Pesticide handling practices by vegetable farmer in Kenya

Pesticide handling practices have a strong bearing on the exposure of toxic effects to target and nontarget organism. A clear understanding of determinants of pesticide handling practices is a precondition in the design and implementation of policy intervention. To accomplish this, a household survey of 425 respondents was conducted in 2008. Majority of the farmers (85 %) had inappropriately handled pesticides, mainly through, unsafe storage (23 %), unsafe disposal of leftover in either sprays solutions, or rinsate and empty pesticide containers (40 %), failure to wear the required minimum protective gear (68 %), or overdosed pesticides (27 %). However, majority of those farmers were aware of the risks of pesticide use, with over 81 % expressing the view that pesticides have harmful effects on human health, livestock, beneficial arthropods, and on water. Econometric models showed that pesticide handling practices were significantly influenced by variation in record keeping, main source advice on pesticide use, toxicity of pesticide, and geographical location. Pesticide risk perception and negative impacts experiences had no association with handling practices. The study recommends policymakers to design effective, participatory, and location targeted outreach programmes, which deal specifically on promotion of record keeping and reduction in use of harmful pesticides.     

A performance-based tabular approach for joint systematic improvement of risk control and resilience applied to telecommunication grid,gas network,and ultrasound localization system

Environment Systems and Decisions - Organizational and technical approaches have proven successful in increasing the performance and preventing risks at socio-technical systems at all scales....     

Science–policy interactions in Austrian,Dutch, and Swiss climate policy: a comparative account

Scientific expertise plays an important role in the complex field of climate policy. Consequently, science–policy interactions have been institutionalized in many countries. However, science–policy arenas vary considerably across countries. Scholars mainly attribute these differences to the influence of specific political cultures. The literature has primarily compared science–policy arenas of countries with diverging political cultures, whereas comparisons of countries with similar political cultures are rare. The latter is especially true for neo-corporatist cultures. Against this background, we compare the climate science–policy arenas of three neo-corporatist countries, Austria, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Conceptually, we draw on the literature regarding politico-cultural imprints in science–policy arenas. We operationalize national science–policy arenas along four dimensions: the knowledge actors, the organizational formats, the styles of science–policy interactions, and their transparency and visibility. Overall, the three arenas reveal many similarities and much fewer differences. Most similarities correspond to neo-corporatist patterns. However, some similarities consistently deviate from neo-corporatist patterns. Interestingly, almost all differences between the countries match national variations of neo-corporatism. In light of these observations and the specific problem structure of climate policy, we develop research questions to investigate potential explanations for correspondence to and deviation from neo-corporatist patterns.     

Analyse von Quecksilber in Seeadlerfedern aus Mecklenburg-Vorpommern mit Hilfe der Hamburger Protonenmikrosonde

With the aid of the Hamburg proton micro-probe, we examined the concentration of mercury in sea eagle feathers collected over the course of several decades in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern area. Based on the sites where these feathers were collected and the data of these findings, it is possible to get a differential picture of mercury contamination related both temporally and regionally to the mercurial pollution of seed mordants used agriculturally. We compared the concentrations found with a basic “geogenic” contamination which was also to be seen in the feather samples from the last century as detected in museum animal specimens.     

Der vorindustrielle Mensch in den Ökosystemen der Erde

Preindustrial man influenced and changed the earth's ecosystems decisively. The disappearance of large animals from all continents (Eurasia, e.g., mammoth; America, e.g., the giant sloths and the giant armadillo) after the Pleistocene was most probably due to a large extent to the early hunters and collectors. Corn-growing and breeding of domestic animals led to the disappearance of their wild forms (e.g., the wild form of today's old world camel is unknown) and the cultivation of huge monocultures. The increasing need for wood resulted in the disappearance of forests almost all over Europe. Specific needs, such as pig-raising or bee-keeping, supported the formation of particular landscapes, e.g., sparsely wooded forests and extensive heathlands. All these factors resulted in extreme soil erosion and the disappearance of nutritionally important minerals from the soil, which was thus severely depleted.     

The evolution of man and the extinction of animals

Africa has lost only very few big mammals at the end of the pleistocene. Evidence is put forward that the reason for the present richness of the African mammal fauna is a very early coevolution between evolving man and the megafauna of this area. Areas without such an early coevolution suffered severe losses (up to 100%) of their native megafauna, when early hunters invaded them.