This project aims at analysing the influence of competing national and international bureaucracies on the fragmentation of the international forest regime complex (IFRC). Its objectives are: - describing the political dimension of fragmentation of the IFRC programme- explaining the political dimension of fragmentation based on the model of bureaucratic politics- analysing the steering consequences resulting from fragmentation - trans-disciplinary design of solutions for coping with political aspects of fragmentationBuilding on the bureaucratic politics approach these objectives will be pursued by testing the linking hypothesis: Interest and influence of the bureaucracies cause a fragmented programme of the IFRC. This programme supports the goal of profitable timber production but keeps the decision about biodiversity and CO2 sequestration open hindering the effective steering by the IFRC. The project develops an analytical framework consisting of the following independent variables: competing national and competing international bureaucracies, elected politicians, national and international non-state actors and media discourses. The fragmentation of the political programme of the IFRC is the overall dependent variable. This project will analyse the influence of bureaucracies and their coalitions on fragmentation at the international level as well as in national case studies in Sweden, Poland and Germany. The other independent variables will be covered by sub-projects 2, 3 and 4. The findings will be linked to the other political and to the economic and technic-ecological sub projects in order to contribute to the multi-disciplinary description and explanation of fragmentation and its steering consequences.
Research in 'silviculture' and 'forest economics' very often takes place largely independent from each other. While silviculture predominantly focuses on ecological aspects, forest eco-nomics is sometimes very theoretic. The applied bioeconomic models often lack biological realism. Investigating mixed forests this proposal tries to improve bioeconomic modelling and optimisation under uncertainty. The hypothesis is tested whether or not bioeconomic model-ling of interacting tree species and risk integration would implicitly lead to close-to-nature forestry. In a first part, economic consequences of interdependent tree species mixed at the stand level are modelled. This part is based on published literature, an improved model of timber quality and existing data on salvage harvests. A model of survival over age is then to be developed for mixed stands. A second section then builds upon data generated in part one and concentrates on the simultaneous optimisation of species proportions and harvest-ing ages. It starts with a mean-variance optimisation as a reference solution. The obtained results are compared with data from alternative approaches as stochastic dominance, down-side risk and information-gap robustness.
Especially during the last decades, the natural forests of Ethiopia have been heavily disturbed by human activities. Some forests have been totally cleared and converted into fields for agricultural use, other suffered from different influences, such as heavy grazing and selective logging. The ongoing research in the Shashemane-Munessa-study area (Gu 406/8-1,2) showed clearly that, in spite of interdiction and control, forests continue to be cleared and degraded. However, it is not yet sufficiently known, how and why these processes are still going on. Growing population pressure and economic constraints for the people living in and around the forests contribute to the actual situation but allow no final answers to the complex situation. Concerning a sustainable management of the forests there is to no solid basis for recommendations from the socioeconomic and socio-cultural view. Therefore, a comprehensive analysis of the traditional needs and forms of forest use, including all forest products, is necessary. The objective of this project is, to achieve this basis by carrying out intensive field observations, the consultation of aerial photographs, satellite imagery and above all semi-structured interviews with the population in the study area in order to contribute to the recommendations for a sustainable use of the Munessa Shasemane forests.
Deviant behaviour on various levels of the food supply chain may cause food risks. It entails irregular technological procedures which cause (increased probabilities of) adverse outcomes for buyers and consumers. Besides technological hazards and hitherto unknown health threats, moral hazard and malpractice in food businesses represent an additional source of risk which can be termed 'behavioural food risk'. From a regulatory perspective, adverse outcomes associated with deviance represent negative externalities that are caused by the breaking of rules designed to prevent them. From a rational choice perspective, the probability of malpractice increases with the benefits for its authors. It decreases with the probability of detection and resulting losses. It also decreases with bonds to social norms that protect producers from yielding to economic temptations. The design of mechanisms that reduce behavioural risks and prevent malpractice requires an understanding of why food businesses obey or do not obey the rules. This project aims to contribute to a better understanding of malpractice on the restaurant/retail level through comparative case studies and statistical analyses of food inspection and survey data. Accounting for the complexity of economic behaviour, we will not only look at economic incentives but consider all relevant behavioural determinants, including social context factors.
The majority of the worlds forests has undergone some form of management, such as clear-cut or thinning. This management has direct relevance for global climate: Studies estimate that forest management emissions add a third to those from deforestation, while enhanced productivity in managed forests increases the capacity of the terrestrial biosphere to act as a sink for carbon dioxide emissions. However, uncertainties in the assessment of these fluxes are large. Moreover, forests influence climate also by altering the energy and water balance of the land surface. In many regions of historical deforestation, such biogeophysical effects have substantially counteracted warming due to carbon dioxide emissions. However, the effect of management on biogeophysical effects is largely unknown beyond local case studies. While the effects of climate on forest productivity is well established in forestry models, the effects of forest management on climate is less understood. Closing this feedback cycle is crucial to understand the driving forces behind past climate changes to be able to predict future climate responses and thus the required effort to adapt to it or avert it. To investigate the role of forest management in the climate system I propose to integrate a forest management module into a comprehensive Earth system model. The resulting model will be able to simultaneously address both directions of the interactions between climate and the managed land surface. My proposed work includes model development and implementation for key forest management processes, determining the growth and stock of living biomass, soil carbon cycle, and biophysical land surface properties. With this unique tool I will be able to improve estimates of terrestrial carbon source and sink terms and to assess the susceptibility of past and future climate to combined carbon cycle and biophysical effects of forest management. Furthermore, representing feedbacks between forest management and climate in a global climate model could advance efforts to combat climate change. Changes in forest management are inevitable to adapt to future climate change. In this process, is it possible to identify win-win strategies for which local management changes do not only help adaptation, but at the same time mitigate global warming by presenting favorable effects on climate? The proposed work opens a range of long-term research paths, with the aim of strengthening the climate perspective in the economic considerations of forest management and helping to improve local decisionmaking with respect to adaptation and mitigation.
The rational calculus of farmers assumed in many agricultural economic models is unrealistic and non-predictive of their actual decision making. Understanding structural change in agriculture can thus be improved via a realistic modeling of the decision making by agricultural entrepreneurs. Specifically, slow disinvestment (i.e., postponing farm exit), persistence of market structures (i.e., failure to reallocate land plots towards higher efficiency), and more generally characterizing the decision making of farmers are crucial for a better understanding of structural change and policy advice. We apply economic experiments to better understand such disinvestment choices, land markets with economies of scale and private opportunity costs, different auction and bargaining forms to improve allocation efficiency of land markets, and to generally characterize the decision making of farmers.
Current climate change research is fundamentally challenged by three questions: (i) the characteristics of natural climate variability, (ii) the discrimination of anthropogenic forcing, and (iii) ecological, societal and economic risks when natural variability and anthropogenic forcing are superposed in a future climate. Insight into the regional (here Alpine) expression of climate change and changes of variability is critically important for two reasons: (1) regional trends (e.g. in the Alps), amplitudes and statistics of extremes strongly exceed values reported for the global scale, and (2) latest modelling results (IPCC AR4) suggest that Europe is globally the hotspot for a future increase in the inter-annual variability (e.g., summer temperatures), which will be the greatest challenge. This project will examine varved (annually laminated) lake sediments and provide seasonally to annually resolved quantitative time series for temperature and precipitation for the eastern and north-western Swiss Alps (Engadine, Berner Oberland) back to ca 3300 years. Varved lake sediments are unique paleoclimatic archives and most suitable for very long records since they preserve the low-frequency (>10^2 yrs) climate signal. More specifically, this project will extend the record of interannual quantitative autum SON temperature reconstructions (biogenic silica flux, r=0.70), summer precipitation reconstructions (mica/chlorite ratios, r=0.59) and autum precipitation (mica/plagioclase ratios, r=0.68) in Lake Silvaplana back from 1580 AD to 1300 BC. The applicability of the methods will be tested for Lake Seeberg and Lake Oeschinen in the limestone province and the climate regime of the northwester Swiss Alps. These time series will provide insight into (i) the structure and absolute amplitudes of decadal-century scale climate variability, (ii) quantified multi-decadal climate trends and rates of change, (iii) the hypothesis of greater interannual climate variability during warm periods of the past (e.g. Iron/Roman Age, Medieval ), as it is suggested for Central Europe in the future ('global hotspot of variability'). This project develops in the core theme of IGBP and WCRP PAGES / CLIVAR Intersection. Our data are made available to the NOAA WDC data base for Paleoclimatology.
Objective: Introduction At the Lisbon European Council, a new strategic goal was set for the European Union 'to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010'. In line with this goal, ERTRAC - the European Road Transport Research Advisory Council - makes a crucial contribution to the establishment of the European Research Area (ERA) by involving all main stakeholders in the road transport sector and by fostering structured, optimised and integrated R&D efforts across European programmes. This is done via a system approach to road transport challenges in order to enhance the efficiency of research activities in Europe ERTRAC Mission & Impacts In order to support the development of a truly sustainable road transport system, the primary mission of ERTRAC is to: Provide a strategic vision of European road transport in 2020, particularly with respect to R&D focused on breakthrough technologies; Set out strategies and roadmaps to realise this vision through the Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) and other associated documents. ERTRAC will address the key economic, technological, environmental and societal challenges of the 21st century for the road transport system, for instance:. Meeting the future demand for road transport and mobility,. Further improving road safety;. Promoting sustainable development;. Contributing to European security of energy supply;. Enhancing the EU competitiveness;. Developing a fully integrated European transport system. Coordination Action Objectives The ERTRAC Coordination Action will provide a platform to all relevant stakeholders for establishing consensus on future road transport research directions. The objective is to provide the management and organisational together with technical support, required to facilitate ERTRAC achieving its mission. Finally, ERTRAC results need an extensive promotion and dissemination towards a large audience of research partners.
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