Exploring synergies and trade-offs among the sustainable development goals: collective action and adaptive capacity in marginal mountainous areas of India

Global environmental change (GEC) threatens to undermine the sustainable development goals (SDGs). Smallholders in marginal mountainous areas (MMA) are particularly vulnerable due to precarious livelihoods in challenging environments. Acting collectively can enable and constrain the ability of smallholders to adapt to GEC. The objectives of this paper are: (i) identify collective actions in four MMA of the central Indian Himalaya Region, each with differing institutional contexts; (ii) assess the adaptive capacity of each village by measuring livelihood capital assets, diversity, and sustainable land management practices. Engaging with adaptive capacity and collective action literatures, we identify three broad approaches to adaptive capacity relating to the SDGs: natural hazard mitigation (SDG 13), social vulnerability (SDG 1, 2 and 5), and social–ecological resilience (SDG 15). We then develop a conceptual framework to understand the institutional context and identify SDG synergies and trade-offs. Adopting a mixed method approach, we analyse the relationships between collective action and the adaptive capacity of each village, the sites where apparent trade-offs and synergies among SDGs occur. Results illustrate each village has unique socio-environmental characteristics, implying distinct development challenges, vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities exist. Subsequently, specific SDG synergies and trade-offs occur even within MMA, and it is therefore crucial that institutions facilitate locally appropriate collective actions in order to achieve the SDGs. We suggest that co-production in the identification, prioritisation and potential solutions to the distinct challenges facing MMA can increase understandings of the specific dynamics and feedbacks necessary to achieve the SDGs in the context of GEC

A discursive review of the textual use of ‘trapped’ in environmental migration studies: The conceptual birth and troubled teenage years of trapped populations

First mooted in 2011, the concept of Trapped Populations referring to people unable to move from environmentally high-risk areas broadened the study of human responses to environmental change. While a seemingly straightforward concept, the underlying discourses around the reasons for being ‘trapped’, and the language describing the concept have profound influences on the way in which policy and practice approaches the needs of populations at risk from environmental stresses and shocks. In this article, we apply a Critical Discourse Analysis to the academic literature on the subject to reveal some of the assumptions implicit within discussing ‘trapped’ populations. The analysis reveals a dominant school of thought that assisted migration, relocation, and resettlement in the face of climate change are potentially effective adaptation strategies along a gradient of migrant agency and governance

Building adaptive capacity to climate change in tropical coastal communities

To minimize the impacts of climate change on human wellbeing, governments, development agencies, and civil society organizations have made substantial investments in improving people's capacity to adapt to change. Yet to date, these investments have tended to focus on a very narrow understanding of adaptive capacity. Here, we propose an approach to build adaptive capacity across five domains: the assets that people can draw upon in times of need; the flexibility to change strategies; the ability to organize and act collectively; learning to recognize and respond to change; and the agency to determine whether to change or not

Graphic Surgical Practice in the Handbills of Seventeenth-Century London Irregulars

The article presents the multimodal analysis of three handbills printed for irregular medical practitioners (especially surgeons) in the second half of the seventeenth century. These cultural artefacts, besides describing irregulars’ usually multiple medicaments, include conspicuous images and/or particular fonts used to catch the reader’s eye and improve sales, thus showing their authors’ sophisticated care for typography. The article considers how such details interacted with the language of advertising in the early stages of mass communication and marketing procedures. It is this interaction between linguistic and visual features which can lead to such a reversal of status between text and images that words may be interpreted as paratextual additions to visual texts. At the end a source of one of the images is pinpointed so as to show how irregulars popularised scientific publications

An atomic force microscopy analysis of yeast mutants defective in cell wall architecture

International audienceYeast cells are surrounded by a thick cell wall, the composition and structure of which have been characterized by biochemical and genetic methods. In this study, we used atomic force microscopy (AFM) to visualize the cell surface topography and to determine cell wall nanomechanical properties of yeast mutants defective in cell wall architecture. While all mutants investigated showed some alteration in cell surface topography, this alteration was particularly salient in mutants defective in β-glucan elongation (gas1), chitin synthesis (chs3) and cross-linkages between chitin and β-glucan (crh1crh2). In addition, these alterations in surface topology were accompanied by increased roughness of the cell. From force-indentation curves, the Young's modulus was determined, as it gives a measure of the elasticity of the cell wall. A value of ∼1.6 MPa was obtained for the cell walls of the wild-type strain in exponential and stationary phases of growth. The same value was measured in a mnn9 mutant defective in protein mannosylation, and was twofold reduced in a mutant with reduced β-glucan (fks1 and knr4), only in the stationary phase of growth. In contrast, the elasticity was dramatically reduced in mutants defective in chitin synthesis (chs3), β-glucan elongation (gas1) and, even more remarkably, in a crh1 crh2 mutant defective in the enzymes that catalyse cross-linkages of chitin to β-glucan. Taken together, these results provide direct physical evidence that the nanomechanical properties of the yeast cell wall are mainly dependent on cross-links and cell wall remodelling, rather than on cell wall composition or thickness