Abstract: I evaluated the Northwest Forest Plan as a model for ecosystem management to achieve social and economic goals in communities located around federal forests in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. My assessment is based on the results of socioeconomic monitoring conducted to evaluate progress in achieving the plan's goals during its first 10 years. The assessment criteria I used related to economic development and social justice. The Northwest Forest Plan incorporated economic development and social justice goals in its design. Socioeconomic monitoring results indicate that plan implementation to achieve those goals met with mixed success, however. I hypothesize there are two important reasons the plan's socioeconomic goals were not fully met: some of the key assumptions underlying the implementation strategies were flawed and agency institutional capacity to achieve the goals was limited. To improve broad-scale ecosystem management in the future, decision makers should ensure that natural-resource management policies are socially acceptable; land-management agencies have the institutional capacity to achieve their management goals; and social and economic management goals (and the strategies for implementing them) are based on accurate assumptions about the relations between the resources being managed and well-being in local communities. One of the difficulties of incorporating economic development and social justice goals in conservation initiatives is finding ways to link conservation behavior and development activities. From a social perspective, the Northwest Forest Plan as a model for ecosystem management is perhaps most valuable in its attempt to link the biophysical and socioeconomic goals of forest management by creating high-quality jobs for residents of forest communities in forest stewardship and ecosystem management work, thereby contributing to conservation. 相似文献
Objective: The ability to detect changing visual information is a vital component of safe driving. In addition to detecting changing visual information, drivers must also interpret its relevance to safety. Environmental changes considered to have high safety relevance will likely demand greater attention and more timely responses than those considered to have lower safety relevance. The aim of this study was to explore factors that are likely to influence perceptions of risk and safety regarding changing visual information in the driving environment. Factors explored were the environment in which the change occurs (i.e., urban vs. rural), the type of object that changes, and the driver's age, experience, and risk sensitivity.
Methods: Sixty-three licensed drivers aged 18–70 years completed a hazard rating task, which required them to rate the perceived hazardousness of changing specific elements within urban and rural driving environments. Three attributes of potential hazards were systematically manipulated: the environment (urban, rural); the type of object changed (road sign, car, motorcycle, pedestrian, traffic light, animal, tree); and its inherent safety risk (low risk, high risk). Inherent safety risk was manipulated by either varying the object's placement, on/near or away from the road, or altering an infrastructure element that would require a change to driver behavior. Participants also completed two driving-related risk perception tasks, rating their relative crash risk and perceived risk of aberrant driving behaviors.
Results: Driver age was not significantly associated with hazard ratings, but individual differences in perceived risk of aberrant driving behaviors predicted hazard ratings, suggesting that general driving-related risk sensitivity plays a strong role in safety perception. In both urban and rural scenes, there were significant associations between hazard ratings and inherent safety risk, with low-risk changes perceived as consistently less hazardous than high-risk impact changes; however, the effect was larger for urban environments. There were also effects of object type, with certain objects rated as consistently more safety relevant. In urban scenes, changes involving pedestrians were rated significantly more hazardous than all other objects, and in rural scenes, changes involving animals were rated as significantly more hazardous. Notably, hazard ratings were found to be higher in urban compared with rural driving environments, even when changes were matched between environments.
Conclusion: This study demonstrates that drivers perceive rural roads as less risky than urban roads, even when similar scenarios occur in both environments. Age did not affect hazard ratings. Instead, the findings suggest that the assessment of risk posed by hazards is influenced more by individual differences in risk sensitivity. This highlights the need for driver education to account for appraisal of hazards’ risk and relevance, in addition to hazard detection, when considering factors that promote road safety. 相似文献
Cooperatives are increasingly advocated as a means to improve incomes, livelihoods and the sustainability of smallholder farmers. This study analyzes the impact of commercial vegetable cooperative membership on smallholder agricultural performance in Cambodia. Institutional heterogeneities are considered across cooperatives and various econometric techniques are used to control for potential selection bias. The impacts of horticulture on agricultural outcomes are also analyzed. The results indicate that membership of commercial vegetable cooperatives has so far had no effect on agricultural incomes or the value or amounts of agricultural inputs. However, results indicate that membership has affected technology choice, access to credit services and information transmission through technological training. Additionally, there is evidence that horticulture, as a component of overall agricultural diversification, can augment farm income. The results suggest that much of the benefit of cooperative membership stems from the cooperative's provision of services, which might not be easily inferred from measures of member incomes. 相似文献