125 research outputs found
Collaborative forest management in Nepal: Tenure, governance and contestations
Collaborative forest management (CFM) is a âcommunity-basedâ forest tenure regime that works in partnership between the central government, local government and local forest user groups in Nepalâs Terai, particularly in the management of large, contiguous forests. It has been in practice since the early 2000s in the form of âpilot initiativesâ and is gradually receiving greater legal attention. Through our own experiences, available literature and policy reviews, we document the evolutionary history of Terai forest and CFMâs current issues. We found that the management aspects of the Terai forests have been weak throughout its history. We also found a number of issues and challenges in the implementation of CFM. Some of the prominent issues include ambiguity in tenure rights and security, lack of appropriate and uncontested policy provisions for cost and bene t sharing among collaborators, limited decision-making space for forest-managing communities and local governments, and limited capacity of collaborators for the productive management of forests. We suggest tenure reform in terms of legal, institutional, technical and financial arrangements, so as to make CFM effective forest management in the Terai
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Adaptive Transmission Planning: Implementing a New Paradigm for Managing Economic Risks in Grid Expansion
The problem of whether, where, when, and what types of transmission facilities to build in terms of minimizing costs and maximizing net economic benefits has been a challenge for the power industry from the beginning-ever since Thomas Edison debated whether to create longer dc distribution lines (with their high losses) or build new power stations in expanding his urban markets. Today?s planning decisions are far more complex, as grids cover the continent and new transmission, generation, and demand-side technologies emerge
A new Himalayan crisis? Exploring transformative resilience pathways
This paper demonstrates that a new crisis has emerged in the Himalayas in recent years, as five decades of well-intentioned policy responses failed to tackle escalating environment and development challenges. It then suggests some practical pathways for achieving what we term transformative resilience in the region. Our analysis draws on a critical review of literature, combined with individual co-authors' longstanding experience in the region in both research and policy arenas. We highlight how the neo-Malthusian Theory of Himalayan Degradation continues to shape simplistic responses to environment and development problems of a multi-faceted nature, in the vulnerable, complex and politicized contexts of the Himalayas. A key reason for this failure is an obsession with technical reasoning underpinned by the dominance of biophysical analyses of the problems, which have, in most cases, undermined the potential for emancipatory political transformations. The failure is visible in various ways: poverty remains, while environmental vulnerabilities have increased. Foreign aid has often been counter-productive and 'blue-print' development planning has been fragmented and dysfunctional. Likewise, livelihood opportunities and social capital have seriously eroded due to unprecedented political crises, out-migration, abandonment of productive mountain lands and unregulated remittance economies. We term this phenomenon a 'new Himalayan crisis'. In response, we argue for the need to open up a transformative agenda for integrating approaches to environment and development challenges, emphasizing an emancipatory multi-scalar politics that has the potential to open up sustainable pathways in the context of dynamic social and ecological changes in the Himalayas
An agenda for ethics and justice in adaptation to climate change
As experts predict that at least some irreversible climate change will occur with potentially disastrous effects on the lives and well-being of vulnerable communities around the world, it is paramount to ensure that these communities are resilient and have adaptive capacity to withstand the consequences. Adaptation and resilience planning present several ethical issues that need to be resolved if we are to achieve successful adaptation and resilience to climate change, taking into consideration vulnerabilities and inequalities in terms of power, income, gender, age, sexuality, race, culture, religion, and spatiality. Sustainable adaptation and resilience planning that addresses these ethical issues requires interdisciplinary dialogues between the natural sciences, social sciences, and philosophy, in order to integrate empirical insights on socioeconomic inequality and climate vulnerability with ethical analysis of the underlying causes and consequences of injustice in adaptation and resilience. In this paper, we set out an interdisciplinary research agenda for the inclusion of ethics and justice theories in adaptation and resilience planning, particularly into the Sixth Assessment Report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6). We present six core discussions that we believe should be an integral part of these interdisciplinary dialogues on adaptation and resilience as part of IPCC AR6, especially Chapters 2 (âTerrestial and freshwater ecosystems and their servicesâ), 6 (âCities, settlements and key infrastructureâ), 7 (âHealth, wellbeing and the changing structure of communitiesâ), 8 (âPoverty, livelihoods and sustainable developmentâ), 16 âKey risks across sectors and regionsâ), 17 (âDecision-making options for managing riskâ), and 18 (âClimate resilient development pathwaysâ).: (i) Where does âjusticeâ feature in resilience and adaptation planning and what does it require in that regard?; (ii) How can it be ensured that adaptation and resilience strategies protect and take into consideration and represent the interest of the most vulnerable women and men, and communities?; (iii) How can different forms of knowledge be integrated within adaptation and resilience planning?; (iv) What trade-offs need to be made when focusing on resilience and adaptation and how can they be resolved?; (v) What roles and responsibilities do different actors have to build resilience and achieve adaptation?; (vi) Finally, what does the focus on ethics imply for the practice of adaptation and resilience planning
Characterization of the Proteostasis Roles of Glycerol Accumulation, Protein Degradation and Protein Synthesis during Osmotic Stress in C. elegans
Exposure of C. elegans to hypertonic stress-induced water loss causes rapid and widespread cellular protein damage. Survival in hypertonic environments depends critically on the ability of worm cells to detect and degrade misfolded and aggregated proteins. Acclimation of C. elegans to mild hypertonic stress suppresses protein damage and increases survival under more extreme hypertonic conditions. Suppression of protein damage in acclimated worms could be due to 1) accumulation of the chemical chaperone glycerol, 2) upregulation of protein degradation activity, and/or 3) increases in molecular chaperoning capacity of the cell. Glycerol and other chemical chaperones are widely thought to protect proteins from hypertonicity-induced damage. However, protein damage is unaffected by gene mutations that inhibit glycerol accumulation or that cause dramatic constitutive elevation of glycerol levels. Pharmacological or RNAi inhibition of proteasome and lyosome function and measurements of cellular protein degradation activity demonstrated that upregulation of protein degradation mechanisms plays no role in acclimation. Thus, changes in molecular chaperone capacity must be responsible for suppressing protein damage in acclimated worms. Transcriptional changes in chaperone expression have not been detected in C. elegans exposed to hypertonic stress. However, acclimation to mild hypertonicity inhibits protein synthesis 50â70%, which is expected to increase chaperone availability for coping with damage to existing proteins. Consistent with this idea, we found that RNAi silencing of essential translational components or acute exposure to cycloheximide results in a 50â80% suppression of hypertonicity-induced aggregation of polyglutamine-YFP (Q35::YFP). Dietary changes that increase protein production also increase Q35::YFP aggregation 70â180%. Our results demonstrate directly for the first time that inhibition of protein translation protects extant proteins from damage brought about by an environmental stressor, demonstrate important differences in aging- versus stress-induced protein damage, and challenge the widely held view that chemical chaperones are accumulated during hypertonic stress to protect protein structure/function
Foliar phenolic compounds of ten wild species of Verbenacea as antioxidants and specific chemomarkers
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The COVIDâ19 Pandemic Not Only Poses Challenges, but Also Opens Opportunities for Sustainable Transformation
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted social, economic, and environmental systems worldwide, slowing down and reversing the progress made in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDGs belong to the 2030 Agenda to transform our world by tackling humankind's challenges to ensure well-being, economic prosperity, and environmental protection. We explore the potential impacts of the pandemic on SDGs for Nepal. We followed a knowledge co-creation process with experts from various professional backgrounds, involving five steps: online survey, online workshop, assessment of expert's opinions, review and validation, and revision and synthesis. The pandemic has negatively impacted most SDGs in the short term. Particularly, the targets of SDG 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 13 have and will continue to have weakly to moderately restricting impacts. However, a few targets of SDG 2, 3, 6, and 11 could also have weakly promoting impacts. The negative impacts have resulted from impeding factors linked to the pandemic. Many of the negative impacts may subside in the medium and long terms. The key five impeding factors are lockdowns, underemployment and unemployment, closure of institutions and facilities, diluted focus and funds for non-COVID-19-related issues, and anticipated reduction in support from development partners. The pandemic has also opened a window of opportunity for sustainable transformation, which is short-lived and narrow. These opportunities are lessons learned for planning and action, socio-economic recovery plan, use of information and communication technologies and the digital economy, reverse migration and âbrain gain,â and local governments' exercising authorities
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