Land Use Pattern, Climate Change, and Its Implication for Food Security in Ethiopia: A Review

Climate change is perhaps the greatest challenge facing the world today. In Africa, a continent which is and still remains vulnerable to the impact of climate change, the effects cannot be overemphasized in view of the already existing pathetic conditions of most developing countries in Africa. In Ethiopia, 85% of the population is directly supported by agricultural economy. However the productivity of the economy is threatened by land use changes and unsustainable land management practices which had impacted seriously on Ethiopia’s rich biodiversity, crop production and livestock grazing lands. While Ethiopia has always suffered from climatic variability like droughts and consequently food shortage and famine, climate change is set to make the lives of the poorest even harder. Climate change has the potential to adversely affect net farm revenues of small holders with increasing land fragmentation due to population growth translating to worsening food security situations. Since food security brings in additional socio-economics, geographical and political factors, focusing on measures of vulnerability, adaptation options and the development of adaptive capacity to reduce the adverse impacts of climate change in the rural areas of Ethiopia, this paper therefore reviewed the effect of climate change on land use pattern and the implication for food security in Ethiopia.Key words: Climate change, Land use pattern, and Food security

Supersymmetric Quantum Mechanics, Engineered Hierarchies of Integrable Potentials, and the Generalised Laguerre Polynomials

Within the context of Supersymmetric Quantum Mechanics and its related hierarchies of integrable quantum Hamiltonians and potentials, a general programme is outlined and applied to its first two simplest illustrations. Going beyond the usual restriction of shape invariance for intertwined potentials, it is suggested to require a similar relation for Hamiltonians in the hierarchy separated by an arbitrary number of levels, N. By requiring further that these two Hamiltonians be in fact identical up to an overall shift in energy, a periodic structure is installed in the hierarchy of quantum systems which should allow for its solution. Specific classes of orthogonal polynomials characteristic of such periodic hierarchies are thereby generated, while the methods of Supersymmetric Quantum Mechanics then lead to generalised Rodrigues formulae and recursion relations for such polynomials. The approach also offers the practical prospect of quantum modelling through the engineering of quantum potentials from experimental energy spectra. In this paper these ideas are presented and solved explicitly for the cases N=1 and N=2. The latter case is related to the generalised Laguerre polynomials, for which indeed new results are thereby obtained. At the same time new classes of integrable quantum potentials which generalise that of the harmonic oscillator and which are characterised by two arbitrary energy gaps are identified, for which a complete solution is achieved algebraically.Comment: 1+19 page