Constructing a transnational timber legality assurance regime: Architecture, accomplishments, challenges

The emerging transnational timber legality assurance regime comprises a set of interrelated policy instruments, both public and private, aimed at controlling trade in illegally logged wood and wood products. The potentially productive interactions among these instruments in the emerging forestry regime create prospects for engendering learning, stimulating cross-fertilization, and enhancing accountability. In this article, we analyze the EU's Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative, interacting with public legal timber regulations and private certification schemes, as the core of an emerging transnational experimentalist regime. An experimentalist regime of this type may provide a promising approach to addressing contentious transnational environmental issues like forest governance where there is no global hegemon to impose a single set of rules. However, experience with FLEGT implementation suggests that there are also a number of outstanding challenges to constructing an effective timber legality assurance regime, which if unresolved could undermine its promise. The argument proceeds in three steps, based on an exhaustive analysis of recent developments. First, we outline the architecture and promise of the emerging timber legality assurance regime. Then, we review key accomplishments to date. Finally, we examine the ongoing challenges facing this innovative regime as it moves forward, and consider how they might be overcome through the adoption of a more consistent experimentalist approach

Cultivating C4 crops in a changing climate: sugarcane in Ghana

Over the next few decades, it is expected that increasing fossil fuel prices will lead to a proliferation of energy crop cultivation initiatives. The environmental sustainability of these activities is thus a pressing issue—particularly when they take place in vulnerable regions, such as West Africa. In more general terms, the effect of increased CO2 concentrations and higher temperatures on biomass production and evapotranspiration affects the evolution of the global hydrological and carbon cycles. Investigating these processes for a C4 crop, such as sugarcane, thus provides an opportunity both to extend our understanding of the impact of climate change, and to assess our capacity to model the underpinning processes. This paper applies a process-based crop model to sugarcane in Ghana (where cultivation is planned), and the São Paulo region of Brazil (which has a well-established sugarcane industry). We show that, in the Daka River region of Ghana, provided there is sufficient irrigation, it is possible to generate approximately 75% of the yield achieved in the São Paulo region. In the final part of the study, the production of sugarcane under an idealized temperature increase climate change scenario is explored. It is shown that doubling CO2 mitigates the degree of water stress associated with a 4 °C increase in temperature

An assessment of the potential of drylands in eight sub-Saharan African countries to produce bioenergy feedstocks

This paper synthesizes lessons learnt from research that aimed to identify land in the dryland regions of eight sub-Saharan African study countries where bioenergy feedstocks production has a low risk of detrimental environmental and socio-economic effects. The methodology involved using geographical information systems (GISs) to interrogate a wide range of datasets, aerial photograph and field verification, an extensive literature review, and obtaining information from a wide range of stakeholders. The GIS work revealed that Africa's drylands potentially have substantial areas available and agriculturally suitable for bioenergy feedstocks production. The other work showed that land-use and biomass dynamics in Africa's drylands are greatly influenced by the inherent ‘disequilibrium’ behaviour of these environments. This behaviour challenges the sustainability concept and perceptions regarding the drivers, nature and consequences of deforestation, land degradation and other factors. An assessment of the implications of this behaviour formed the basis for the practical guidance suggested for bioenergy feedstock producers and bioenergy policy makers