Spatial aspects of the design and targeting of agricultural development strategies:

Two increasingly shared perspectives within the international development community are that (a) geography matters, and (b) many government interventions would be more successful if they were better targeted. This paper unites these two notions by exploring the opportunities for, and benefits of, bringing an explicitly spatial dimension to the tasks of formulating and evaluating agricultural development strategies. We first review the lingua franca of land fragility and find it lacking in its capacity to describe the dynamic interface between the biophysical and socioeconomic factors that help shape rural development options. Subsequently, we propose a two-phased approach. First, development strategy options are characterized to identify the desirable ranges of conditions that would most favor successful strategy implementation. Second, those conditions exhibiting important spatial dependency – such as agricultural potential, population density, and access to infrastructure and markets – are matched against a similarly characterized, spatially-referenced (GIS) database. This process generates both spatial (map) and tabular representations of strategy-specific development domains. An important benefit of a spatial (GIS) framework is that it provides a powerful means of organizing and integrating a very diverse range of disciplinary and data inputs. At a more conceptual level we propose that it is the characterization of location, not the narrowly-focused characterization of land, that is more properly the focus of attention from a development perspective. The paper includes appropriate examples of spatial analysis using data from East Africa and Burkina Faso, and concludes with an appendix describing and interpreting regional climate and soil data for Sub-Saharan Africa that was directly relevant to our original goal.Spatial analysis (Statistics), Agricultural development., Burkina Faso., Africa, Sub-Saharan.,

EuReCa ONE—27 Nations, ONE Europe, ONE Registry A prospective one month analysis of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest outcomes in 27 countries in Europe

AbstractIntroductionThe aim of the EuReCa ONE study was to determine the incidence, process, and outcome for out of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) throughout Europe.MethodsThis was an international, prospective, multi-centre one-month study. Patients who suffered an OHCA during October 2014 who were attended and/or treated by an Emergency Medical Service (EMS) were eligible for inclusion in the study. Data were extracted from national, regional or local registries.ResultsData on 10,682 confirmed OHCAs from 248 regions in 27 countries, covering an estimated population of 174 million. In 7146 (66%) cases, CPR was started by a bystander or by the EMS. The incidence of CPR attempts ranged from 19.0 to 104.0 per 100,000 population per year. 1735 had ROSC on arrival at hospital (25.2%), Overall, 662/6414 (10.3%) in all cases with CPR attempted survived for at least 30 days or to hospital discharge.ConclusionThe results of EuReCa ONE highlight that OHCA is still a major public health problem accounting for a substantial number of deaths in Europe.EuReCa ONE very clearly demonstrates marked differences in the processes for data collection and reported outcomes following OHCA all over Europe. Using these data and analyses, different countries, regions, systems, and concepts can benchmark themselves and may learn from each other to further improve survival following one of our major health care events

EUROPEAN SOIL BUREAU ⎯ RESEARCH REPORT NO. 7 Pondering Hierarchical Soil Classification Systems

The paper discusses a number of problems of modern soil classification systems. It dismisses some of the exagerated fears about the lack, until recently, of a universally accepted soil classification system. It welcomes that the pedogenetic basis for subdivising and categorizing soils has become an excuse rather than the foundation of modern soil classification systems that are invariably pedophenetic. The central discussion concerns hierarchical classification systems that are questioned as complicating rather than assisting the task of soil correlators. The limitations of too close a linkage between soil classification and soil legends and between hierarchical levels and scales of soil maps are highlighted and a non–hierarchical structure for the World Reference Base as a soil classification system is defended. For didactic and soil correlation purposes, one rationale and example is given for a possible reasoned ranking of the qualifiers in the World Reference Base for Soil Resources

A Land Resources Planning Toolbox to Promote Sustainable Land Management

This paper provides a brief overview of how traditional concepts and approaches of land use planning have evolved into a more widely accepted vision of „land resources planning‟ and its requirements for participatory processes, involvement of multi-sectoral stakeholders, and multi-thematic information at appropriate scales. Given its comprehensive ambitions, land resource planning (LRP) has a growing demand for a wide-ranging toolset, encompassing different tools in the biophysical, socio-economic, and governance (in a form of guidelines, methods, approaches and support tools). In order to collate knowledge, experiences and lessons from the LRP tools users, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) - Land and Water Division held a consultation process through a survey among a range of stakeholders operating at different levels, sectors and regions. The survey evidenced limited awareness about the current availability of tools for land use planning. To remedy this situation, FAO developed the Land Resources Planning Toolbox (LRPT), a web-based inventory of existing tools. The Toolbox makes distinguishing between the tools in the socio-economic domain, those in the biophysical and the ones combining the two domains. The Toolbox explains the ability and restrictions of the LRP tools and their appropriateness to different regions, stakeholders and levels, and can be searched according to several criteria. It is concluded that, the Toolbox offers a useful mechanism for knowledge sharing and exchange of recent tools to enhance participatory LRP. It also has a great potential to support sustainable land management and landscape restoration. In this way it addresses, indirectly, conflicts and competition over resources

EUROPEAN SOIL BUREAU ⎯ RESEARCH REPORT NO. 7 World Reference Base for Soil Resources – in a nutshell

Since its endorsement by the IUSS in 1998, the World Reference Base for Soil Resources has established itself as a comprehensive soil correlation system. The system has so far been translated into 9 languages and is used and tested all over the world. This paper describes the WRB in a nutshell. Although originally designed for general-purpose soil correlation at world scale, WRB is increasingly used as a classification system. The issue of strict ranking of taxa and the rationale behind ranking have been major points of debate; a ranking scenario is presented here, mainly to stimulate the discussion

Spatial Aspects of the Design and Targeting of Agricultural Development Strategies

Two increasingly shared perspectives within the international development community are that (a) geography matters, and (b) many government interventions would be more successful if they were better targeted. This paper unites these two notions by exploring the opportunities for, and benefits of, bringing an explicitly spatial dimension to the tasks of formulating and evaluating agricultural development strategies. The paper was originally conceived to address the more specific goal of proposing a spatial characterization to underpin deliberations on appropriate development strategies for the “fragile” or “less-favored” lands of Sub-Saharan Africa. In practice, however, we considered that goal to be not only impractical but, perhaps, ill-conceived. The multiple senses in which land may be considered fragile, coupled with the myriad of potential development pathways would result in either an overly complex characterization or, more likely, a need to aggregate and generalize that would render the characterization of little use when confronted with any specific, real-world problem. We first review the lingua franca of land fragility and find it lacking in its capacity to describe the dynamic interface between the biophysical and socioeconomic factors that help shape rural development options. Subsequently, we propose a two-phased approach. First, development strategy options are characterized to identify the desirable ranges of conditions that would most favor successful strategy implementation. Second, those conditions exhibiting important spatial dependency – such as agricultural potential, population density, and access to infrastructure and markets – are matched against a similarly characterized, spatially-referenced (GIS) database. This process generates both spatial (map) and tabular representations of strategy-specific development domains. While there are many advantages to this tailored approach, it does depend on having access to a modest GIS capacity to re-characterize and re-interpret spatial datasets as the nature and focus of development problems change, and as new and improved data become available. This would be a significant step for many policy analysis units, typically run by economists. However, while acknowledging that not all aspects of strategic analysis necessarily benefit from a spatial perspective, we feel an important additional benefit of a spatial (GIS) framework is that it provides a powerful means of organizing and integrating a very diverse range of disciplinary and data inputs. At a more conceptual level we propose that it is the characterization of location, not the narrowly-focused characterization of land, that is more properly the focus of attention from a development perspective. IFPRI is expanding on these concepts in its work on policy-relevant applications of GIS linked more closely to economic perceptions of space. The paper includes appropriate examples of spatial analysis using data from East Africa and Burkina Faso, and concludes with an appendix describing and interpreting regional climate and soil data for Sub-Saharan Africa that was directly relevant to our original goal

EPTD DISCUSSION PAPER NO. 44 SPATIAL ASPECTS OF THE DESIGN AND TARGETING OF AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES

Two increasingly shared perspectives within the international development community are that (a) geography matters, and (b) many government interventions would be more successful if they were better targeted. This paper unites these two notions by exploring the opportunities for, and benefits of, bringing an explicitly spatial dimension to the tasks of formulating and evaluating agricultural development strategies. The paper was originally conceived to address the more specific goal of proposing a spatial characterization to underpin deliberations on appropriate development strategies for the "fragile" or "less-favored" lands of Sub-Saharan Africa. In practice, however, we considered that goal to be not only impractical but, perhaps, ill-conceived. The multiple senses in which land may be considered fragile, coupled with the myriad of potential development pathways would result in either an overly complex characterization or, more likely, a need to aggregate and generalize that would render the characterization of little use when confronted with any specific, real-world problem. We first review the lingua franca of land fragility and find it lacking in its capacity to describe the dynamic interface between the biophysical and socioeconomic factors that help shape rural development options. Subsequently, we propose a two-phased approach. First, development strategy options are characterized to identify the desirable ranges of conditions that would most favor successful strategy implementation. Second, those conditions exhibiting important spatial dependency -- such as agricultural potential, population density, and access to infrastructure and markets -- are matched against a similarly characterized, spatiallyreferenced (GIS) database. This process generates both spatial..