Search results for "Land Use"
showing 10 items of 333 documents
Assessment of site-specific drivers of farmland abandonment in mosaic-type landscapes: A case study in Vidzeme, Latvia
2018
Abstract Farmland abandonment, which causes changes in rural life and farming practices, can be observed throughout Europe. Over the last decades natural afforestation has decreased the area of farmland used for agricultural production, thereby leading to landscape homogenization and polarization. This process is explicitly evident in mosaic type landscapes consisting of highly complex land cover patterns, soil composition and topography. The aim of the study was to determine the site-specific driving forces of farmland abandonment at landscape scale in relation to agro-ecological and geographic factors, in a post-Soviet country in Eastern Europe. An extensive field survey approach with sta…
Placing unprecedented recent fir growth in a European-wide and Holocene-long context
2014
7 páginas.- Büntgen, U.
Traditions, Land Rights, and Local Welfare Creation: Studies from Eastern Indonesia
2016
This research focuses on the impacts of traditional systems of land distribution among households, clans, and the government in two of Indonesia’s poorest provinces: East Nusa Tenggara and Maluku. Our main goal is to discuss and propose alternative ways of dividing and governing productive land to meet new needs in the management of agriculture and forestry. We apply a mixed research methodology that includes in-depth discussions with more than 50 key informants and survey interviews with 640 randomly selected respondents. We find that the number of land conflicts is rising, that land privatisation is becoming increasingly relevant, and that communal land ownership tends to lead to land und…
Does a voluntary conservation program result in a representative protected area network?
2009
Abstract Conservation contracting has attained growing interest worldwide as a tool for protecting biodiversity in privately owned lands. In this policy, landowners receive payments from an environmental agency in exchange for land use practices that contribute to the supply of biodiversity. This approach may result in a conservation network which does not cover all focal ecological characteristics, because landowners determine the supply of potential targets. In addition, the contracts are typically allocated by using a scoring method that is not giving information on the representativeness of the species composition of the sites. In this study, we investigated what is the performance of a…
On the risk premium in Nordic electricity futures prices
2011
Abstract This paper examines empirically the relationship between electricity spot and futures prices, by analysing a decade of data for a set of short term-to-maturity futures contracts traded in the Nordic Power Exchange. It is found that, on average, there are significant positive risk premiums in short-term electricity futures prices. The significance and size of the premiums, however, varies seasonally over the year; whereas it is greatest during winter, it is zero in summer. It is also found that time-varying risk premiums are significantly related to unexpectedly low reservoir levels. Furthermore, before the unprecedented supply-shock that hit the market around the end of year 2002, …
Credit Demand and Supply Shocks in Italy During the Great Recession
2018
In this paper, we use Structural VAR analysis to disentangle credit demand and supply shocks and their eFFect on real economic activity in Italy during the 2008-2014 crisis period. The three endogenous variables considered are the loan interest rate, the loans growth rate and the employment to population ratio. The data are observed at annual frequency for each of 103 Italian provinces. The structural shocks are identified through heteroscedasticity, by letting the variance of the shocks to switch across four Italian macro-regions: North, Centre, South and Islands. Sign restrictions are used to interpret ex post the structural shocks. The empirical findings suggest a more important role of …
Small Wind Technology Diffusion in Suburban Areas of Sicily
2015
Among renewable energy resources, wind energy became more attractive in the last decade. Wind farm installations dramatically increased in areas where climatic conditions, topography, and environment have allowed their development. The installation of wind turbines, usually carried out in remote areas, recently began to cover areas identified by a complex terrain such as urban and suburban zones. Although these new plant choices are characterized by lower productivity, there is increasing interest in wind energy production in both urban and suburban areas. In this work the authors have carried out an energy analysis developed from a sample of small wind turbines available on the market. Thi…
Describing urban soils through a faceted system ensures more informed decision-making
2016
Urban areas are increasing worldwide at a dramatic rate and their soils definitely deserve more attention than they have received in the past. In urban environments, soils potentially provide the same ecosystem services as in rural and wild environments, although in some cases they are depleted of their basic functions, such as when they lose their productive and filtering capacities because of sealing, and become mere supports for infrastructures. In other cases, soils of urban areas acquire new functions that are unique to these environments. Current soil classifications fail to effectively account for the complexity of urban soils and the information that is required for their management…
Life cycle assessment of olive oil: A case study in southern Italy
2018
Abstract The paper describes the results of a specific LCA based analysis of the production of olive oil in the region of Calabria, in southern Italy. The goal of the study is to assess the energy and environmental impacts of different scenarios involving conventional and organic cultivations, plains and hills cultivations and involving different operating techniques. The study also aims at assessing the share of each life cycle step on the total of energy and environmental impacts. The functional unit chosen for the comparative analysis is a glass bottle of 0.75 L of extra virgin olive oil. A “from cradle to gate” perspective was chosen. The analysis was developed according to the LCA stan…
Nutrient mitigation under the impact of climate and land-use changes: A hydro-economic approach to participatory catchment management
2020
Abstract Excessive nutrient loadings into rivers are a well-known ecological problem. Implemented mitigation measures should ideally be cost-effective, but perfectly ranking alternative nutrient mitigation measures according to cost-effectiveness is a difficult methodological challenge. Furthermore, a particularly practical challenge is that cost-effective measures are not necessarily favoured by local stakeholders, and this may impede their successful implementation in practice. The objective of this study was to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of mitigation measures using a methodology that includes a participatory process and social learning to ensure their successful implementation. By …