14 research outputs found
Exploring future agricultural development and biodiversity in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi: a spatially explicit scenario-based assessment
Competition for land is increasing as a consequence of the growing demands for food and other commodities and the need to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services. Land conversion and the intensification of current agricultural systems continues to lead to a loss of biodiversity and trade-offs among ecosystem functions. Decision-makers need to understand these trade-offs in order to better balance different demands on land and resources. There is an urgent need for spatially explicit information and analyses on the effects of different trajectories of human-induced landscape change in biodiversity and ecosystem services. We assess the potential implications of a set of plausible socio-economic and climate scenarios for agricultural production and demand and model-associated land use and land cover changes between 2005 and 2050 to assess potential impacts on biodiversity in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. We show that different future socio-economic scenarios are consistent in their projections of areas of high agricultural development leading to similar spatial patterns of habitat and biodiversity loss. Yet, we also show that without protected areas, biodiversity losses are higher and that expanding protected areas to include other important biodiversity areas can help reduce biodiversity losses in all three countries. These results highlight the need for effective protection and the potential benefits of expanding the protected area network while meeting agricultural production needs
Cross-sectoral impacts of climate change and socio-economic change for multiple, European land- and water-based sectors
Understanding cross-sectoral impacts is important in developing appropriate adaptation strategies to climate change, since such insight builds the capacity of decision-makers to understand the full extent of climate change vulnerability, rather than viewing single sectors in isolation. A regional integrated assessment model that captures interactions between six sectors (agriculture, forests, biodiversity, water, coasts and urban) was used to investigate impacts resulting from a wide range of climate and socio-economic scenarios. Results show that Europe will be significantly influenced by these possible future changes with between 79 and 91 % of indicator-scenario combinations found to be statistically significantly different from the baseline. Urban development increases in most scenarios across Europe due to increases in population and sometimes GDP. This has an indirect influence on the number of people affected by a 1 in 100 year flood which increases in western and northern Europe. Changes in other land uses (intensive farming, extensive farming, forests and unmanaged land) vary depending on the scenario, but food production generally increases across Europe at the expense of forest area and unmanaged land to satisfy increasing food demand. Biodiversity vulnerability and water exploitation both increase in southern and Eastern Europe due to direct effects from climate and indirect effects from changes in land use and irrigation water use. The results highlight the importance of considering non-climatic pressures and cross-sectoral interactions to fully capture climate change impacts at the regional scal
European participatory scenario development: strengthening the link between stories and models
Scenario development methods get to grips with taking a long-term view on complex issues such as climate change through involvement of stakeholders. Many of the recent (global) scenario exercises have been structured according to a Story-and-Simulation approach. Although elaborately studied, conceptual and practical issues remain in linking qualitative stories and quantitative models. In this paper, we show how stakeholders can directly estimate model parameter values using a three-step approach called Fuzzy Set Theory. We focus on the effect of multiple iterations between stories and models. Results show that we were successful in quickly delivering stakeholder-based quantification of key model parameters, with full consistency between linguistic terms used in stories and numeric values. Yet, values changed strongly from one iteration to the next. A minimum of two and preferably at least three iterations is needed to harmonise stories and models. We conclude that the application of Fuzzy Set Theory enabled a highly valuable, structured and reproducibl
Exploring future agricultural development and biodiversity in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi: a spatially explicit scenario-based assessment
Competition for land is increasing as a consequence of the growing demands for food and other commodities and the need to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services. Land conversion and the intensification of current agricultural systems continues to lead to a loss of biodiversity and trade-offs among ecosystem functions. Decision-makers need to understand these trade-offs in order to better balance different demands on land and resources. There is an urgent need for spatially explicit information and analyses on the effects of different trajectories of human-induced landscape change in biodiversity and ecosystem services. We assess the potential implications of a set of plausible socio-economic and climate scenarios for agricultural production and demand and model-associated land use and land cover changes between 2005 and 2050 to assess potential impacts on biodiversity in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. We show that different future socio-economic scenarios are consistent in their projections of areas of high agricultural development leading to similar spatial patterns of habitat and biodiversity loss. Yet, we also show that without protected areas, biodiversity losses are higher and that expanding protected areas to include other important biodiversity areas can help reduce biodiversity losses in all three countries. These results highlight the need for effective protection and the potential benefits of expanding the protected area network while meeting agricultural production needs
High Spin Structure in Xe
Excited states of the nucleus Xe have been investigated
with the fusion–evaporation-reaction
Pd(O,5n)Xe at 86 MeV beam energy,
the compton-suppressed
Nordball-multidetector-system at the Niels-Bohr-Institute in
Risø, Denmark. The level scheme of Xe was extended up to
a level of tentative . Four excited bands of
3-quasiparticle-character were observed. Analyzing the directional
correlation information, we could assign spin- and parity-values to
all observed bands in Xe. The observed band structures
fit well into systematics of the neighboring nuclei Xe
and Xe
A New High-Spin Isomer in <sup>145</sup>Sm
A new high-spin isomer in Sm was observed by in-beam -ray
spectroscopy with the reaction at 127 MeV
performed at the Nord ball multi-detector array in Roskilde.
The excitation energy of the isomer was determined to be
E_{\mbox{\scriptsize x}} = 11147~\mbox{keV}, and using the generalized
centroid-shift method its half-life was found to be
ns
Multi-factor, multi-state, multi-model scenarios: Exploring food and climate futures for Southeast Asia
Decision-makers aiming to improve food security, livelihoods and resilience are faced with an uncertain future. To develop robust policies they need tools to explore the potential effects of uncertain climatic, socioeconomic, and environmental changes. Methods have been developed to use scenarios to present alternative futures to inform policy. Nevertheless, many of these can limit the possibility space with which decision-makers engage. This paper will present a participatory scenario process that maintains a large possibility space through the use of multiple factors and factor-states and a multi-model ensemble to create and quantify four regional scenarios for Southeast Asia. To do this we will explain 1) the process of multi-factor, multi-state building was done in a stakeholder workshop in Vietnam, 2) the scenario quantification and model results from GLOBIOM and IMPACT, two economic models, and 3) how the scenarios have already been applied to diverse policy processes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam
Multi-factor, multi-state, multi-model scenarios: Exploring food and climate futures for Southeast Asia
Decision-makers aiming to improve food security, livelihoods and resilience are faced with an uncertain future. To develop robust policies they need tools to explore the potential effects of uncertain climatic, socioeconomic, and environmental changes. Methods have been developed to use scenarios to present alternative futures to inform policy. Nevertheless, many of these can limit the possibility space with which decision-makers engage. This paper will present a participatory scenario process that maintains a large possibility space through the use of multiple factors and factor-states and a multi-model ensemble to create and quantify four regional scenarios for Southeast Asia. To do this we will explain 1) the process of multi-factor, multi-state building was done in a stakeholder workshop in Vietnam, 2) the scenario quantification and model results from GLOBIOM and IMPACT, two economic models, and 3) how the scenarios have already been applied to diverse policy processes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam