Climate change and disaster management

Climate change, although a natural phenomenon, is accelerated by human activities. Disaster policy response to climate change is dependent on a number of factors, such as readiness to accept the reality of climate change, institutions and capacity, as well as willingness to embed climate change risk assessment and management in development strategies. These conditions do not yet exist universally. A focus that neglects to enhance capacity-building and resilience as a prerequisite for managing climate change risks will, in all likelihood, do little to reduce vulnerability to those risks. Reducing vulnerability is a key aspect of reducing climate change risk. To do so requires a new approach to climate change risk and a change in institutional structures and relationships. A focus on development that neglects to enhance governance and resilience as a prerequisite for managing climate change risks will, in all likelihood, do little to reduce vulnerability to those risks.     

吹扫捕集-GC-MS测定废水中的硝基氯苯

建立了吹扫捕集-GC-MS测定水样中硝基氯苯类化合物的方法.考察了吹扫温度、吹扫时间等对吹扫捕集效率和方法检出限的影响.在室温下,当吹扫时间为30 min时,该方法的最低检出限可达0.002 mg/L,工作曲线的线性范围为2×10 -3 ～2 mg/L,相对标准偏差在2%～6%,加标回收率在97.0%～110.0%.与国家标准方法相比,该法具有操作简便、灵敏度高、线性范围宽且无须使用有毒有机溶剂等优点,可满足工业废水和地表水中硝基氯苯的测定要求.     

Managing Watershed Externalities in India: Theory and Practice

Watershed development is the focus of poverty alleviation programs in rural India. Watershed projects aim to solve problems of externalities, but they also create their own externalities, which cause uneven distribution of costs and benefits that undermine project objectives and harm the poor. Numerous approaches exist to internalize externalities, including awareness creation, moral suasion, investment subsidies, regulatory limits and fines, indirect benefits, mergers, and recent innovations like payment for environmental services and cap and trade. These can be judged on several criteria; the best approach would solve the problem cost effectively and help or at least not hurt poor people. Watershed projects in India were examined to identify the approaches taken to internalize watershed externalities. Investment subsidies and indirect employment benefits are the least effective approaches theoretically, but they are the most commonly applied, most likely because they are easy to administer and bring popular short term gains. Some theoretically favorable approaches that have been used elsewhere, such as payment for environmental services, may not work as well in India due to high transaction costs. However, one key innovation that easily could be applied in India is to make investment subsidies contingent on performance. Legal support and property rights reform would be needed for other favorable approaches.     

Sustainable agriculture and eradication of rural poverty in Pakistan

Poverty is rampant in the rural areas of Pakistan, where people are in a state of deprivation with regard to incomes, clothing, housing, healthcare, education, sanitary facilities and human rights. Agriculture generates nearly 20.9 percent of the country's GDP and provides employment for 43.4 percent of its workforce. Most importantly, 65.9 percent of the population living in rural areas is directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture for their livelihood. Rising population, shrinking agricultural land, increasing demand for water resources, widespread land degradation and inadequate infrastructure appear to be major concerns of the agriculture sector in Pakistan. An attempt has been made to examine the population growth–agriculture growth–poverty alleviation linkage. It is argued that agriculture will continue to be one of the most important sectors of Pakistan's economy for years to come. To alleviate poverty, it is suggested that Pakistan enhance the productivity of the agriculture sector through the provision of a series of inputs including provision of easy credit to the small farmer, availability of quality fertilizers and pesticides, tractor and harvester services, improvement in the effectiveness of the vast irrigation system and, finally, farmer education. It is concluded that the high rate of population growth needs to be curbed for increased agricultural productivity to have any significant effect on poverty in rural areas of Pakistan.     

Profiling unauthorized natural resource users for better targeting of conservation interventions

Unauthorized use of natural resources is a key threat to many protected areas. Approaches to reducing this threat include law enforcement and integrated conservation and development (ICD) projects, but for such ICDs to be targeted effectively, it is important to understand who is illegally using which natural resources and why. The nature of unauthorized behavior makes it difficult to ascertain this information through direct questioning. Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda, has many ICD projects, including authorizing some local people to use certain nontimber forest resources from the park. However, despite over 25 years of ICD, unauthorized resource use continues. We used household surveys, indirect questioning (unmatched count technique), and focus group discussions to generate profiles of authorized and unauthorized resource users and to explore motivations for unauthorized activity. Overall, unauthorized resource use was most common among people from poor households who lived closest to the park boundary and farthest from roads and trading centers. Other motivations for unauthorized resource use included crop raiding by wild animals, inequity of revenue sharing, and lack of employment, factors that created resentment among the poorest communities. In some communities, benefits obtained from ICD were reported to be the greatest deterrents against unauthorized activity, although law enforcement ranked highest overall. Despite the sensitive nature of exploring unauthorized resource use, management‐relevant insights into the profiles and motivations of unauthorized resource users can be gained from a combination of survey techniques, as adopted here. To reduce unauthorized activity at Bwindi, we suggest ICD benefit the poorest people living in remote areas and near the park boundary by providing affordable alternative sources of forest products and addressing crop raiding. To prevent resentment from driving further unauthorized activity, ICDs should be managed transparently and equitably.     

The convergence of alternative food networks within “rural development” initiatives: the case of the New Rural Reconstruction Movement in China†

Rural sociologists and geographers have conceptualised different rural development trajectories including “the agri-industrial model”, “the post-productivist model” and “the rural development model”. Alternative food networks (AFNs) are increasingly recognised as a “forerunner” and a critical component of the emerging “rural development model” in the West. Meanwhile, Marsden and Franklin [2013. Replacing neoliberalism: theoretical implications of the rise of local food movements. Local Environment, 18 (5), 636–641] pointed out that there is a “local trap” in the current conceptualisation of AFNs that overemphasises their local embeddedness and heterogeneity. This “local trap” marginalises AFNs and, therefore, hinders their potential for transforming the industrialised conventional food system. The convergence and scaling-up of fragmented AFNs have been recognised as important ways to address this marginalisation issue and thus have attracted considerable attention. However, current studies of the convergence of AFNs focus mainly on the role of food-centred organisations without recognising the role of the emerging “rural development” initiatives in the convergence of AFNs. Based on in-depth interviews with key stakeholders and analysis of secondary data, this paper uses the New Rural Reconstruction Movement (NRRM), an emerging alternative rural development movement in China, as an example to illustrate how the NRRM opens up a novel space for the convergence of AFNs. We argue that the interrelationship between AFNs and rural development is indeed reciprocal. The NRRM, following the “rural development” trajectory, functions as a hub for the convergence and scaling-up of various alternative food initiatives. Strategies for achieving convergence include constructing a “common ground” for these initiatives, establishing national alliances and organisations, sharing knowledge and exchanging personnel among them.     

Monitoring and targeting the sanitation poor: A multidimensional approach

Water, sanitation and hygiene (WaSH) are at the core of sustainable development. As we embark on a new round of global goals, namely the Sustainable Development Goals, a top priority is to address a coherent framework for monitoring these services. In the coming years, the sector will witness the development of a variety of multidimensional monitoring measures, albeit from different perspectives. This paper reviews the relevant literature and discusses the adequacy and applicability of one approach that is increasingly adopted for multidimensional poverty measurement at the household level, the Alkire‐Foster methodology. Drawing on this method, we identify and combine a set of direct household‐related water and sanitation deprivations that batter a person at the same time. This new multidimensional measure is useful for gaining a better understanding of the context in which WaSH services are delivered. It captures both the incidence and intensity of WaSH poverty, and provides a new tool to support monitoring and reporting. For illustrative purposes, one small town in Mozambique is selected as the initial case study.     

Accounting for the Impact of Conservation on Human Well‐Being

Conservationists are increasingly engaging with the concept of human well‐being to improve the design and evaluation of their interventions. Since the convening of the influential Sarkozy Commission in 2009, development researchers have been refining conceptualizations and frameworks to understand and measure human well‐being and are starting to converge on a common understanding of how best to do this. In conservation, the term human well‐being is in widespread use, but there is a need for guidance on operationalizing it to measure the impacts of conservation interventions on people. We present a framework for understanding human well‐being, which could be particularly useful in conservation. The framework includes 3 conditions; meeting needs, pursuing goals, and experiencing a satisfactory quality of life. We outline some of the complexities involved in evaluating the well‐being effects of conservation interventions, with the understanding that well‐being varies between people and over time and with the priorities of the evaluator. Key challenges for research into the well‐being impacts of conservation interventions include the need to build up a collection of case studies so as to draw out generalizable lessons; harness the potential of modern technology to support well‐being research; and contextualize evaluations of conservation impacts on well‐being spatially and temporally within the wider landscape of social change. Pathways through the smog of confusion around the term well‐being exist, and existing frameworks such as the Well‐being in Developing Countries approach can help conservationists negotiate the challenges of operationalizing the concept. Conservationists have the opportunity to benefit from the recent flurry of research in the development field so as to carry out more nuanced and locally relevant evaluations of the effects of their interventions on human well‐being. Consideración del Impacto de la Conservación sobre el Bienestar Humano     

吹扫捕集-气相色谱／质谱法测定水中25种挥发性有机物研究

建立了吹扫捕集与气相色谱／质谱联用测定水中25种挥发性有机物的分析方法。该方法的加标回收率在90％-119％之间,响应因子（RF）的相对标准偏差均小于20％,检出限在0．04μg／L-0．22μg／L之间。该方法具有简单、快速、准确、灵敏,无其他有机物的污染等优点,适用于地表水、地下水和饮用水中挥发性有机物的测定,结果令人满意。     

青海湖湖水性质、颗粒物沉积通量季节和年际变化——来自沉积物捕获器的研究

本文通过在青海湖南盆沉积中心试验性放置的Mark 8-13型时间序列沉积物捕获器所收集到的为期15个月的自然沉降颗粒物,分析了颗粒物沉积通量和物质组成,结合温盐传感器（CTD）所记录湖水参数数据的分析,讨论了青海湖上部10 m左右湖水中所发生沉积作用的季节与年际变化特征及其与环境参数的相互关系。结果表明,采集期间所沉降的总颗粒物具有显著季节和年际变化特征,其平均年沉降通量为112 g·m^-2·yr^-1,其组成主要是自生碳酸盐（高Mg方解石、文石）、生物壳体（介形虫、硅藻等）等内生作用形成的物质,以及少量的碎屑矿物。与实时监测的湖水参数比较表明,具有显著季节和年际变化的青海湖内生物质通量变化主要受控于夏季温度的变化。其沉积机制为：湖水温度的升高,有利于高Mg方解石和文石等自生矿物从碳酸盐过饱和的碱性湖水中结晶沉淀（盐度降低）,也有利于藻类和介形虫等微体生物大量繁殖,表现为温度偏高的2010年比2011年具有较低的湖水盐度和高得多的沉积通量。因此,青海湖自生碳酸盐沉淀通量可以用来反映湖水盐度和/或温度的变化,尽管这些内生作用形成的物质可能只约占到湖底沉积物的5%~20%。为更全面地了解青海湖现代沉积过程,有必要在更多点位、不同的深度进行长期放置捕获器和实时监测湖水参数变化。