1,257 research outputs found

    Multifunctionality of Agriculture Products: Towards Collaborative Policy Guidelines on Sustainable Agro-Related Fuel Development

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    This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Biofuels on 23 January 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17597269.2017.1278930.The primacy of food security overrides that of energy. This is a reasoned view under the United Nations rights-based theories and practice. Within this context, there are voluntary guidelines according to which countries must secure an adequate food supply. Nevertheless, agro-related fuel has recently attracted scientific and commercial attention, following revolutionary thinking concerning the multifunctionality nature of agriculture products and the innovative use of crop resources as conduits in building our energy security and promoting economic growth. Consequently, many countries may be facing the need for strategic decision-making in developing an agro-related fuel programme, given the lack of a credible global framework to inform policy approaches. On the back of this complexity, a key objective of this paper is to provide a critical assessment of whether a credible global collaborative framework can bring much-needed certainty to enable developing countries to weigh up the importance and risks involved and to manage all of the related biodiversity intricacies connected to agro-related policy development in relation to the realisation of sustainable food security.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

    Low-carbon cities: Lifestyle changes are necessary

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    Today, more than half the world's population live in cities, and the UN expect this figure to rise to two-thirds by 2050. Already, cities are responsible for an estimated 70% of global energy use. Cities must cut their energy use in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Urban Heat Island effect and urban air pollution, and global fossil fuel (especially oil) depletion. Available approaches include shifting to alternative energy, energy efficiency improvements, and energy conservation. We find that although both increased use of renewable energy and energy efficiency improvements are desirable, they will be unable to reduce significantly fossil fuel use by 2050. This is important because many researchers argue that large reductions in oil, and to a lesser extent other fossil fuels, will be needed within the next two decades, because of their mounting energy, monetary and environmental costs. Achieving the necessary large cuts in both fossil energy use and their accompanying emissions will, we argue, necessitate energy conservation, largely though lifestyle changes

    The environmental security debate and its significance for climate change

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    Policymakers, military strategists and academics all increasingly hail climate change as a security issue. This article revisits the (comparatively) long-standing “environmental security debate” and asks what lessons that earlier debate holds for the push towards making climate change a security issue. Two important claims are made. First, the emerging climate security debate is in many ways a re-run of the earlier dispute. It features many of the same proponents and many of the same disagreements. These disagreements concern, amongst other things, the nature of the threat, the referent object of security and the appropriate policy responses. Second, given its many different interpretations, from an environmentalist perspective, securitisation of the climate is not necessarily a positive development
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