Application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process to Riparian Revegetation Policy Options

While riparian vegetation can play a major role in protecting land, water and natural habitat in catchments, there are high costs associated with tree planting and establishment and in diverting land from cropping. The distribution of costs and benefits of riparian revegetation creates conflicts in the objectives of various stakeholder groups, and elicitation of importance weights of objectives and determination of rankings of a number of policy options by these stakeholder groups becomes critical in decision-making. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is a multicriteria analysis technique that provides an appropriate tool to accommodate the conflicting views of various stakeholder groups. The AHP allows the users to assess the relative importance of multiple criteria (or multiple alternatives against a given criterion) in an intuitive manner. This paper presents an application of AHP to obtain preference weights of environmental, social and economic objectives which have been used in ranking riparian revegetation policy options in a small catchment (watershed) in north Queensland, Australia. The preference weights towards environmental, economic and social objectives have been obtained for the various stakeholder groups (landholders, representatives of local sugar mill staff, environmentalists, recreational fishers and the local community). The AHP technique has proved useful in eliciting objectives and ranking policy options as well as in checking for consistency of the statements of stakeholder groups. Implementation of this approach requires a complex data elicitation process

Modeling human population death rates: a bi–dimensional stochastic Gompertz model with correlated Wiener processes

This study presents an innovative approach to human mortality data analysis, namely a transversal analysis across time using stochastic differential equation models, as a form of considering random environmental oscillations on the death rates. For each age between 0 and 99, we use a bi-dimensional stochastic Gompertz model with correlated Wiener processes to model the dynamics of female (first component of the stochastic process) and male (second component) crude death rates of the Portuguese population over the period 1940–2009. We test the complete model, with correlation between the unidimensional Wiener processes associated with males and with females, against the model without correlation effects. Results show significant correlations for most ages, particularly on ages below 5 and above 50

IFAD Research Series 79: The position of export crops banana and cocoa in food systems analysis with special reference to the role of certification schemes

Food system analysis is used to understand relations between the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural products. Many export commodities commodities are facing “consumer concerns” and certification requirement issues. In this paper, the certification requirements and schemes of two export commodities—banana and cocoa—are discussed using food system analysis. The “inclusiveness” of the food system, in terms of living wage, is also discussed