Development of consumption-based land use indicators

With this UFOPLAN project on land use indicators, the German Federal Environment Agency aimed at further developing indicators from a consumption perspective in support of Germany’s sustainability strategy, covering both area-based and impact-oriented land footprint indicators.The project also aimed at calculating selected land footprint indicators for Germany and the EU. These indicators should provide an improved understanding of the global teleconnections of consumption and land use relevant for policy making towards achieving sustainable land use. This synthesis report presents the key results from this project. First, we present a structured overview of existing approaches for estimating land footprintsand describe their technical and structural characteristicsas well as their strengths and weaknesses. This leads to the specification of a hybrid methodology as the preferred calculation approach. In the second part, we present the developed innovative hybrid land footprint method, consisting of a global land flow accounting and trade model capturing commodity flows in physical units to track embodied land along global supply chains. For non-food commodities the supply chains were complemented by an environmental input-output model. This method was used to calculate the cropland, grassland and forestland footprint of Germany and the EU. Finally, an overview of existing indicator systems for representing the environmental impacts of land use was provided and their complementary usage to extend area-based land footprints was discussed. A few of these complementary indicators were also quantified, most notably the deforestation footprint. The synthesis report closes with an overview of the thematic areas that need to be addressed in future research

Extending land footprints towards characterizing sustainability of land use

The global trade of biomass-based products leads to an increasing regional decoupling of the area of production and consumption. Area-based land footprint calculations attribute the extents of land use required to prevailing national consumption patterns. Another report (Fischer et al., 2016) of the present study describes the methodology for the calculation of area-based footprints and presents results for Germany and the EU. Beyond area extents, additional information is needed to assess the sustainability of land use, requiring further analyses regarding environmental impacts and preservation of land quality and ecosystem services. This report discusses extensions of area-based land footprints with meaningful impact-oriented indicators for the assessment of the effects of different consumption patterns on the ecosystems and sustainability of land use. First, existing indicators for representing the environmental impacts of land use are introduced in the context of their linkages and complementarity to area-based land footprints. The report discusses the following key indicators, which were identified as particularly relevant during an export workshop: System indicators, which qualify the area-based footprints across globally very different potential land productivities,deforestation footprint, energy use in agriculture, and irrigation water use in agriculture classified by degree of water scarcity. We introduce the methods developed for the quantification of system indicators for cropland and grassland footprints and for the deforestation footprint, and present results for Germany and the EU

Agricultural biomass as provisioning ecosystem service: quantification of energy flows

Agro-ecosystems supply provisioning, regulating and cultural services to human society. This study focuses on the agro-ecosystem provisioning services regarding the production of agricultural biomass. These services strongly respond to the socio-economic demands of human beings, and are characterised by an injection of energy in the ecosystems production cycle which is often exceeding the ecological capacity of the ecosystem, i.e. the overall ability of the ecosystem to produce goods and services linked to its bio-physical structure and processes that take place during the agricultural production. Agricultural production is identified as ecosystem service in widely recognised ecosystem service frameworks, but currently there is no clear agreement within the scientific and policy communities on how the ecological-socio-economic flow linked to this provisioning service should be assessed, beyond a mere accounting of yields. This study attempts to provide a new insight to this issue by proposing an approach based on the energy budget, which takes into consideration the energy needed by the ecosystem to supply the service. The approach is based on the concepts of Energy Return on Investment (EROI) and Net Energy Balance (NEB), and considers different bio-physical structures and processes of agroecosystems. The work is structured in three parts: the first aims at estimating inputs (machinery, seeds, fertilizers, irrigation, labour) in energy terms; the second at estimating biomass output in energy terms; the third to compare actual agricultural production with three reference scenarios encompassing a range of human input (no input – low input –high input scenarios). Results show that in general terms cereal and grassland systems have the largest energy gains (both in terms of EROI and NEB). Such systems are characterised by a lower economic value of their output compared to other producing systems such as fruits, which have lower energy gains but a higher embodied energy, which is recognized in the market as valuable. Comparison of actual production systems with the high input scenario confirms that current production in Europe is already highly intensive, and that increasing the energy input would not improve the efficiency of the conversion of such additional energy into biomass. Overall, the proposed approach seems a useful tool to identify which are the factors in the agricultural production process that could be modified to improve the energy efficiency in agricultural systems and the sustainability of their production. This study can be considered as a first step in the assessment of the total energy balance of the agro-ecosystem. In fact it deals with the quantification of energy regarding human inputs and the corresponding output and further analysis should address crucial issues such as the quality of the energy and the embodied energy in the plant production, which will help to better understand the complexity of the agro-ecosystems

Effects of habitat structure and shrub encroachment on bird species diversity in arid savanna in Northern Cape province, South Africa

Bird community diversity was assessed in semi-arid savanna in the Northern Cape province of South Africa and related to vegetation diversity and foliage height diversity. As this is an area in which shrub encroachment is common, the effects of shrub or bush encroachment on bird species diversity were specifically addressed. An experiment in which the dominant encroaching species, Acacia mellifera, was removed from ten 1 ha plots was used and compared with ten controls. A strong positive association with foliage height diversity was shown. No effect of experimental removal of the dominant encroacher, A. mellifera, on bird species diversity or species richness was found. However, four species increased in relative abundance in cut plots and two species decreased in relative abundance in these plots. Copyright © NISC Pty Ltd.Articl

A Total Approach to Partial Algebraic Specification

Partiality is a fact of life, but at present explicitly partial algebraic specifications lack tools and have limited proof methods. We propose a sound and complete way to support execution and formal reasoning of explicitly partial algebraic specifications within the total framework of membership equational logic (MEL) which has a high-performance interpeter (Maude) and proving tools. This is accomplished by a sound and complete mapping PMEL ! MEL of partial membership equational (PMEL) theories into total ones

A meta-analysis on farm-level costs and benefits of GM crops

This paper reviews the evidence on the socio-economic impacts of GM crops and analyzes whether there are patterns across space and time. To this end, we investigate the effect of GM crops on farm-level costs and benefits using global data from more than one decade of field trials and surveys. More specifically, we analyze the effects of GM-crops on crop yields, seed costs, pesticide costs, and management and labor costs and finally gross margins. Based on collected data from studies on Bt cotton and Bt maize, statistical analyses are conducted to estimate the effect of GM crop adoption on these parameters. Our results show that, compared to conventional crops, GM crops can lead to yield increases and can lead to reductions in the costs of pesticide application, whereas seed costs are usually substantially higher. Thus, the results presented here do support the contention that the adoption of GM crops leads on average to a higher economic performance, which is also underlined by the high adoption rates for GM crops in a number of countries. However, the kind and magnitude of benefits from GM crops are very heterogeneous between countries and regions, particularly due to differences in pest pressure and pest management practices. Countries with poor pest management practices benefited most from a reduction in yield losses, whereas other countries benefited from cost reductions. However, our study also reveals limitations for meta-analyses on farm-level costs and benefits of GM crops. In particular, published data are skewed towards some countries and the employed individual studies rely on different assumptions, purposes and methodologies (e.g., surveys and field trials). Furthermore, a summary of several (often) short-term individual studies may not necessarily capture long-term effects of GM crop adoption

How does knowledge about spinal cord injury-related complications develop in subjects with spinal cord injury? A descriptive analysis in 214 patients.

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