Reducing Global Warming and Adapting to Climate Change: The Potential of Organic Agriculture

Climate change mitigation is urgent and adaptation to climate change is crucial, particularly in agriculture, where food security is at stake. Agriculture, currently responsible for 20-30% of global greenhouse gas emissions counting direct and indirect agricultural emissions), can however contribute to both climate change mitigation and adaptation. The main mitigation potential lies in the capacity of agricultural soils to sequester CO2 through building organic matter. This potential can be realized by employing sustainable agricultural practices, such as those commonly found within organic farming systems. Examples of these practices are the use of organic fertilizers and crop rotations including legumes leys and cover crops. Mitigation is also achieved in organic agriculture through the avoidance of open biomass burning and the avoidance of synthetic fertilizers and the related production emissions from fossil fuels. Common organic practices also contribute to adaptation. Building soil organic matter increases water retention capacity, and creates more stabile, fertile soils, thus reducing vulnerability to drought, extreme precipitation events, floods and water logging. Adaptation is further supported by increased agro-ecosystem diversity of organic farms, due to reduced nitrogen inputs and the absence of chemical pesticides. The high diversity together with the lower input costs of organic agriculture is key in reducing production risks associated with extreme weather events. All these advantageous practices are not exclusive to organic agriculture. However, they are core parts of the organic production system, in contrast to most non-organic agriculture, where they play a minor role only. Mitigation in agriculture cannot be restricted to the agricultural sector alone, though. Consumer behaviour strongly influences agricultural production systems, and thus their mitigation potential. Significant factors are meat consumption and food wastage. Any discussion on mitigation climate change in agriculture needs to address the entire food chain and needs to be linked to general sustainable development strategies. The main challenges to climate change mitigation and adaptation in organic agriculture and agriculture in general concern a)the understanding of some of the basic processes, such as the interaction of N2O emissions and soil carbon sequestration, contributions of roots to soil carbon sequestration and the life-cycle emissions of organic fertilizers such as compost; b) approaches for emissions accounting that adequately represent agricultural production systems with multiple and diverse outputs and that also encompass ecosystem services; c) the identification and implementation of most adequate policy frameworks for supporting mitigation and adaptation in agriculture, i.e: not putting systemic approaches at a disadvantage due to difficulties in the quantification of emissions, and in their allocation to single products; d) how to assure that the current focus on mitigation does not lead to neglect of the other sustainability aspects of agriculture, such as pesticide loads, eutrophication, acidification or soil erosion and e) the question how to address consumer behaviour and how to utilize the mitigation potential of changes in consumption patterns

Helping out: a national survey of volunteering and charitable giving

This report details the main findings of a national survey of volunteering and charitable giving – termed Helping Out – carried out by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) in partnership with the Institute for Volunteering Research (IVR) in 2006/07. The study was carried out for the Office of the Third Sector in the Cabinet Office. The main aims of the study were to examine: - how and why people give unpaid help to organisations, and what they think of their experiences; - what stops people from giving help; - the links between giving time and giving money; - how, why and how much people give money to charity; - what stops people from giving money to charity. There was also interest in estimates of the prevalence of volunteering and charitable giving. However, for a number of reasons (detailed in Chapters 2 and 10), prevalence estimates derived from this study should not be used to look at changes in these measures over time. Other study series are better suited to this purpose. In terms of volunteering, the study focused on formal help given through groups and organisations rather than informal help (given as an individual, e.g. to family and friends)

Water Vapour Effects in Mass Measurement

Water vapour inside the mass comparator enclosure is a critical parameter. In fact, fluctuations of this parameter during mass weighing can lead to errors in the determination of an unknown mass. To control that, a proposal method is given and tested. Preliminary results of our observation of water vapour sorption and desorption processes from walls and mass standard are reported

Submillimeter CO emission from shock-heated gas in the L1157 outflow

We present the CO J=6-5, 4-3, and 3-2 spectra from the blueshifted gas of the outflow driven by the low-mass class 0 protostar in the L1157 dark cloud. Strong submillimeter CO emission lines with T_mb > 30 K have been detected at 63" (~0.13 pc) south from the protostar. It is remarkable that the blue wings in the submillimeter lines are stronger by a factor of 3-4 than that of the CO J=1-0 emission line. The CO line ratios suggest that the blueshifted lobe of this outflow consists of moderately dense gas of n(H_2) = (1-3)x10^4 cm^-3 heated to T_kin = 50-170 K.It is also suggested that the kinetic temperature of the outflowing gas increases from ~80 K near the protostar to ~170 K at the shocked region in the lobe center, toward which the largest velocity dispersion of the CO emission is observed. A remarkable correlation between the kinetic temperature and velocity dispersion of the CO emission along the lobe provides us with direct evidence that the molecular gas at the head of the jet-driven bow shock is indeed heated kinematically. The lower temperature of ~80 K measured at the other shocked region near the end of the lobe is explained if this shock is in a later evolutionary stage, in which the gas has been cooled mainly through radiation of the CO rotational lines.Comment: 10 pages, 4 PDF figures, APJL in pres

Six questions on the construction of ontologies in biomedicine

(Report assembled for the Workshop of the AMIA Working Group on Formal Biomedical Knowledge Representation in connection with AMIA Symposium, Washington DC, 2005.) Best practices in ontology building for biomedicine have been frequently discussed in recent years. However there is a range of seemingly disparate views represented by experts in the field. These views not only reflect the different uses to which ontologies are put, but also the experiences and disciplinary background of these experts themselves. We asked six questions related to biomedical ontologies to what we believe is a representative sample of ontologists in the biomedical field and came to a number conclusions which we believe can help provide an insight into the practical problems which ontology builders face today

Integrated assurance assessment of a reconfigurable digital flight control system

The integrated application of reliability, failure effects and system simulator methods in establishing the airworthiness of a flight critical digital flight control system (DFCS) is demonstrated. The emphasis was on the mutual reinforcement of the methods in demonstrating the system safety

A blinded determination of H0H_0 from low-redshift Type Ia supernovae, calibrated by Cepheid variables

Presently a ${>}3\sigma$ tension exists between values of the Hubble constant $H_0$ derived from analysis of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background by Planck, and local measurements of the expansion using calibrators of type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). We perform a blinded reanalysis of Riess et al. 2011 to measure $H_0$ from low-redshift SNe Ia, calibrated by Cepheid variables and geometric distances including to NGC 4258. This paper is a demonstration of techniques to be applied to the Riess et at. 2016 data. Our end-to-end analysis starts from available CfA3 and LOSS photometry, providing an independent validation of Riess et al. 2011. We obscure the value of $H_0$ throughout our analysis and the first stage of the referee process, because calibration of SNe Ia requires a series of often subtle choices, and the potential for results to be affected by human bias is significant. Our analysis departs from that of Riess et al. 2011 by incorporating the covariance matrix method adopted in SNLS and JLA to quantify SN Ia systematics, and by including a simultaneous fit of all SN Ia and Cepheid data. We find $H_0 = 72.5 \pm 3.1$ (stat) $\pm 0.77$ (sys) km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$ with a three-galaxy (NGC 4258+LMC+MW) anchor. The relative uncertainties are 4.3% statistical, 1.1% systematic, and 4.4% total, larger than in Riess et al. 2011 (3.3% total) and the Efstathiou 2014 reanalysis (3.4% total). Our error budget for $H_0$ is dominated by statistical errors due to the small size of the supernova sample, whilst the systematic contribution is dominated by variation in the Cepheid fits, and for the SNe Ia, uncertainties in the host galaxy mass dependence and Malmquist bias.Comment: 38 pages, 13 figures, 13 tables; accepted for publication in MNRA