The potential of current legal structures to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander interests in the Australian bush food industry

There are complex connections between Australia’s native plants and first peoples, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The maintenance of these connections is central to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and well-being and the tangible realisation of Australian policy commitments. Diverse cultural connections combine with other motivations to underpin an array of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander interests in the commercial development of traditional plant foods (‘bush foods’). Despite nation-wide policy support for these interests, there is no national legal framework to support them. This fortifies the popular call for a new (sui generis) law that transforms the interests of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples into enforceable legal rights. It is unclear the extent to which a single sui generis law might help Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples realise their diverse interests in the development of gourmet bush food products and new bush food varieties. It is also unlikely that Australia will implement such a law in the near future. This paper offers a preliminary study of the capacity of current legal structures to support some key Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander interests that might arise in these two development contexts. The study can inform the future development of practical legal strategies to support the diverse interests of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the bush food industry.     

《名古屋议定书》政府间委员会(ICNP)议题谈判成效

《生物多样性公约》缔约方大会第10次会议(COP-10)决定设立名古屋议定书政府间委员会(ICNP),主要负责《关于遗传资源获取与惠益分享(ABS)的名古屋议定书》(简称《议定书》)缔约方大会第1次会议(COP/MOP-1)的筹备工作。2011年6月、2012年7月和2014年2月,分别在加拿大、印度和韩国共召开了3次会议。会议对《议定书》生效和执行将面临的问题开展了讨论。通过详细梳理不同缔约方与其它国家政府对两年期方案预算、COP/MOP议事规则、COP/MOP-1临时议程草案、全球多边惠益分享机制、ABS信息交换所、能力建设、意识提高、遵约程序和机制、监测与报告以及示范合同条款等主要议题所持观点,总结了会议的进展动态,综合分析了各议题的谈判成效,深入探讨了名古屋议定书委员会对《议定书》生效和执行的积极作用以及面临的挑战。     

Using plants for health: Indigenous knowledge in health care in a tribal region of Bihar,India

While the potential of indigenous knowledge for health care is fully recognised in the literature and by many health professionals, the practices of so many indigenous peoples go unrecorded and untested. Indigenous knowledge remains essentially untapped, an unwritten resource involving information, language and skills in many groups, languages, cultures and environments. An attempt is made in this paper to identify selected indigenous health technologies in a tribal area of Bihar State, India; to describe the treatments, their application and preparation; and to link the traditional practice with the relevant scientific information to test or determine the validity of the practices. These practices were found to be effective in the treatment of a variety of health problems, and most were also scientifically confirmed. The paper argues, however, that other plant uses practised by tribal people still need to be explored: in order to popularise more widely the authenticated practices; to preserve indigenous knowledge; to integrate or blend it with scientific knowledge so that health professionals and healthcare users may benefit from a wider range of healthcare strategies which are environmentally unthreatening.     

Rehabilitation of degraded community lands for sustainable development in Himalaya: a case study in Garhwal Himalaya,India

SUMMARY

An approach to the rehabilitation of degraded community lands built on people's perceptions and traditional knowledge was developed, implemented on a small scale (6 ha plot), and evaluated in terms of economic and ecological costs and benefits over a period of 5 years in a mid-altitude (1200 m) village of Garhwal Himalaya. Rehabilitation comprised establishment of water harvesting tanks, organic management of soil, agroforestry (native multipurpose trees t traditional crops), and decision making by the whole village community. Costs and benefits under irrigated and unirrigated conditions were compared. The total cost of establishing the irrigated agroforestry system was 1.23 fold that of the unirrigated one, whereas the total benefit was 2.09 fold. The average standing above-ground biomass of the 4-year-old plantation in the irrigated agroforestry system was 11.69 t/ha compared to 8.34 t/ha in the unirrigated system. Improvement in soil properties was more pronounced in the irrigated system than in the unirrigated one. Nutrient input, an input derived largely from forest biomass, in the unirrigated system was nearly 3 times higher than that in the irrigated system. It is concluded that, considering the local and national/regional/global interests in an integrated manner, agroforestry incorporating water management would be a more effective option for rehabilitating degraded community lands than the afforestation currently being attempted by the government in the mid-altitudes of Indian Himalaya.     

Exploring system interactions for building resilience within coastal environments and communities

This paper focuses on identifying examples of first-order system interactions, which make important contributions to building coastal resilience for coastal zone management. This discussion is based on an application of the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework to a case-study analysis of coastal management in South Australia. The study suggests that cross-scale interactions and informal relationships within and between users and managers are key interactions defining resilience outcomes within the current system. A significant constraint on improving resilience was the lack of evaluative criteria for identifying sustainable forms of system behaviour. The paper argues that resilience is a function of a normative statement on the characteristics desirable in the functioning system. Analyses of coastal resilience, which facilitate greater understanding of the range of complexities in coastal behaviour, are therefore central to gaining the most useful insights into the options and pathways for building more sustainable coastal futures.     

Eliciting expert knowledge in conservation science

Expert knowledge is used widely in the science and practice of conservation because of the complexity of problems, relative lack of data, and the imminent nature of many conservation decisions. Expert knowledge is substantive information on a particular topic that is not widely known by others. An expert is someone who holds this knowledge and who is often deferred to in its interpretation. We refer to predictions by experts of what may happen in a particular context as expert judgments. In general, an expert-elicitation approach consists of five steps: deciding how information will be used, determining what to elicit, designing the elicitation process, performing the elicitation, and translating the elicited information into quantitative statements that can be used in a model or directly to make decisions. This last step is known as encoding. Some of the considerations in eliciting expert knowledge include determining how to work with multiple experts and how to combine multiple judgments, minimizing bias in the elicited information, and verifying the accuracy of expert information. We highlight structured elicitation techniques that, if adopted, will improve the accuracy and information content of expert judgment and ensure uncertainty is captured accurately. We suggest four aspects of an expert elicitation exercise be examined to determine its comprehensiveness and effectiveness: study design and context, elicitation design, elicitation method, and elicitation output. Just as the reliability of empirical data depends on the rigor with which it was acquired so too does that of expert knowledge.     

地铁施工风险应急管理研究

针对近年来地铁施工事故频发,难以快速、有针对性地进行应急处置的问题,通过对近年来地铁施工事故案例的统计,分析导致地铁施工事故的相关因素,用Protege软件对以往地铁施工事故应急案例建立知识本体模型。通过目标案例与本体库中的源案例进行相似度计算与匹配,检索出案例库中相似度超过阈值的源案例,然后再对比筛选后的源案例与目标案例之间的关键属性相似度,从而决定进行规则推理或直接参考该案例的应急措施,以此提高应急处置的速度与针对性。     

国际土壤质量研究热点与趋势——基于大数据的Citespace可视化分析

论文利用文献计量学方法定量分析了土壤质量研究领域的科学文献,结果显示国际土壤质量研究热点从有机质及其组分对管理措施的响应、微生物指标敏感性、土壤质量定义到土壤质量评价方法、评价指标和框架的完善,在农业生产和环境保护中的应用性不断加强。目前,土壤质量的监测及其对土壤修复、全球气候变化的响应是未来研究热点。主要研究趋势有：1）发展中国家将在土壤质量研究领域中发挥重要作用;2）土壤质量对土壤修复、全球气候变化的响应以及应对措施成为未来的研究重点;3）可持续发展仍然是土壤质量研究的主题,不同国家及地区应根据自身特点进行土壤质量评价、监测、修复研究,制定法律,保障土壤管理的规范化和可持续化。     

Evaluating Rapid Participatory Rural Appraisal as an Assessment of Ethnoecological Knowledge and Local Biodiversity Patterns

Abstract:  There is a pressing need to find both locally and globally relevant tools to measure and compare biodiversity patterns. Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is important to biodiversity monitoring, but has a contested role in preliminary biodiversity assessments. We examined rapid participatory rural appraisal (rPRA) (a tool commonly used for local needs assessments) as an alternative to surveys of vascular plants conducted by people with local knowledge. We used rPRA to determine the local-knowledge consensus on the average richness, diversity, and height of local grasses and trees in three habitats surrounding Boumba, Niger, bordering Park-W. We then conducted our own vascular plant surveys to collect information on plant richness, abundance, and structure. Using a qualitative ranking, we compared TEK-based assessments of diversity patterns with our survey-based assessments. The TEK-based assessments matched survey-based assessments on measures of height and density for grasses and trees and tree richness. The two assessments correlated poorly on herb richness and Simpson's D value for both trees and grasses. Plant life form and gender of the participant affected the way diversity patterns were described, which highlights the usefulness of TEK in explaining local realities and indicates limitations of using TEK as a large-scale assessment tool. Our results demonstrate that rPRA can serve to combine local-knowledge inquiry with scientific study at a cost lower than vascular plant surveys and demonstrates a useful blunt tool for preliminary biodiversity assessment.     

Exploring the lay/expert divide: the attribution of responsibilities for coal ash pollution in Tuzla,Bosnia and Herzegovina

Invoking expert knowledge is a common strategy in attempts to settle environmental disputes. However, the validity of expertise is contingent upon the context in which an actor is recognised as an expert. In complex environmental conflicts the distinction between lay and expert knowledge is not always fixed a priori. However, as conflicts unfold, intervening parties tend to present their cases in ways that reinforce this distinction. This is apparent in the attribution of environmental responsibilities. This paper presents an empirical case of an environmental conflict related to land contamination due to coal ash disposal in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The analysis revealed two polar positions in the conflict: the first one, mainly held by scientists and industry representatives, invoked expert knowledge and presented a distributed approach to the attribution of responsibilities; the second one, mainly held by local residents and municipal officials, presented an experiential understanding of pollution, as lay knowledge, and attributed direct responsibilities to the local energy industry. The paper concludes that the persistence of the distinction between expert and lay knowledge is a manifestation of the social structures that underlie the conflict.