Enhancing engagement with community sector organisations working in sustainable waste management: a case study

Voluntary and community sector organisations are increasingly being viewed as key agents of change in the shifts towards the concepts of resource efficiency and circular economy, at the community level. Using a meta-analysis and questionnaire surveys across three towns in the East Midlands of England, namely Northampton, Milton Keynes and Luton, this study aimed to understand public engagement with these organisations. The findings suggest that these organisations play a significant and wide-spread role, not only with regard to sustainable environmental management, but also a social role in community development and regeneration. The surveys indicated that there were generally high levels of awareness of the organisations and strong engagement with them. Clothes were the items most donated. Key reasons for engagement included the financial value offered and the perception that it helped the environment. However, potential limitations in future public engagement were also determined and recommendations for addressing these suggested

Modeled spatial assessment of biomass productivity and technical potential of Miscanthus× giganteus, Panicum virgatum L. and Jatropha on marginal land in China

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study was supported by Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC). We thank our colleagues from Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences for data collection, and thank Tao Sang from the Institute of Botany of Chinese Academy of Sciences for providing data. The MiscanFor modeling was supported by UK NERC ADVENT (NE/1806209) and FAB-GGR (NE/P019951/1) project funding. John Clifton-Brown received support from the United Kingdom's DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs) as part of the MISCOMAR project (FACCE SURPLUS, Sustainable and Resilient Agriculture for food and non-food systems)Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Network analysis of a stakeholder community combatting illegal wildlife trade

The illegal wildlife trade has emerged as a growing and urgent environmental issue. Stakeholders involved in the efforts to curb wildlife trafficking include non- governmental organizations (NGOs), academia, and state government/enforcement bodies. The extent to which these stakeholders work and communicate amongst each other is fundamental to effectively combatting illicit trade. Using the United Kingdom as a case study, we conducted a mixed methods study using a social network analysis and stakeholder interviews to assess communication relationships in the counter wildlife trafficking community. NGOs consistently occupied 4 of the 5 most central positions in the generated networks, while academic institutions were routinely the converse, filling 4 of the 5 most peripheral positions. However, NGOs were also shown to be the least diverse in their communication practices, compared to the other stakeholder groups. Through semi- structured interviews, personal relationships were identified as the biggest key to functioning communication. Participant insights also showed that stakeholder-specific variables (e.g. ethical/confidentiality concerns), and competition and fundraising, can have a confounding effect on inter-communication. Evaluating communication networks and intra- stakeholder communication trends is essential to facilitate a more cohesive, productive, and efficient response to the challenges of combatting illegal wildlife trade

Rural Development Programme measures on cultivated land in Europe to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions – regional ‘hotspots’ and priority measures

© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.Agriculture is a significant source of GHG emissions, contributing 10% of total emissions within the EU-28. Emissions from European agriculture have been reduced, albeit at the expense of crop yield and the risk of production displacement (the transfer of production, and associated emissions, to land outside of Europe). This article assesses the impact on GHG emissions of selected European Rural Development Program measures, representative of a diversity of management strategies implemented on cultivated land, within nine European Member States. Climatic zone and underlying spatial environmental variables were accounted for using a novel technique, “Regional Variation Categories,” developed with European-scale GIS data sets. Production displacement is assessed with two benchmarks: (1) compared with existing crop production and (2) relative to a “minimum requirement” land management scenario, where an emissions reduction of less than this does not constitute mitigation. Most measures reduce emissions relative to the baseline crop scenario; however, many do not reduce emissions beyond the “minimum requirement,” this being limited to measures such as catch crops and within-field grass areas to prevent soil erosion. The selection and targeting of measures to maximize agricultural GHG mitigation on cultivated land within Europe is discussed...Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Exploring Entrepreneurial Skills and Competencies in Farm Tourism

Diversification to farm tourism is increasingly seen as a viable development strategy to promote a more diverse and sustainable rural economy and to counter declining farm incomes. However, our understanding of the dynamics of the modern farm tourism business and the entrepreneurial and competitive skills farmers require in making the transition from agriculture to a diversified - and service based - enterprise remains limited. Hence, the aim of this paper is to explore the range of skills and competencies that farmers in the North West of England identify as important when adopting a diversification strategy to farm tourism. With the findings indicating that that whilst a range of managerial skills are valued by farmers, they lack many of the additional business and entrepreneurial competencies required for success. Moreover, this paper acknowledges the need to generate consensus on the requisite skill-set that farm tourism operators require, along with a need for a currently fragmented rural tourism literature to acknowledge the significance of rural entrepreneurship and the characteristics of successful farmers and farm tourism ventures

Combining two national‐scale datasets to map soil properties, the case of available magnesium in England and Wales

Given the costs of soil survey it is necessary to make the best use of available datasets, but data that differ with respect to some aspect of the sampling or analytical protocol cannot be combined simply. In this paper we consider a case where two datasets were available on the concentration of plant‐available magnesium in the topsoil. The datasets were the Representative Soil Sampling Scheme (RSSS) and the National Soil Inventory (NSI) of England and Wales. The variable was measured over the same depth interval and with the same laboratory method, but the sample supports were different and so the datasets differ in their variance. We used a multivariate geostatistical model, the linear model of coregionalization (LMCR), to model the joint spatial distribution of the two datasets. The model allowed us to elucidate the effects of the sample support on the two datasets, and to show that there was a strong correlation between the underlying variables. The LMCR allowed us to make spatial predictions of the variable on the RSSS support by cokriging the RSSS data with the NSI data. We used cross‐validation to test the validity of the LMCR and showed how incorporating the NSI data restricted the range of prediction error variances relative to univariate ordinary kriging predictions from the RSSS data alone. The standardized squared prediction errors were computed and the coverage of prediction intervals (i.e. the proportion of sites at which the prediction interval included the observed value of the variable). Both these statistics suggested that the prediction error variances were consistent for the cokriging predictions but not for the ordinary kriging predictions from the simple combination of the RSSS and NSI data, which might be proposed on the basis of their very similar mean values. The LMCR is therefore proposed as a general tool for the combined analysis of different datasets on soil properties

Regulating services

No abstract available

The experience of stakeholder participation in tourism planning: operationalising ‘best practice’

Stakeholder participation has become widely viewed as an essential feature of sustainable policy and decision-making. As a result the provision for stakeholder participation has been included within a range of decision-making processes but without necessarily ensuring that its structure is appropriate to the context. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 legislation required the creation of Local Access Forums to advise on public access to the English countryside. However guidance on their role and structure was vague and in 2005 a government commissioned survey indicated that many Local Access Forums were experiencing a lack of empowerment. Through observation of four Local Access Forums (LAFs) over a period of two years it was possible to compare their experiences with the findings of the government commissioned survey. One of the four LAFs studied provided indications of strategies leading to outcomes that were satisfactory for both participants and organisers. This case study has been further examined in order to develop an outline of ‘Best Practice’ that is appropriate to the formation and management of Local Access Forums within the context of stakeholder participatory groups

The North Wyke Farm Platform : effect of temperate grassland farming systems on soil moisture contents, runoff and associated water quality dynamics

The North Wyke Farm Platform is a UK National Capabilitysupported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences ResearchCouncil (BBSRC BB/J004308/1). This work was carried out inaccordance with the welfare standards approved by RothamstedResearch, North Wyke’s Animal Welfare Ethical Review Board.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Nitrogen deposition and plant biodiversity : past, present and future

Reactive nitrogen (N) deposition from intensive agricultural and industrial activity has been identified as the third greatest threat to global terrestrial biodiversity, after land-use and climate change. While the impacts of N deposition are widely acknowledged, their magnitude is poorly quantified. We combine N deposition models, empirical response functions, and vegetation mapping to simulate the effects of N deposition on plant species richness from 1900 to 2030, using the island of Great Britain as a case study. We find that current species richness values – when averaged across five widespread habitat types – are approximately one-third less than without N deposition. Our results suggest that currently expected reductions in emissions will achieve no more than modest increases in species richness by 2030, and that emissions cuts based on habitat-specific “critical loads” may be an inefficient approach to managing N deposition for the protection of plant biodiversity. The effects of N deposition on biodiversity are severe and are unlikely to be quickly reversed