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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The mission of the TIDE project will be to enhance the broad transfer and take-up of 15 innovative urban transport and mobility concepts throughout Europe and to make a visible contribution to establish them as mainstream measures. The TIDE partners will make a range of new and feasible solutions easily accessible to address key challenges of urban transport such as energy efficiency, decarbonisation, demographic change, safety, access for all and new economic and financial conditions. TIDE will focus on 15 innovative concepts in five thematic clusters: financing models and pricing measures (1), non-motorised transport (2), network and traffic management to support traveller information (3), electric vehicles (4) and public transport organisation (5). Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans will be a horizontal topic to integrate the cluster activities. The project will provide a strong approach in methodology, content and outreach. The needs of practitioners in European cities and regions will be a guiding principle. A particular focus will also be on providing guidance for finding cost-efficient solutions (cost-benefit analysis). The project will refine existing and well proven transferability methodologies and integrate them into an easy to apply handbook. Face-to-Face training and exchange events as well as guidelines and e-learning on how to successfully implement innovative solutions will be the key tools to effectively support a wide range of take-up candidates in overcoming real or perceived barriers to implementation. A broad portfolio of dissemination activities will ensure a high visibility of the project. TIDE will actively support 15 committed cities in developing implementation scenarios. They will demonstrate how to successfully prepare implementation of innovative solutions and provide examples to a wider group of cities. An experienced and committed consortium will ensure that the advanced project approach will achieve a well visible impact.
Objective: Integrated assessment and energy-economy models have become central tools for informing long-term global and regional climate mitigation strategies. There is a large demand for improved representations of complex system interactions and thorough validation of model behaviour in order to increase user confidence in climate policy assessments. ADVANCE aims to respond to this demand by facilitating the development of a new generation of integrated assessment models. This will be achieved by substantial progress in key areas where model improvements are greatly needed: end use and energy service demand; representation of heterogeneity, behaviour, innovation and consumer choices; technical change and uncertainty; system integration, path dependencies and resource constraints; and economic impacts of mitigation policies. In the past, methodological innovations and improvements were hindered by the unavailability of suitable input data. The ADVANCE project will make a large and coordinated effort to generate relevant datasets. These datasets, along with newly developed methodologies, will be made available to the broader scientific community as open-access resources. ADVANCE will also put a focus on improved model transparency, model validation, and data handling. A central objective of ADVANCE is to evaluate and to improve the suitability of models for climate policy impact assessments. The improved models will be applied to an assessment of long-term EU climate policy in a global context, and disseminated to the wider community. The ADVANCE consortium brings together long-standing expertise in integrated assessment and energy-economy modelling with a strong expertise in material flows, energy system integration, and energy service demand.
Changes in European agricultural landscapes have gained on intensification in the second half of the last century. Among others, they are driven by global change phenomena such as climate change, demographic change and migration, increasing global bio-energy demands and changing human diets as well as by trade liberalisation, technological progress, and leakage effects of land use policy interventions. Farmers usually respond to such changes by adapting production and land use systems to efficiently utilize and manage their farm resource endowments. However, this process often leads to adverse impacts on the diversity of agricultural landscapes and environmental qualities. EU policies have been formulated as a reaction to singular or sectoral problems (e.g. the Common Agricultural Policy, the Water Framework Directive, the Nitrates Directive, NATURA2000), which are usually differently implemented among member states by using a variety of legislative or incentive based instruments. Consequently, more coordination among policies is required to minimize the trade-offs between different land use policy targets (i.e. land conservation versus boosting biomass production), and between private (adaptive) and societal (mitigative) land use benefits. Mitigation and adaptation are often separately analysed due to the nature of the problem i.e. mitigation is often considered as public good versus adaptation as private or club good. However, it is necessary to consider both in assessing the mutual benefits of cost-effective land uses and farm mitigation and adaptation measures, which mainly depend on spatial heterogeneity of natural and farming conditions. Consequently, it is important to consider bio-physical, ecological, and economic relationships in assessing the mitigative (public) and adaptive (private) potentials and trade-offs of alternative land uses and farm management measures.In this project we implement a data-model-policy fusion concept, which shall guarantee cost-effective mitigation and adaptation of farms and sustainable landscape and biodiversity developments in the context of climate, market, and policy instrument changes. The concept is applied to two case-study landscapes in the Mostviertel region in Austria and contains an integrated spatially explicit modelling framework to simulate the land use changes at field, farm, and landscape level as well as cost-effective farm mitigation and adaptation portfolios. The land use changes are assessed with farm economic, biodiversity, abiotic, and landscape indicators including GIS-modelling and field observations. Biodiversity effects are central in the integrated assessment acknowledging the roles of landscape structure and land use intensity. Geo-referenced land uses and land use attributes are a major interface in the data-model-policy fusion concept. The results will help farmers and regional stakeholders to identify best management practices for climate change mitigation and adaptation i
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