Seeking Common Ground in Dryland Systems: Steps Towards Adaptive Water Governance

Drylands are exposed to climate stressors, such as water scarcity, as well as societal stressors, including conflicts, which can make water governance unsuitable for the system’s context. The emergence of adaptive water governance often takes places in these challenging contexts, but the process of achieving this style of governance requires a better consideration of system complexities. Using the Rio del Carmen watershed in Mexico as a case study, with primary data obtained through a questionnaire survey carried out with 217 farmers, this paper aims to identify the main complexities and needs to enable the emergence of adaptive water governance. We found that different groups of farmers converge in identifying system stressors and the main needs regarding water governance; yet, the ways these stressors are perceived differ between groups. The results indicate that contrasting perceptions are shaped by the different cultural roots and environmental conditions in the upper and lower parts of the watershed. This variation increases the difficulty in achieving collaboration and compromise when conflicts ensue. Reducing inequalities in the awareness of system stressors has the potential to enable adaptive water governance. This could be achieved through a peacebuilding technique with an appropriate cultural approach for the watershed’s context in the early stages of a stakeholder engagement process

Implementing Climate-Compatible Development in the Context of Power: Lessons for Encouraging Procedural Justice through Community-Based Projects

Climate-compatible development (CCD) is being operationalised across the developing world through projects that integrate development, adaptation and mitigation using community-based approaches—community-based CCD (CB-CCD). By incorporating and considering local people’s concerns, these projects are positioned as more effective, efficient and sustainable than ‘top-down’ climate and development solutions. However, the literature pays little attention to whether and how these projects achieve procedural justice by recognising local people’s identities, cultures and values; and providing local people with meaningful participatory opportunities. We address this gap through an analysis of two donor-funded CB-CCD projects in Malawi, drawing on household surveys, semi-structured interviews and documentary materials. Our findings show that the projects had only limited success in facilitating procedural justice for the target populations. Households’ meaningful engagement in project activities and decision-making was often curtailed because power asymmetries went unchallenged. While many households were well engaged in projects, the recognition and participation of others—including many of the most vulnerable households—was limited. Building on our findings, we present a six-step approach to help CB-CCD project staff understand, manage and challenge power asymmetries; and create widespread recognition of, and meaningful participatory opportunities for, local people

Coherence of marine alien species biosecurity legislation: A study of England and Wales

The marine environment is particularly at risk from the intentional and unintentional introduction and spread of invasive alien species (IAS); preventing their introduction and spread from occurring is therefore, a key component in the on-going management of marine IAS. Ensuring legislation is coherent and consistent is essential to the success of managing the existing and future impacts of marine IAS. We explore the coherence (determined as consistency and interaction) of marine biosecurity legislation for IAS at different geopolitical scales. There was consistency between both the Bern Convention and Convention on Biological Diversity and European and national legislation that had been created in response. There was a lack of interaction evidenced by the Ballast Water Management Convention, which had not yet been transposed into regional (mainly European) or national legislation. Implementation measures such as legislation should be coherent as any failure in the chain could potentially weaken the overall effort to establish and maintain biosecurity and achieve behaviour change

Links between climate change mitigation, adaptation and development in land policy and ecosystem restoration projects: lessons from South Africa

Links between climate change adaptation, mitigation and development co-benefits in land policy and ecosystem restoration projects are hampered by limited understanding of how multi-faceted policy, institutions and projects interact. This paper explores perceptions of co-benefits produced by two community-level projects that pursue ecosystem restoration in South Africa. It develops a new analytical framework to assess the enabling and constraining factors in delivering triple wins for adaptation, mitigation and development. The aim is to investigate the potential for integrating community perspectives into policy and project development and implementation. Data collected through mixed-methods (policy analysis, semi-structured interviews, participatory site visits and focus groups) are analysed using thematic analysis. We find that while the projects investigated have potential to deliver triple wins, siloed approaches presently hinder effective implementation. In particular, project focus on job creation hampers the achievement of longer-term mitigation and adaptation benefits. Operational flexibility, long-term goals, multi-sectoral cooperation and enabling frameworks are imperative to the achievement of triple wins. Findings provide valuable lessons that can be applied across sub-Saharan Africa towards achieving triple wins in climate and development policy and practice, especially those developed with job creation and ecological restoration aims

Exploring the attitudes to and uptake of biosecurity practices for invasive non-native species: views amongst stakeholder organisations working in UK natural environments

Invasions by invasive non-native species (INNS) can have profound consequences for natural environments, impacting on biodiversity and the biophysical landscape in ways that can endanger other species, human wellbeing and infrastructure. The financial costs of dealing with established INNS populations can be extremely high. Biosecurity measures (simple procedures designed to reduce the risk of human activities spreading INNS to new areas) are being promoted in order to minimize these negative impacts and associated costs. This paper reports on research undertaken with stakeholder organisations that operate within UK natural environments. It aims to evaluate stakeholder perceptions of their role in INNS biosecurity practice in the UK, and the implications of this for INNS strategy more broadly. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with organisation representatives to explore current practices and communications about INNS and perceptions of barriers and opportunities to implement better biosecurity. Whilst participants generally agreed on the need for biosecurity, there were variations among participants in levels of knowledge about INNS (related to background) and the capacity of organisations to engage in biosecurity practices (related to organisational size). Critical barriers to biosecurity were identified as costs, lack of clear guidance, difficulties changing attitudes and implementing collective responsibility, and reactionary versus precautionary approaches. As a result, partnership working on INNS is difficult and action tends to focus on individual species perceived as the most threatening to a particular organisations’ interests. In this way, action on INNS biosecurity faces the kinds of barriers that are common to many environmental problems where individuals/organisations prioritise self-interest despite the potential to obtain greater benefits if collective action could be achieved

10- m imaging of the bipolar protoplanetary nebula Mz-3

A 10-µm image is presented of the bipolar protoplanetary nebula Mz-3 made at the 3.9-m Anglo-Australian Telescope using the NIMPOL mid-infrared imaging polarimeter. The image shows extended emission from warm (110–130 K) dust both to the north and to the south of the central star, which correlates well with the visible bipolar lobes. The observed surface brightness of this emission is consistent with radiative heating of the dust by both direct stellar illumination and trapped Lyman α photons. Emission in excess of the point-source profile indicates that there is also an extended shell of dust surrounding the central star

Delivering Climate-Development Co-Benefits through Multi-Stakeholder Forestry Projects in Madagascar: Opportunities and Challenges

This paper explores multi-stakeholder perspectives on the extent to which forestry projects that pursue ecological restoration and rehabilitation in Madagascar engage with local communities and can co-deliver climate-development benefits. Drawing on mixed methods (policy analysis, semi-structured interviews, participatory site visits and focus groups) in two different forestry contexts, we show that by strengthening access to capital availability, projects can enhance local adaptive capacity and mitigation and deliver local development. We show that active consideration of ecological conservation and action plans early in project design and implementation can co-develop and support monitoring and reporting systems, needed to progress towards integrated climate-compatible development approaches. Climate mitigation benefits remain poorly quantified due to limited interest in, and low capacity to generate, carbon revenues. Monitoring alone does not ensure carbon benefits will materialize, and this research stresses that institutional considerations and strengthened engagement and cooperation between practitioners and communities are key in achieving both climate mitigation and community development impacts. Multiple benefits can be fostered by aligning objectives of multiple landscape actors (i.e., community needs and project developers) and by systematically linking project deliverables, outputs, outcomes and impacts over time, grounded in a theory of change focused on ensuring community buy-in and planning for delivery of tangible benefits

Resilience, political ecology, and well-being: An interdisciplinary approach to analysing social-ecological change in coastal Bangladesh

The commodification of peasant livelihoods through export-oriented aquaculture has brought about significant social-ecological changes in low-lying coastal areas in many parts of Asia. A better understanding of the underlying drivers and distributional effects of these changes requires integration of social and ecological approaches that often have different epistemological origins. Resilience thinking has gained increased traction in social-ecological systems research because it provides a dynamic analysis of the cross-scalar interactions between multiple conditions and processes. However, the system-oriented perspective inherent in resilience thinking fails to acknowledge the heterogeneous values, interests, and power of social actors and their roles in navigating social-ecological change. Incorporation of political ecology and well-being perspectives can provide an actor-oriented analysis of the trade-offs associated with change and help to determine which state is desirable for whom. However, empirical demonstrations of such interdisciplinary approaches remain scarce. Here, we explore the combined application of resilience, political ecology, and well-being in investigating the root causes of social-ecological change and identifying the winners and losers of system transformation through empirical analysis of the differential changes in farming systems in two villages in coastal Bangladesh. Using the adaptive cycle as a structuring model, we examine the evolution of the shrimp aquaculture system over the past few decades, particularly looking at the power dynamics between households of different wealth classes. We found that although asymmetric land ownership and political ties enabled the wealthier households to reach their desired farming system in one village, social resilience achieved through memory, leadership, and crisis empowered poorer households to exercise their agency in another village. Material dimensions such as improved living standards, food security, and cash incomes were evidently important; however, freedom to pursue desired livelihood activities, better environmental quality, mental peace, and cultural identities had significant implications for relational and subjective well-being

Multi-Decadal Changes in Mangrove Extent, Age and Species in the Red River Estuaries of Viet Nam

This research investigated the performance of four different machine learning supervised image classifiers: artificial neural network (ANN), decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), and support vector machine (SVM) using SPOT-7 and Sentinel-1 images to classify mangrove age and species in 2019 in a Red River estuary, typical of others found in northern Viet Nam. The four classifiers were chosen because they are considered to have high accuracy, however, their use in mangrove age and species classifications has thus far been limited. A time-series of Landsat images from 1975 to 2019 was used to map mangrove extent changes using the unsupervised classification method of iterative self-organizing data analysis technique (ISODATA) and a comparison with accuracy of K-means classification, which found that mangrove extent has increased, despite a fall in the 1980s, indicating the success of mangrove plantation and forest protection efforts by local people in the study area. To evaluate the supervised image classifiers, 183 in situ training plots were assessed, 70% of them were used to train the supervised algorithms, with 30% of them employed to validate the results. In order to improve mangrove species separations, Gram–Schmidt and principal component analysis image fusion techniques were applied to generate better quality images. All supervised and unsupervised (2019) results of mangrove age, species, and extent were mapped and accuracy was evaluated. Confusion matrices were calculated showing that the classified layers agreed with the ground-truth data where most producer and user accuracies were greater than 80%. The overall accuracy and Kappa coefficients (around 0.9) indicated that the image classifications were very good. The test showed that SVM was the most accurate, followed by DT, ANN, and RF in this case study. The changes in mangrove extent identified in this study and the methods tested for using remotely sensed data will be valuable to monitoring and evaluation assessments of mangrove plantation projects

The optical calcium frequency standards of PTB and NIST

We describe the current status of the Ca optical frequency standards with laser-cooled neutral atoms realized in two different laboratories for the purpose of developing a possible future optical atomic clock. Frequency measurements performed at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) make the frequency of the clock transition of 40Ca one of the best known optical frequencies (relative uncertainty 1.2e-14) and the measurements of this frequency in both laboratories agree to well within their respective uncertainties. Prospects for improvement by orders of magnitude in the relative uncertainty of the standard look feasible.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, to appear in Comptes Rendus Physiqu