Advancing procedural justice in conservation

Just participation in conservation decision-making is a moral imperative and critical to achieving social and ecological goals. However, understanding of what constitutes a just decision-making process in conservation remains limited. Integrating key literature from environmental justice, psychology of justice, and participatory conservation, we identify 11 procedural justice criteria, many of which have been overlooked in conservation literature. We develop a framework to help promote procedural justice in conservation decision-making which organizes the criteria into three key domains (Process properties, Agency of participants, Interpersonal treatment), which are underpinned by the justice dimension of recognition. We highlight seven policy levers that can be used to enhance procedural justice (e.g., scalar and contextual fit, conflict resolution, facilitation). However, advancing just decision-making using this framework requires addressing a number of key challenges, in particular those related to broader structural power inequalities, and elucidating and accounting for plural and situated conceptions of procedural justice. We outline a number of pathways to overcome these challenges, including promoting knowledge coproduction and self-reflexivity

What matters to whom and why? Understanding the importance of coastal ecosystem services in developing coastal communities

Coastal ecosystems support the livelihoods and wellbeing of millions of people worldwide. However, the marine and terrestrial ecosystem services that coastal ecosystems provide are particularly vulnerable to global environmental change, as are the coastal communities who directly depend on them. To navigate these changes and ensure the wellbeing of coastal communities, policy-makers must know which coastal ecosystem services matter to whom, and why. Yet, in developing coastal settings, capturing people's perceptions of the importance of ecosystem services is challenging for several reasons. Firstly, coastal ecosystem services encompass both terrestrial and marine services across multiple categories (i.e. provisioning, supporting, and cultural) that are difficult to value together. Secondly, widely used monetary valuation techniques are often inappropriate because of culturally specific attributions of value, and the intangible nature of key cultural ecosystem services. Thirdly, people within communities may hold different ecosystem services values. In this paper, we examine how people ascribe and explain the importance of a range of marine and terrestrial ecosystem services in three coastal communities in Papua New Guinea. We use a mixed-methods approach that combines a non-monetary ranking and rating assessment of multiple ecosystem services, with a socio-economic survey (N = 139) and qualitative explanations of why ecosystem services matter. We find that people uniformly ascribe the most importance to marine and terrestrial provisioning services that directly support their livelihoods and material wellbeing. However, within communities, gender, wealth, and years of formal schooling do shape some differences in how people rate ecosystem services. In addition, although cultural ecosystem services were often rated lower, people emphasized that they ranked provisioning services highly, in part, because of their contribution to cultural values like bequest. People also expressed concern about extractive ecosystem services, like fuelwood, that were perceived to be destructive, and were rated low. We contend that comprehensive ecosystem services assessments that include narratives can capture the broad importance of a range of ecosystem services, alongside relational values and normative judgements. This exploratory approach is a useful step towards understanding the complexities of ecosystem services in developing coastal settings

Markets and the crowding out of conservation-relevant behavior

Markets are increasingly being incorporated into many aspects of daily life and are becoming an important part of the conservation solution space. Although market-based solutions to environmental problems can result in improvements to conservation, a body of social science research highlights how markets may also have unforeseen consequences by crowding out or displacing 3 key types of behaviors potentially relevant to conservation, including people's willingness to engage in collective action and civic duty; tolerance for inflicting harm on others (third-party externalities); and desire for equity. Better understanding of the contexts and mechanisms through which this crowding out occurs and whether specific market-based instruments are more prone to different types of crowding out will be crucial to developing novel conservation initiatives that can reduce or prevent crowding out

Disparities in the impacts of co-management on fishers’ livelihoods

Natural resources are widely managed through collaborative governance arrangements (e.g., co-management) which often result in the uneven distribution of costs and benefits among fishers. Discrepancies in how a fisher is impacted by co-management relative to other fishers or others in the community (i.e., disparity) can negatively affect fishers’ wellbeing, their support for management, and subsequently, ecological outcomes. Yet, disparities in the distribution of social impacts from co-management have rarely been assessed. We address this gap by examining disparities (losses and gains) in perceived livelihood impacts from co-management. Losses (or gains) occur when a fisher experiences a more negative (or positive) impact on their livelihood relative to other fishers or others in the community. We used data from interviews with 1191 fishers associated with 48 coral reef co-management arrangements across Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea to examine how socioeconomic and institutional characteristics were associated with losses and gains from co-management. Overall, we found that more fishers perceived equality than disparities in the distribution of co-management impacts. Of those that perceived disparities, more fishers perceived losses than gains. We also found that disparities could be predicted by a range of socioeconomic characteristics, including distance to markets and wealth, and institutional characteristics of the co-management regime, such as gear, access, and area restrictions. This study provides insights on potential entry points that could be used by managers and policy-makers to promote equitable co-management of small-scale fisheries, such as the reduction of losses by increasing participation in decision-making processes, fostering conflict resolution mechanisms, prioritizing gear restrictions over area restrictions, and reducing poverty

Critical view of WKB decay widths

A detailed comparison of the expressions for the decay widths obtained within the semiclassical WKB approximation using different approaches to the tunneling problem is performed. The differences between the available improved formulae for tunneling near the top and the bottom of the barrier are investigated. Though the simple WKB method gives the right order of magnitude of the decay widths, a small number of parameters are often fitted. The need to perform the fitting procedure remaining consistently within the WKB framework is emphasized in the context of the fission model based calculations. Calculations for the decay widths of some recently found super heavy nuclei using microscopic alpha-nucleus potentials are presented to demonstrate the importance of a consistent WKB calculation. The half-lives are found to be sensitive to the density dependence of the nucleon-nucleon interaction and the implementation of the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization condition inherent in the WKB approach.Comment: 18 pages, Late

A simple and efficient numerical scheme to integrate non-local potentials

As nuclear wave functions have to obey the Pauli principle, potentials issued from reaction theory or Hartree-Fock formalism using finite-range interactions contain a non-local part. Written in coordinate space representation, the Schrodinger equation becomes integro-differential, which is difficult to solve, contrary to the case of local potentials, where it is an ordinary differential equation. A simple and powerful method has been proposed several years ago, with the trivially equivalent potential method, where non-local potential is replaced by an equivalent local potential, which is state-dependent and has to be determined iteratively. Its main disadvantage, however, is the appearance of divergences in potentials if the wave functions have nodes, which is generally the case. We will show that divergences can be removed by a slight modification of the trivially equivalent potential method, leading to a very simple, stable and precise numerical technique to deal with non-local potentials. Examples will be provided with the calculation of the Hartree-Fock potential and associated wave functions of 16O using the finite-range N3LO realistic interaction.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Eur. Phys. J.

Chaos induced coherence in two independent food chains

Coherence evolution of two food web models can be obtained under the stirring effect of chaotic advection. Each food web model sustains a three--level trophic system composed of interacting predators, consumers and vegetation. These populations compete for a common limiting resource in open flows with chaotic advection dynamics. Here we show that two species (the top--predators) of different colonies chaotically advected by a jet--like flow can synchronize their evolution even without migration interaction. The evolution is charaterized as a phase synchronization. The phase differences (determined through the Hilbert transform) of the variables representing those species show a coherent evolution.Comment: 5 pages, 5 eps figures. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

An atmospheric perspective on North American carbon dioxide exchange: CarbonTracker

We present an estimate of net CO2 exchange between the terrestrial biosphere and the atmosphere across North America for every week in the period 2000 through 2005. This estimate is derived from a set of 28,000 CO2 mole fraction observations in the global atmosphere that are fed into a state-of-the-art data assimilation system for CO2 called CarbonTracker. By design, the surface fluxes produced in CarbonTracker are consistent with the recent history of CO2 in the atmosphere and provide constraints on the net carbon flux independent from national inventories derived from accounting efforts. We find the North American terrestrial biosphere to have absorbed –0.65 PgC/yr (1 petagram = 10^15 g; negative signs are used for carbon sinks) averaged over the period studied, partly offsetting the estimated 1.85 PgC/yr release by fossil fuel burning and cement manufacturing. Uncertainty on this estimate is derived from a set of sensitivity experiments and places the sink within a range of –0.4 to –1.0 PgC/yr. The estimated sink is located mainly in the deciduous forests along the East Coast (32%) and the boreal coniferous forests (22%). Terrestrial uptake fell to –0.32 PgC/yr during the large-scale drought of 2002, suggesting sensitivity of the contemporary carbon sinks to climate extremes. CarbonTracker results are in excellent agreement with a wide collection of carbon inventories that form the basis of the first North American State of the Carbon Cycle Report (SOCCR), to be released in 2007. All CarbonTracker results are freely available at http://carbontracker.noaa.gov