25,502 research outputs found
The role of rainfed agriculture in the future of global food production:
This paper examines future prospects for rainfed cereal production, and its importance in the evolving global food system. First, the paper undertakes a critical synthesis of the literature to assess three primary ways to enhance rainfed cereal yields: increasing effective rainfall use through improved water management, particularly water harvesting; increasing crop yields in rainfed areas through agricultural research; and reforming policies and increasing investments in rainfed areas. Second, the IMPACT-WATER integrated water-food modeling framework is applied to assess the current situation and plausible future options of irrigation water supply and food security, primarily on a global scale. This model simulates the relationships among water availability and demand, food supply and demand, international food prices, and trade at regional and global levels. The results show that rainfed agriculture will maintain an important role in the growth of food production in the future, although appropriate investments and policy reforms will be required to enhance the contribution of rainfed agriculture.Agricultural policy., Rainfed farming Developing countries., Cereal crops. Agricultural policy., Rainfed farming Developing countries., Cereal crops., Food security., Water-supply., Food supply., Trade., Crop yields., Water use Management.,
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Zero-Emission Medium- and Heavy-duty Truck Technology, Markets, and Policy Assessments for California
This report assesses zero emissions medium- and heavy-duty vehicle technologies, their associated costs, projected market share, and possible policy mandates and incentives to support their adoption. Cost comparisons indicate that battery-electric transit buses and city delivery trucks are the most economically attractive of the zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) based on their break-even mileage being a small fraction of the expected total mileage. These ZEVs using fuel cells are also attractive for a hydrogen cost of $5/kg. The most economically unattractive vehicle types for ZEV adoption are long-haul trucks and inter-city buses. Developing mandates for buses and trucks will be more difficult than for passenger cars for several reasons, including the large differences in the size and cost of the vehicles and the ways they are used in commercial, profit-oriented fleets. The best approach will be to develop separate mandates for classes of vehicles that have similar sizes, cost characteristics, use patterns, and ownership/business models. These mandates should be coupled to incentives that vary by vehicle type/class and by year or accumulated sales volume, to account for the effects of expected price reductions with time
ASCR/HEP Exascale Requirements Review Report
This draft report summarizes and details the findings, results, and
recommendations derived from the ASCR/HEP Exascale Requirements Review meeting
held in June, 2015. The main conclusions are as follows. 1) Larger, more
capable computing and data facilities are needed to support HEP science goals
in all three frontiers: Energy, Intensity, and Cosmic. The expected scale of
the demand at the 2025 timescale is at least two orders of magnitude -- and in
some cases greater -- than that available currently. 2) The growth rate of data
produced by simulations is overwhelming the current ability, of both facilities
and researchers, to store and analyze it. Additional resources and new
techniques for data analysis are urgently needed. 3) Data rates and volumes
from HEP experimental facilities are also straining the ability to store and
analyze large and complex data volumes. Appropriately configured
leadership-class facilities can play a transformational role in enabling
scientific discovery from these datasets. 4) A close integration of HPC
simulation and data analysis will aid greatly in interpreting results from HEP
experiments. Such an integration will minimize data movement and facilitate
interdependent workflows. 5) Long-range planning between HEP and ASCR will be
required to meet HEP's research needs. To best use ASCR HPC resources the
experimental HEP program needs a) an established long-term plan for access to
ASCR computational and data resources, b) an ability to map workflows onto HPC
resources, c) the ability for ASCR facilities to accommodate workflows run by
collaborations that can have thousands of individual members, d) to transition
codes to the next-generation HPC platforms that will be available at ASCR
facilities, e) to build up and train a workforce capable of developing and
using simulations and analysis to support HEP scientific research on
next-generation systems.Comment: 77 pages, 13 Figures; draft report, subject to further revisio
Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Large Hadron Collider to 2025 and beyond
Social cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of projects has been successfully applied
in different fields such as transport, energy, health, education, and
environment, including climate change. It is often argued that it is impossible
to extend the CBA approach to the evaluation of the social impact of research
infrastructures, because the final benefit to society of scientific discovery
is generally unpredictable. Here, we propose a quantitative approach to this
problem, we use it to design an empirically testable CBA model, and we apply it
to the the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the highest-energy accelerator in the
world, currently operating at CERN. We show that the evaluation of benefits can
be made quantitative by determining their value to users (scientists,
early-stage researchers, firms, visitors) and non-users (the general public).
Four classes of contributions to users are identified: knowledge output, human
capital development, technological spillovers, and cultural effects. Benefits
for non-users can be estimated, in analogy to public goods with no practical
use (such as environment preservation), using willingness to pay. We determine
the probability distribution of cost and benefits for the LHC since 1993 until
planned decommissioning in 2025, and we find there is a 92% probability that
benefits exceed its costs, with an expected net present value of about 3
billion euro, not including the unpredictable economic value of discovery of
any new physics. We argue that the evaluation approach proposed here can be
replicated for any large-scale research infrastructure, thus helping the
decision-making on competing projects, with a socio-economic appraisal
complementary to other evaluation criteria.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure
Strategic Analyses of the National River Linking Project (NRLP) of India, Series 1. India’s water future: scenarios and issues
River basinsEnvironmental flowsDevelopment projectsWater requirementsIrrigated farmingWater demandFood demandGroundwater irrigationIrrigation efficiencyWater harvestingSupplemental irrigationWater productivityWater conservationDrip irrigationSprinkler irrigationRainfed farmingAgricultural policy
Pan-European backcasting exercise, enriched with regional perspective, and including a list of short-term policy options
This deliverable reports on the results of the third and final pan-European stakeholder meeting and secondly, on the enrichment with a Pilot Area and regional perspective. The main emphasis is on backcasting as a means to arrive at long-term strategies and short-term (policy) actions
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