Land Use / Land-Use Change in an Emissions Constrained World: The Need of a New Approach

The concept of constraining cumulative greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally until, e.g., 2050 influences climate policy-making since the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Cumulative emissions allow specifying the risk of exceeding a global warming target (e.g., 2 degrees C) by 2050 and beyond better than any other concept. Cumulative emission constraints must be expected to receive increasing attention in the future both scientifically and politically. However, the treatment of emissions from land use / land-use change (LUC) under this concept falls short

A genealogical critique of Beauchamp and Childress' for principles approach to medical ethics

<bold>Part Three</bold> examines the development of Beauchamp and Childress 'four principles' approach to medical ethics from the 1<super> st</super> to the 6<super>th</super> Editions of <italic>Principles of Biomedical Ethics,</italic> arguing that it has, thanks to changes in the authors' conception of philosophical moral theory, been able to productively incorporate the views of many of its critics over this time; that it is also able to incorporate features of different ethical approaches such as virtue ethics, narrative ethics and ethics of care; and that, properly understood, it continues to provide a good framework both for moral reflection in medicine and the provision of concrete action-guides. The thesis concludes by considering this view of the four principles in the light of the earlier sections' approach, and attempting to demonstrate further demonstrate their value through two case-studies.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Uncertainties in Greenhouse Gas Inventories. Expanding Our Perspectives

This book is based on the 2014 Special Issue 124(3) of Climatic Change. It brings together 16 key papers presented at, or produced, subsequent to the 2010 (3rd) International Workshop on Uncertainty in Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventories. The Workshop was jointly organized by the Lviv Polytechnic National University, Ukraine; the Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences; and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria. This book has been written to enhance understanding of the uncertainty encountered in estimating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and in dealing with the challenges resulting from those estimates. Such challenges include, but are not limited to i) monitoring emissions; ii) adhering to emission commitmets; iii) securing the proper functioning of emission trading markets; and iv) meeting low-carbon or low-GHG futures in the long term. The approaches to addressing uncertainty discussed by all authors attempt to improve national inventories, not only for their own sake but also from a wider, systems analytical perspective that seeks to strengthen their usefulness under a compliance and/or global monitoring and reporting framework. These approaches show the challenges and benefits of including inventory uncertainty in policy analysis and where advances are being made

Uncertainties in greenhouse gases inventories - Expanding our perspective

Strategies for mitigating global climate change require accurate estimates of the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). A strong consensus in the global scientific community states that efforts to control climate change require stabilization of the atmopheric concentration of GHGs (as per a recent compilation; (IPCC 2013)). Estimates of the amounts of carbon dioxide and other GHGs emitted to the atmosphere, as well as the amounts absorbed by terrestrial and aquatic systems, are crucial for planning, analyzing, validating and at global scale verifying mitigation efforts and for analyzing scenarios of future emissions. The magnitude and distribution of current emissions and the path of future emissions are both of considerable importance. It is critical that we have estimates of emissions and that we acknowledge and deal with the uncertainty in our best estimates. The range of issues that derive from uncertainty in emissions estimates was the subject of the 3rd Interntional Uncertainty Workshop held in Lviv, Ukraine 2010, and is the subject of this special issue

Ecophysiology of forest and savanna vegetation

Ecophysiological characteristics of forest and savanna vegetation are compared in an attempt to understand how physiological differences within and between these vegetation types relate to their geographical distributions. A simple ordination first shows that although precipitation exerts a key effect on Amazonian vegetation distributions, soil characteristics are also important. In particular, it is found that under similar precipitation regimes, deciduous forests tend to occur on more fertile soils than do cerrado vegetation types. A high subsoil clay content is also important in allowing the existence of semievergreen forests at only moderate rainfall. Such observations are consistent with biome specific physiological characteristics. For example, deciduous trees have higher nutrient requirements than do evergreen ones which also tend to have characteristics associated with severe water deficits such as a low specific leaf area. Nutrient contents and photosynthetic rates are lower than for savanna than for forest species with several ecosystem characteristics suggesting a primary limitation of nitrogen on savanna productivity. By contrast, phosphorus seems to constrain the productivity of most Amazonian forest types. Differentiation is made between the fast-growing, high-nutrient-requiring forest types of western Amazonia and their counterparts in eastern Amazonia, which tend to occupy infertile but deeper soils of high water-holding ability. On the basis of observed physiological characteristics of the various vegetation forms, it is argued that, should Amazonian precipitation decline sharply in the future, the slower growing forests of eastern Amazonia will transform directly into an evergreen cerrado type vegetation but with the more fertile western Amazonian forests being replaced by some form of drought-deciduous vegetation

Land System Science In Latin America: Challenges And Perspectives

This article reviews the current status, trends and challenges of land system science in Latin America. We highlight the advances in the conceptualization, analysis and monitoring of land systems. These advances shift from a focus on the relationships between forests and other land uses to include a greater diversity of land cover and land-use types and the processes and interactions that link them. We then provide a biome-level typology of social-ecological land systems (SELS) as an approach to help connect local-level realities to regional processes and we discuss how this approach can help to design more socially inclusive land systems. We also discuss the increased role of distant socio-economic and ecological interactions that connect these SELS to global processes. Combined, these insights support a research agenda for land system science in the region that can develop more accurate and integrative monitoring of land change and their social and ecological consequences, better understand different stakeholder perspectives within a context of livelihood diversification, and encourage institutional feedbacks to govern land systems influenced by distant drivers. © 201726-27374

Intercomparison of burned area products and its implication for carbon emission estimations in the amazon

Carbon (C) emissions from forest fires in the Amazon during extreme droughts may correspond to more than half of the global emissions resulting from land cover changes. Despite their relevant contribution, forest fire-related C emissions are not directly accounted for within national-level inventories or carbon budgets. A fundamental condition for quantifying these emissions is to have a reliable estimation of the extent and location of land cover types affected by fires. Here, we evaluated the relative performance of four burned area products (TREES, MCD64A1 c6, GABAM, and Fire_cci v5.0), contrasting their estimates of total burned area, and their influence on the fire-related C emissions in the Amazon biome for the year 2015. In addition, we distinguished the burned areas occurring in forests from non-forest areas. The four products presented great divergence in the total burned area and, consequently, total related C emissions. Globally, the TREES product detected the largest amount of burned area (35,559 km2 ), and consequently it presented the largest estimate of committed carbon emission (45 Tg), followed by MCD64A1, with only 3% less burned area detected, GABAM (28,193 km2 ) and Fire_cci (14,924 km2 ). The use of Fire_cci may result in an underestimation of 29.54 ± 3.36 Tg of C emissions in relation to the TREES product. The same pattern was found for non-forest areas. Considering only forest burned areas, GABAM was the product that detected the largest area (8994 km2 ), followed by TREES (7985 km2 ), MCD64A1 (7181 km2) and Fire_cci (1745 km2 ). Regionally, Fire_cci detected 98% less burned area in Acre state in southwest Amazonia than TREES, and approximately 160 times less burned area in forests than GABAM. Thus, we show that global products used interchangeably on a regional scale could significantly underestimate the impacts caused by fire and, consequently, their related carbon emissions. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland