Environmental footprints show China and Europe\u27s evolving resource appropriation for soybean production in Mato Grosso, Brazil

Mato Grosso has become the center of Brazil\u27s soybean industry, with production located across an agricultural frontier expanding into savanna and rainforest biomes. We present environmental footprints of soybean production in Mato Grosso and resource flows accompanying exports to China and Europe for the 2000s using five indicators: deforestation, land footprint (LF), carbon footprint (CF), water footprint (WF), and nutrient footprints. Soybean production was associated with 65% of the state\u27s deforestation, and 14–17% of total Brazilian land use change carbon emissions. The decade showed two distinct production systems illustrated by resources used in the first and second half of the decade. Deforestation and carbon footprint declined 70% while land, water, and nutrient footprints increased almost 30% between the two periods. These differences coincided with a shift in Mato Grosso\u27s export destination. Between 2006 and 2010, China surpassed Europe in soybean imports when production was associated with 97 m2 deforestation yr−1 ton−1 of soybean, a LF of 0.34 ha yr−1 ton−1, a carbon footprint of 4.6 ton CO2-eq yr−1 ton−1, a WF of 1908 m3 yr−1 ton−1, and virtual phosphorous and potassium of 5.0 kg P yr−1 ton−1 and 0.0042 g K yr−1 ton−1. Mato Grosso constructs soil fertility via phosphorous and potassium fertilizer sourced from third party countries and imported into the region. Through the soybean produced, Mato Grosso then exports both water derived from its abundant, seasonal precipitation and nutrients obtained from fertilizer. In 2010, virtual water flows were 10.3 km3 yr−1 to China and 4.1 km3 yr−1 to Europe. The total embedded nutrient flows to China were 2.12 Mtons yr−1 and 2.85 Mtons yr−1 to Europe. As soybean production grows with global demand, the role of Mato Grosso\u27s resource use and production vulnerabilities highlight the challenges with meeting future international food security needs

Looking ‘beyond the factory gates’:towards more pluralist and radical approaches to intra-organizational trust research

The aim of this paper is to suggest new avenues for trust research by critiquing the extant literature on this topic. We analyze the most influential research on intra-organizational trust from the perspective of a classic industrial sociology framework from the 1970s – Alan Fox’s work on frames of reference and trust dynamics. Our analysis of intra-organizational trust studies leads us to three conclusions. Firstly, the large majority of intra-organizational trust research has strong unitarist underpinnings, which support a managerial agenda that is potentially detrimental to employees’ and (indeed managers’) long-term interests. Secondly, most of this research fails to explain how trust in organizations is embedded in societal and field level institutions, hence it would benefit from looking ‘beyond the factory gates’ for a more complete understanding of trust dynamics in organizations. In this connection, we argue that Fox’s pluralist and radical perspectives, which are under-represented in intra-organizational trust research, could provide new lines of inquiry by locating internal trust relations in a wider institutional context. Thirdly, Fox’s explanation of how low and high trust dynamics in organizations are embedded in wider society may help address the concerns about under-socialized, endogenous explanations and open the way for structure-agency analyses of building, maintaining and repairing intra-organizational trust

Aligning evidence generation and use across health, development, and environment

© 2019 The Authors Although health, development, and environment challenges are interconnected, evidence remains fractured across sectors due to methodological and conceptual differences in research and practice. Aligned methods are needed to support Sustainable Development Goal advances and similar agendas. The Bridge Collaborative, an emergent research-practice collaboration, presents principles and recommendations that help harmonize methods for evidence generation and use. Recommendations were generated in the context of designing and evaluating evidence of impact for interventions related to five global challenges (stabilizing the global climate, making food production sustainable, decreasing air pollution and respiratory disease, improving sanitation and water security, and solving hunger and malnutrition) and serve as a starting point for further iteration and testing in a broader set of contexts and disciplines. We adopted six principles and emphasize three methodological recommendations: (1) creation of compatible results chains, (2) consideration of all relevant types of evidence, and (3) evaluation of strength of evidence using a unified rubric. We provide detailed suggestions for how these recommendations can be applied in practice, streamlining efforts to apply multi-objective approaches and/or synthesize evidence in multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary teams. These recommendations advance the necessary process of reconciling existing evidence standards in health, development, and environment, and initiate a common basis for integrated evidence generation and use in research, practice, and policy design