Pesticides and farmer health in Nicaragua: a willingness-to-pay approach to evaluation

Health risks, Pesticides, Contingent valuation, Nicaragua,

Missing the forest for the trees? Navigating the trade-offs between mitigation and adaptation under REDD

Forested landscapes play a critical role in mitigating climate change by sequesteringcarbon while at the same time fostering adaption by supporting ecosystem services, therecognition of which is reflected in the recent Paris Agreement on climate change. It has beensuggested, therefore, that the conservation of forested landscapes may provide a potential win-win in the fight against global environmental change. Despite the potential synergies betweenmitigation and adaptation efforts, recent studies have also raised concerns about possible trade-offs. Our research employs the analytic lens of social-ecological resilience to explore theintersection between mitigation and adaptation in the context of a Reduced Emissions fromDeforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) project in Lao PDR. Drawing on ecosystemanalyses, group discussions and interviews with policy makers, practitioners and resource-dependent communities, we identify three potential limitations of REDD for achieving climatesynergies. First, by disrupting existing disturbance regimes, REDD interventions run the riskof reducing diversity and structural heterogeneity and thus may undermine functional redun-dancy core to resilience. Second, REDD-as-practiced has tended to select local, rather thanstructural, drivers of deforestation, focusing disproportionately on curtailing local livelihoodpractices, reducing local resources for adaptation. Third, REDD risks redirecting ecosystemservice benefits away from local communities toward state agencies, incentivizing recentrali-zation and limiting the scope of local governance. We argue that REDD’s potential fordelivering synergies between climate change mitigation and adaptation in Laos is currentlyattenuated by structural factors rooted in development policies and broader political-economictrajectories in ways that may not be legible to, or adequately addressed by, current programmesand policy

Solid State Polymorphism of Isotactic and Syndiotactic Polypropylene

The crystal structure and polymorphism of isotactic (iPP) and syndioactic polypropylene (sPP) are illustrated, highlighting the rich variety of phase behavior of these polymers, the conditions of obtainment of the different polymorphs and the disorder phenomena occurring in the crystals. After description of the concepts of packing and conformational polymorphism occurring in the case of iPP and sPP respectively, the crystal structure of the different polymorphs of iPP and sPP are described. In particular, the main structural features relative to the monoclinc α-, the trigonal β- and the orthorhombic γ-forms, of iPP including the mesomorphic form, and the trigonal form which develops in random isotactic copolymers of propylene with pentene or hexene units, are described at first, the chain conformation in all these polymorphs being the 3/1 helix. Then, the complex polymorphism of sPP and the crystal structure of the orthorhombic helical form I and II, the orthorhombic trans-planar form III, the monoclininc form IV, and the trans-planar and helical mesophases are illustrated. The implications of the crystal structure with the final properties are outlined for these polymers, the great fortune of which was the almost simultaneous discovery of the polymerization catalyst systems and the structural elucidation