

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Kathleen Lewis, John Skinner, James Finch, Tina Kaho, Marguerite Newbold, and Keith Bardon, ‘Scoring and ranking farmland conservation activities to evaluate environmental performance and encourage sustainable farming’, Sustainable Development, Vol. 5 (2): 71-77, version of record online 4 December 1998. The final, published version is available online at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1719(199708)5:2%3C71::AID-SD61%3E3.0.CO;2-F/pdf © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.The University of Hertfordshire, in collaboration with two UK agricultural establishments ADAS and IACR-Rothamsted are developing a computerised decision support system for environmental management of arable agriculture. Part of this system is aimed towards encouraging sound farmland conservation to protect existing plants and animals, to encourage greater biodiversity and to help the farming community adopt more sustainable practices. The software aims to assess performance, help identify areas where improvements to existing habitats can be made and highlight the potential for new habitat creation. The assessment routines used determine a numerical eco-rating and textual description of performance by comparing actual practices with best practice.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Filling a blank on the map: 60 years of fisheries in Equatorial Guinea

Despite a scarcity of pertinent information, it has been possible to reconstruct time series of marine fisheries catches for Equatorial Guinea from 1950 to 2010 using per capita fish consumption and population numbers for small-scale fisheries, catch rates and number of vessels for industrial fisheries and discard rates to estimate the discarded bycatch. Small-scale fisheries, industrial large-scale fisheries, domestic and legal and illegal foreign fisheries and their discards are all included. Total catches were estimated at 2.7 million tonnes over the time period considered, of which 653 000 t were caught domestically compared to 187 000 t reported by FAO. This shows that fisheries have more importance for Equatorial Guinea's food security than the official data suggest. In contrast to what is suggested by official figures, fisheries were shown to be strongly impacted by civil and political unrest; notably, they declined overall because of civil and political conflicts, socio-demographic dynamics, and a growing role of the newly discovered oil resources, which directly and indirectly threaten the food security of the people of Equatorial Guinea

Measuring the unmeasurable? A method to quantify adoption of integrated pest management practices in temperate arable farming systems

BACKGROUND: The impetus to adopt integrated pest management (IPM) practices has re-emerged in the last decade, mainly as a result of legislative and environmental drivers. However a significant deficit exists in the ability to practically monitor and measure IPM adoption across arable farms; therefore the aim of the project reported here was to establish a universal metric for quantifying adoption of IPM in temperate arable farming. This was achieved by: (a) identifying a set of key activities that contribute to IPM; (b) weighting these in terms of their importance to the achievement of IPM using panels of expert stakeholders in order to create the metric (scoring system from 0-100 indicating level of IPM practiced); (c) surveying arable farmers in the UK and Ireland about their pest management practices; and (d) measuring level of farmer adoption of IPM using the new metric. RESULTS. This new metric was found to be based on a consistent conception of IPM between countries and professional groups. The survey results showed that, while level of adoption of IPM practices varied over the sample, all farmers had adopted IPM to some extent (minimum 27.2 points, mean score of 65.1), but only 13 of 225 farmers (5.8%) had adopted more than 85% of what is theoretically possible, as measured by the new metric. CONCLUSION. We believe that this new metric would be a viable and cost-effective system to use to facilitate the benchmarking and monitoring of national IPM programmes in temperate zone countries with large scale arable farming systems

European Union

The European Community has had a decidedly significant impact upon the legal systems of the Member States. It was established in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome, the main objectives being to develop stability throughout Europe by means of encouraging a closer union between member states. It has evolved a long way since having developed its own institutions and an autonomous legal system, with laws that bind each member state ultimately enabling it to regulate the rights and obligations of its members. It achieves this primarily through Treaties, a primary form of EC legislation that forms the basis of all other European Law. However the effect of EC treaties is unlike that of any other international agreement as the latter bind only states at an intergovernmental level and do not of themselves give rise to rights or interests which the citizens of the states can have enforced before their own national courts even if they are designed for the protection of individuals. Although the text of EC treaties does not indicate that their provisions will be any different, the ECJ has taken its own view as to the nature and effect of treaties known as the doctrine of ‘direct effect.’ This jurisprudential concept means that individuals are able to derive rights directly from community law, which can be enforced in their own national courts. It is a private species of enforcement, placing control in the hands of ordinary individuals as distinct from the public enforcement mechanism of community law as contained in Article 226 of the Treaty of Rome which enabled the Commission to bring proceedings against member states for breaches. This system was deficient in many ways as, not only was it unable to cope with the increasing work load and had insufficient remedies, it was political in nature. Direct effect, on the other hand, has allowed individuals to play a role and has potentially brought the community into the lives of every citizen. However despite its significance, it is important to put it into context of the many types of community law, not all of which entail direct effect or which can only be directly effective in certain circumstances, such as directives

European Union

The European Community has had a decidedly significant impact upon the legal systems of the Member States. It was established in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome, the main objectives being to develop stability throughout Europe by means of encouraging a closer union between member states. It has evolved a long way since having developed its own institutions and an autonomous legal system, with laws that bind each member state ultimately enabling it to regulate the rights and obligations of its members. It achieves this primarily through Treaties, a primary form of EC legislation that forms the basis of all other European Law. However the effect of EC treaties is unlike that of any other international agreement as the latter bind only states at an intergovernmental level and do not of themselves give rise to rights or interests which the citizens of the states can have enforced before their own national courts even if they are designed for the protection of individuals. Although the text of EC treaties does not indicate that their provisions will be any different, the ECJ has taken its own view as to the nature and effect of treaties known as the doctrine of ‘direct effect.’ This jurisprudential concept means that individuals are able to derive rights directly from community law, which can be enforced in their own national courts. It is a private species of enforcement, placing control in the hands of ordinary individuals as distinct from the public enforcement mechanism of community law as contained in Article 226 of the Treaty of Rome which enabled the Commission to bring proceedings against member states for breaches. This system was deficient in many ways as, not only was it unable to cope with the increasing work load and had insufficient remedies, it was political in nature. Direct effect, on the other hand, has allowed individuals to play a role and has potentially brought the community into the lives of every citizen. However despite its significance, it is important to put it into context of the many types of community law, not all of which entail direct effect or which can only be directly effective in certain circumstances, such as directives.European Community, European Law, EC treaties, Direct effect, directives.

Commission Staff Working Document: Report on the Implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) by the European Union

On 5 June 2014, the European Union published its first report on the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD). The EU ratified the Convention in 2010 making it the first international human rights treaty ever ratified by a regional organisation like the European Union. The EU has the obligation to prepare and submit a report on the actions it took to give effect to the Convention. Considering this as a historic moment for the rights of persons with disabilities, EDF welcomes the publication of the EU report as an evolving and dynamic process to which it would like to contribute by sharing the clear and structured view of 80 million persons with disabilities. The EU report offers a complete description and information on the actions taken by the European Commission. However, it misses the opportunity to involve the Council and the European Parliament, as well as the Commission at its highest political levels. The report also fails to include civil society, first and foremost organisations of persons with disabilities, as well as to trigger a substantial debate on the role of the EU in implementing the rights of persons with disabilities. Among others: - The report outlines adopted measures, but does not include an assessment of their actual implementation and of the budget available to do so. In this sense, it also lacks self-criticism; - The report presents a too strict view of the competences of the EU and of the actions in which the EU as a whole or the European Commission have been involved and have had impact on the rights of persons with disabilities; - The report does not address the diversity of persons with disabilities

European Union Pension Directive

[Excerpt] This Directive thus represents a first step on the way to an internal market for occupational retirement provision organised on a European scale. By setting the ‘prudent person’ rule as the underlying principle for capital investment and making it possible for institutions to operate across borders, the redirection of savings into the sector of occupational retirement provision is encouraged, thus contributing to economic and social progress. The prudential rules laid down in this Directive are intended both to guarantee a high degree of security for future pensioners through the imposition of stringent supervisory standards, and to clear the way for the efficient management of occupational pension schemes

Livestock trade networks for guiding animal health surveillance

BACKGROUND: Trade in live animals can contribute to the introduction of exotic diseases, the maintenance and spread endemic diseases. Annually millions of animals are moved across Europe for the purposes of breeding, fattening and slaughter. Data on the number of animals moved were obtained from the Directorate General Sanco (DG Sanco) for 2011. These were converted to livestock units to enable direct comparison across species and their movements were mapped, used to calculate the indegrees and outdegrees of 27 European countries and the density and transitivity of movements within Europe. This provided the opportunity to discuss surveillance of European livestock movement taking into account stopping points en-route. RESULTS: High density and transitivity of movement for registered equines, breeding and fattening cattle, breeding poultry and pigs for breeding, fattening and slaughter indicates that hazards have the potential to spread quickly within these populations. This is of concern to highly connected countries particularly those where imported animals constitute a large proportion of their national livestock populations, and have a high indegree. The transport of poultry (older than 72 hours) and unweaned animals would require more rest breaks than the movement of weaned animals, which may provide more opportunities for disease transmission. Transitivity is greatest for animals transported for breeding purposes with cattle, pigs and poultry having values of over 50%. CONCLUSIONS: This paper demonstrated that some species (pigs and poultry) are traded much more frequently and at a larger scale than species such as goats. Some countries are more vulnerable than others due to importing animals from many countries, having imported animals requiring rest-breaks and importing large proportions of their national herd or flock. Such knowledge about the vulnerability of different livestock systems related to trade movements can be used to inform the design of animal health surveillance systems to facilitate the trade in animals between European member states. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12917-015-0354-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users