3,496 research outputs found

    Impact of climate change on yields and output supply responses of selected cereal crops in Ethiopia

    Get PDF
    Climate change affects agricultural production and productivity in sub-Saharan Africa, including Ethiopia, where it poses some threats to sustainable economic growth and ag-ricultural development. As studies conducted on the impact of climate change on crop production are limited, this study analyzed the impacts of the changes in climate on yields and output supply responses of teff, wheat and maize crops in Ethiopia. The study employed time series secondary data on selected variables over the period of 1981 to 2018. The data were collected from various reputable sources such as the Ethio-pian CSA, NMA, and FAO data set (FAOSTAT). The study adopted Cobb-Douglas Pro-duction Function and Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) modeling approaches. The impacts of climate change on crop yields and output was estimated using key cli-mate parameters (minimum and maximum temperature and short- and long- season rainfalls). The results of Production Function analysis on the impact of climate variables on yield of cereal crops revealed that long-season rainfall have negative (-0.352, -0.498, and -0.429) and significant (at 1% and 5% levels) impact on yields of teff, wheat and maize crops, respectively. Maximum temperature also had negative (-2.810 & -3.681) and sig-nificant (at 10% level) impact on the yields of wheat and maize crops while it had posi-tive (0.372) and significant (at 10% level) impact on teff yield. Equally, the impact of climatic variables on crop output supply responses was estimated based on crop season temperature and short- and long-season rainfalls. The results indi-cated that changes in short- and long-season rainfalls had negative (-0.453 and -0.077) and significant (at 1% level) impact on wheat and maize outputs in their first lag order. The results also demonstrated that crop growing period mean temperature had negative (-2.88 and -10.70) and significant (at 1% and 5% levels) impacts on wheat and maize outputs in their first lag orders. Although temperature and long-season rainfall parame-ters showed negative impact on teff output, their impacts were minimal as they were statistically insignificant. Conversely, carbon dioxide (CO2) showed positive (4.76 and 2.256) and significant (at 5% and 1% level) impact on teff and wheat outputs in their first lag orders. This signified that teff and wheat outputs were positively responsive to an increase in CO2 concentration. Forecasted future changes in temperature and rainfall variables showed increasing trend in mean temperature (rise from -4.850C to 0.1950C by 2080) in teff growing belt while future changes in rainfall (both short- and long-season rainfalls) showed a decreasing trend in teff (from -0.06mm to -1.58mm), wheat (from -0.11mm to -1.3mm), and maize (from -0.01mm to -0.17mm) growing belts by 2080. However, the projected future changes in the yields of wheat, maize and teff are positive over the selected scenarios. By 2080, yield of wheat would increase by 237% while those teff and maize would increase by48% and 10% respectively. In conclusion, rainfall and temperature parameters were found to increase yield level and variability for wheat crop. However, rainfall and temperature parameters were indi-vidually found to have adverse effects on yield of teff and maize crops. Unless some abatement measures are taken on increasing CO2 emission, the rise in temperature and the decrease in seasonal rainfall will continue and this will negatively affect cereal crop yields. It is therefore recommended that there is the need to design and implement adap-tation strategies that reverse and mitigate the risks of changing climate. Development of early maturing and stress tolerant crop varieties as well as supporting research and ex-tension tasks becomes imperative.Agriculture and  Animal HealthPh. D. (Agriculture

    Hunting Wildlife in the Tropics and Subtropics

    Get PDF
    The hunting of wild animals for their meat has been a crucial activity in the evolution of humans. It continues to be an essential source of food and a generator of income for millions of Indigenous and rural communities worldwide. Conservationists rightly fear that excessive hunting of many animal species will cause their demise, as has already happened throughout the Anthropocene. Many species of large mammals and birds have been decimated or annihilated due to overhunting by humans. If such pressures continue, many other species will meet the same fate. Equally, if the use of wildlife resources is to continue by those who depend on it, sustainable practices must be implemented. These communities need to remain or become custodians of the wildlife resources within their lands, for their own well-being as well as for biodiversity in general. This title is also available via Open Access on Cambridge Core

    Conjunctures in Law and Development: Assemblages for Progress in Indian Agricultural Futures

    Get PDF
    This dissertation asks: how are the legal, political, and social legacies of the Green Revolution and India's incorporation into the global knowledge economy shaping or undermining the emergent discourses, practices, and regulatory rationalities of India's current Climate Smart Agriculture development initiatives? To answer this question, I construct a theoretical/methodological framework that brings together conjunctural analysis, assemblage theory, Foucaultian governmentality, and transnational legal pluralism. I identify two previous historical eras of significant agricultural and developmental change in India: the Green Revolution (1950s-early 1970s) and the liberalization of Indian agriculture as part of India's broader incorporation into the global knowledge economy (1991-mid 2000s). I study the historical relationship between the modern Indian state and Indian farmers across these eras of agricultural and developmental transformation to investigate how they are informing current Climate Smart Agriculture programs, how these contemporary programs work, and the extent to which these programs and the political struggles they incite represent a new historical phase of state power in India. I argue that Climate Smart Agriculture programs and the accompanying introduction of Big Data technology in Indian agriculture should not be understood as a singular event or a unique and novel initiative, but as the most recent project of governmentality mediating the relationship between the Indian state and Indian farmers. This dissertation further shows how relationships between states in the Global South and farmers are shaped by the interplay of technologies (understood both conventionally and in the Foucaultian sense) that are constructed and regulated through the law. I simultaneously demonstrate how the entwined processes of postcolonial state- and subject-making in the domains of agriculture and development always invokes forms of resistance that often result in contradictory regulatory outcomes, which continue to establish the conditions for future political contestation. This dissertation contributes to the field of Socio-legal Studies at large, and the subfields of Law and Development, Law and Globalization/TWAIL, and Green Criminology

    Infrastructure for the Circular Economy: The Role of Policy in System Change

    Get PDF
    The concept of a Circular Economy has gained policy traction as a mainstream solution for preserving and renewing. This work sought to understand which policy instruments have been successful, might still be necessary, and are most likely in the future to deliver a high penetration Circular Economy for materials, wastes and associated energy. Waste related policy decisions in England over the past 20 years were reviewed, exploring the regulatory means that had achieved the current 44% diversion of municipal wastes from landfill. The hypothesis is that to achieve a far-reaching Circular Economy, at a greater scale, across different sectors and for a wider product range, suitable physical infrastructure (waste treatment assets) must be available to circulate those materials in the economy. Furthermore, the study set out to value financially and in terms of social and economic benefits that could be derived from a circular approach across the whole economy. We found the financial value to be significant at circa 1.5% of English GDP or  32bn and 72,000-175,000 jobs. It was demonstrated by calculation that DEFRA analysis (for England) underestimated the capacity gap for infrastructure by 11.3 million tonnes per annum in 2014. The policy findings were that the early implementation of blunt instruments such as a landfill tax and separate collection of recyclables did allow for diversion performance of approximately 45-50% recycling and composting, the remaining 50% of which was progressively treated by energy from waste rather than landfill. It is apparent that policies that drive system changes are effective in bringing about ecological transformations of how societies, economies, and governments operate at all levels. This ecological transformation is undoubtedly difficult to achieve since it will require consumers, manufacturers, regulators, policymakers, media, and business all to move differently and together, but nevertheless it is critical at a global scale.Open Acces

    Collected Papers (on various scientific topics), Volume XIII

    Get PDF
    This thirteenth volume of Collected Papers is an eclectic tome of 88 papers in various fields of sciences, such as astronomy, biology, calculus, economics, education and administration, game theory, geometry, graph theory, information fusion, decision making, instantaneous physics, quantum physics, neutrosophic logic and set, non-Euclidean geometry, number theory, paradoxes, philosophy of science, scientific research methods, statistics, and others, structured in 17 chapters (Neutrosophic Theory and Applications; Neutrosophic Algebra; Fuzzy Soft Sets; Neutrosophic Sets; Hypersoft Sets; Neutrosophic Semigroups; Neutrosophic Graphs; Superhypergraphs; Plithogeny; Information Fusion; Statistics; Decision Making; Extenics; Instantaneous Physics; Paradoxism; Mathematica; Miscellanea), comprising 965 pages, published between 2005-2022 in different scientific journals, by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 110 co-authors (alphabetically ordered) from 26 countries: Abduallah Gamal, Sania Afzal, Firoz Ahmad, Muhammad Akram, Sheriful Alam, Ali Hamza, Ali H. M. Al-Obaidi, Madeleine Al-Tahan, Assia Bakali, Atiqe Ur Rahman, Sukanto Bhattacharya, Bilal Hadjadji, Robert N. Boyd, Willem K.M. Brauers, Umit Cali, Youcef Chibani, Victor Christianto, Chunxin Bo, Shyamal Dalapati, Mario Dalcín, Arup Kumar Das, Elham Davneshvar, Bijan Davvaz, Irfan Deli, Muhammet Deveci, Mamouni Dhar, R. Dhavaseelan, Balasubramanian Elavarasan, Sara Farooq, Haipeng Wang, Ugur Halden, Le Hoang Son, Hongnian Yu, Qays Hatem Imran, Mayas Ismail, Saeid Jafari, Jun Ye, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Darjan Karabašević, Abdullah Kargın, Vasilios N. Katsikis, Nour Eldeen M. Khalifa, Madad Khan, M. Khoshnevisan, Tapan Kumar Roy, Pinaki Majumdar, Sreepurna Malakar, Masoud Ghods, Minghao Hu, Mingming Chen, Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Mohamed Talea, Mohammad Hamidi, Mohamed Loey, Mihnea Alexandru Moisescu, Muhammad Ihsan, Muhammad Saeed, Muhammad Shabir, Mumtaz Ali, Muzzamal Sitara, Nassim Abbas, Munazza Naz, Giorgio Nordo, Mani Parimala, Ion Pătrașcu, Gabrijela Popović, K. Porselvi, Surapati Pramanik, D. Preethi, Qiang Guo, Riad K. Al-Hamido, Zahra Rostami, Said Broumi, Saima Anis, Muzafer Saračević, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Selvaraj Ganesan, Shammya Shananda Saha, Marayanagaraj Shanmugapriya, Songtao Shao, Sori Tjandrah Simbolon, Florentin Smarandache, Predrag S. Stanimirović, Dragiša Stanujkić, Raman Sundareswaran, Mehmet Șahin, Ovidiu-Ilie Șandru, Abdulkadir Șengür, Mohamed Talea, Ferhat Taș, Selçuk Topal, Alptekin Ulutaș, Ramalingam Udhayakumar, Yunita Umniyati, J. Vimala, Luige Vlădăreanu, Ştefan Vlăduţescu, Yaman Akbulut, Yanhui Guo, Yong Deng, You He, Young Bae Jun, Wangtao Yuan, Rong Xia, Xiaohong Zhang, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas, Zayen Azzouz Omar, Xiaohong Zhang, Zhirou Ma.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

    The European Spallation Source neutrino super-beam conceptual design report

    Full text link
    Artículo escrito por un elevado número de autores, solo se referencian el que aparece en primer lugar, el nombre del grupo de colaboración, si le hubiere, y los autores pertenecientes a la UAMA design study, named ESS νSB for European Spallation Source neutrino Super Beam, has been carried out during the years 2018–2022 of how the 5 MW proton linear accelerator of the European Spallation Source under construction in Lund, Sweden, can be used to produce the world’s most intense long-baseline neutrino beam. The high beam intensity will allow for measuring the neutrino oscillations near the second oscillation maximum at which the CP violation signal is close to three times higher than at the first maximum, where other experiments measure. This will enable CP violation discovery in the leptonic sector for a wider range of values of the CP violating phase δCP and, in particular, a higher precision measurement of δCP. The present Conceptual Design Report describes the results of the design study of the required upgrade of the ESS linac, of the accumulator ring used to compress the linac pulses from 2.86 ms to 1.2 μs, and of the target station, where the 5 MW proton beam is used to produce the intense neutrino beam. It also presents the design of the near detector, which is used to monitor the neutrino beam as well as to measure neutrino cross sections, and of the large underground far detector located 360 km from ESS, where the magnitude of the oscillation appearance of νe from νμ is measured. The physics performance of the ESS νSB research facility has been evaluated demonstrating that after 10 years of data-taking, leptonic CP violation can be detected with more than 5 standard deviation significance over 70% of the range of values that the CP violation phase angle δCP can take and that δCP can be measured with a standard error less than 8° irrespective of the measured value of δCP. These results demonstrate the uniquely high physics performance of the proposed ESS νSB research facilit

    Cooperatives in the social and solidarity economy: Sustainable development and decent work in Africa’s informal economy

    Get PDF
    How can the contribution of cooperatives and the wider social and solidarity economy (SSE) to global development frameworks (the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Decent Work Agenda (DWA) be made more effective, impactful and visible, in particular with regard the informal economy in sub-Saharan Africa? This thesis seeks to provide an answer to this question through the journey of my professional practice, bridging the gap to academic theory. The thesis critically analyses and builds upon the contributions to knowledge of my portfolio of seven ‘professional practice’ papers published between 1993 and 2020. The papers were written upon request or invitation by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the UN Department for Economic and Social Affairs, the Plunkett Foundation, and the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation. The thesis starts with a contextual overview of the state of the field from both practice and theory. This is followed by a literature review which examines academic theory in relation to, and interaction between, the five focus areas of my thesis (cooperatives, SSE, DWA, SDGs, informal economy) within the context of neoliberal policies in Africa. I then critically reflect on the methodological, theoretical and political aspects of my seven publications. Finally, I pin-point directions for future research. I conclude that the SSE’s potential to contribute to sustainable development and decent work in Africa is far from being fully harnessed, for the reason that most policy-makers, researchers and practitioners lack cognizance of the existence and agency of member-based organizations that constitute the SSE. Through the journey of writing the theses I have developed a conceptual model and an accompanying tool to systematically identify and evaluate the synergies and complementarities between the four dimensions of sustainable development (economic, social, environmental and institutional), the four pillars of decent work (jobs, protection, dialogue, rights), and the four functions of the SSE (economic opportunities, social security, societal empowerment, environmental protection). This then helps to identify SSE-pertinent SDG targets, and to determine which types of organizations in the SSE are best suited to contribute to specific SDG targets. I consider this conceptual model and its accompanying tool as an original contribution to knowledge of theoretical and practical applicability
    corecore