ABSTRACT
Non-grain production (NGP) on cultivated land has become a common phenomenon due to the prosperity of the rural economy and the optimisation of the agricultural structure. However, the excessive use of cultivating land for NGP has threatened food production and the sustainable use of cultivated land. To halt this trend and to ensure food security, the authors of this paper applied a novel non-grain index to measure NGP, which could reflect multiple NGP activities;designated Hubei Province as its object of research;and revealed NGP's spatio-temporal patterns of the past 30 years. We then assessed the characteristics of NGP based on spatial autocorrelation analysis, the Theil index, and geographically weighted regression. The results showed that the value of the non-grain index grew from 0.497 to 1.113 as NGP increased significantly in Hubei Province. The number of high-NGP counties increased, spatial agglomeration became obvious, and the eastern and western sides of Hubei Province witnessed an observable growth in NGP. As a result, the NGP in the eastern and western regions overtook production in the central region. Despite a series of historical subsidy policies and agricultural modernisation initiatives that promoted the planting of grain crops, the policy of "grain on valuable cultivated land” could be better implemented. We conclude by making some suggestions for reducing NGP and protecting cultivated land.
ABSTRACT
Economists and policy makers are interested in producers' responses to policies in order to achieve some national or sectoral objectives, e.g., growth, employment, food security. The way producers respond to policy depends on their production function. If producers do not have homogenous production function, policy responses will be heterogeneous. We use the underlying functional relationship to derive homogenous groupings. The paper employs finite regression mixture models to specify and estimate farm groups with regard to pre-specified functional relationship. The proposed approach is illustrated with regard to the aggregate production function of Kosovo agriculture, characterised by high prevalence of small farmers. The results point out to two farm clusters. The first one extracts more output from labour and intermediate consumption. The second one makes a better use of land. Perhaps, surprisingly, both clusters appear quite similar in terms of their stock of production inputs. Cluster 1 however appears to be more specialised. We can conclude that in Kosovo agriculture appearances and size are not primary determinants of productivity.
ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is accurately framed in its title: Are pluvial and fluvial (river) floods on the rise? First, physical mechanisms that drive changes in hazard of pluvial and fluvial floods were examined. Then, a review of literature was undertaken on detection and an attribution of changes in hazard of pluvial and fluvial floods in observation records for past to present, as well as in model-based projections for the future. Various aspects, factors, processes and mechanisms, as well as various indices of interest were considered. There is quite a common, even if not scientifically justified, belief that, generally, floods are on the rise. However, in this paper, a balanced, knowledge-based assessment was undertaken, with discussion and interpretation, including caveats and indicating considerable departures from such a flat-rate statement. Observation records show that precipitation extremes have been intensifying on a global scale and for many regions. A formal detection and attribution analysis shows that intensification of rainfall events may have been influenced by greenhouse gas forcing of anthropogenic origin. Frequency and magnitude of pluvial floods is on the rise with increasing intense precipitation, while changes of river floods are more complex. High river discharges were found to increase in some regions, but to decrease in other regions, so that no general corollaries can be drawn at the global scale. Heavy rainfall events and pluvial floods are projected to become, almost ubiquitously, more frequent and more intense with progressing climate change, while frequency and magnitude of fluvial floods are likely to increase in many but not all regions.
ABSTRACT
To date, research regarding the changes of the sulfur and nitrogen rates in Wuhan during the summer is limited. In this study, we analyzed the air quality in Wuhan, China, using water-soluble ion, gaseous precursor, and weather data. A Spearman correlation analysis was then performed to investigate the temporal changes in air quality characteristics and their driving factors to provide a reference for air pollution control in Wuhan. The results indicate that SO2 in the atmosphere at Wuhan undergoes secondary conversion and photo-oxidation, and the conversion degree of SO2 is higher than that of NO2. During the summers of 2016 and 2017, secondary inorganic atmospheric pollution was more severe than during other years. The fewest oxidation days occurred in summer 2020 (11 days), followed by the summers of 2017 and 2014 (25 and 27 days, respectively). During the study period, ion neutralization was the strongest in summer 2015 and the weakest in August 2020. The aerosols in Wuhan were mostly acidic and NH4+ was an important neutralizing component. The neutralization factors of all cations showed little change in 2015. K+, Mg2+, and Ca2+ level changes were the highest in 2017 and 2020. At low temperature, high humidity, and low wind speed conditions, SO2 and NO2 were more easily converted into SO42− and NO3−.
ABSTRACT
Food security is one of the key global challenges in this century. In Singapore, our research team has been using novel aeroponic technology to produce fresh vegetables since 1997. Aeroponic systems allow for year-round production of not only tropical, but also sub-tropical and temperate fresh vegetables, by simply cooling the roots suspended in aeroponic systems while the aerial parts grow under tropical ambient environments. It has also been used to investigate the impacts of root-zone CO2 on vegetables by enriching root-zone CO2 while their aerial portions were subjected to constant atmospheric CO2. To compensate for the lack of available land, Singapore also needs to develop a farming system that can increase productivity per unit land area by many-fold. Over the past 10 years, my research team has established a commercially viable LED integrated vertical aeroponic farming system to grow different leafy vegetables under different LED spectra, intensities, and durations in the tropical greenhouse. The results demonstrate that it is possible to increase shoot production and rate of shoot production of leafy vegetables by increasing light intensity and extending the photoperiod under effective LED lighting. Furthermore, temperate vegetable crops such as lettuce were able to acclimate to high light intensity under supplementary LED lights to natural sunlight in the greenhouse. Supplementary LED lightings promote both leaf initiation and expansion with increased photo synthetic pigments, higher Cyt b6f and Rubisco protein contents on a per area basis and thus improve photosynthetic capacity and enhance productivity. Plants sense and respond to changes in their immediate environments (microclimate), manipulating the root zone temperature (RZT) and water supply will impact not only their growth and development but also their nutritional quality. Our on-going research aims to investigate if the nutritional quality of leafy vegetables could be improved under suboptimal RZT and mild water deficit through deficit irrigation. If substantial energy and water savings in urban farming can be achieved without substantial yield penalty but with higher nutritional quality, the amount of water and energy saved can bring substantial benefits to society.
ABSTRACT
The pattern of international agricultural trade is undergoing profound changes. The influence of country risks on the international agricultural trade pattern is prominent. In this paper, we comprehensively analyze the international agricultural trade patterns and explore the influence of country risks on them. Specifically, we first construct an international agricultural trade network (IATN) based on complex network theory. Second, we analyze each country’s diversity of import sources and the position of countries in the IATN using the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) and network indicators, such as in-degree, out-degree, weighted in-degree, weighted out-degree, and betweenness centrality. Third, this paper explores the influence of different types of country risks, including economic risk and political risk, on international agricultural trade patterns using the panel regression method. The results show that countries played different roles and occupied different positions in the international agricultural trade pattern;notably, the United States occupied a core position, while Japan and Mexico had insufficient diversity in import sources. Moreover, based on the panel regression method, we find that political risks have a positive impact on the agricultural trade pattern, while an unstable economic environment could inhibit the agricultural trade pattern in various countries. This study could provide references for countries to implement agricultural trade policies regarding country risks to ensure stable agricultural trade relations and national food security.
ABSTRACT
Based on nationwide survey data from China, we used a fractional logit model for analysis and propensity score matching (PSM) to evaluate the impact of family members serving as village cadres on household food waste. We found that, first, one household in rural China wasted an average of 1.62% of total food per day;in particular, the waste of staple foods was the most serious, with 5.14% of rice wasted per day. Differences in economic development, the geographical environment and diet habits caused differences in food waste in various regions of China. Second, empirical analysis showed that family members serving as cadres significantly increased household food waste. Third, the PSM results showed that family members serving as village cadres significantly increased household food waste and the waste of rice products. Households with members serving as cadres wasted 1.98% of total foods and 7.15% of rice products, on average, while other households wasted only 1.22–1.55% of total foods and 3.55–4.74% of rice products, on average.
ABSTRACT
A protected area (PA) is essentially a governance system, a spatially defined area encompassing natural and/or cultural attributes, governed by a set of actors with different roles and institutional frameworks. There are many types of PA governance systems, guided by historical-, site-specific- and context-dependent factors. This study has the objective to advance understanding of PA governance systems, their diversity and the implications for management. We take the case of Iceland and five of its major PAs. We develop an analytical framework for the study of PA governance systems, investigating their evolutionary trajectories, conducting a comparative institutional analysis of their environmental governance systems (EGS), and assessing their management implications using nature-based tourism as a key variable. We find this framework effective and applicable beyond this study. We find great diversity in the five PA governance systems that has not come by chance but deliberately negotiated in their protracted establishment trajectories. At the individual park level, such PA diversity can be embraced as a sign of an adaptive approach to governance instead of a one-size-fits-all solution while at the national level, however, such fragmentation constitutes coordination challenges. Our analysis of the current portfolio of PA governance systems reveals they accommodate most of the needed management measures, but a problem remains concerning scattered and locked-in individual governance systems that do not support coordinated action and sharing of expertise and resources. This calls upon policy guidance with more formal coordination, such as a legal and national policy framework embracing PA governance diversity, but also securing more coordinated measures for day-to-day management.
ABSTRACT
Despite the declining hunger in Central Asia, food insecurity remains an important issue due to the dry climate. Taking Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan as examples, this study assesses their land-water resources carrying capacity in 1999, 2009, and 2018, on the premise that agricultural water and farmland are spatially matched based on the “buckets effect”, using the ecological footprint and water footprint methods. Results show the following: (1) the total farmland area in Central Asia is sufficient to achieve food self-sufficiency;the available farmland area is 2.45 times that of the farmland required for self-sufficiency in 1999, which decreased to 1.71 times in 2009, but slightly increased to 1.92 times in 2018. Specifically, Kazakhstan maintains a surplus of more than 15 × 106 ha in farmland, while the other 4 countries could not achieve self-sufficiency. (2) The water resources pressure rises;the available agricultural water resource (AAWR) in Central Asia is 3.07 times that of the water demand for agricultural irrigation (WDAI), and 3.06 times that of the water demand for irrigation and environmental purification (WDIEP) in 1999, which decreased to 1.69 times of WDAI and to 1.60 times of WDIEP in 2018. Tajikistan has the highest level of water surplus, followed by Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan do not have enough water to sustain agricultural production. (3) The trend of land-water resources carrying capacity declines in Central Asia. In 1999, 2009, and 2018, the land-water resources could support the population’s food demand in this region when only considering farmland matched with WDAI. However, the population carrying capacity deficit would emerge if we considered the matching farmland with WDIEP.
ABSTRACT
This article proposes a high-speed communication system. Past few years ago, all people witnessed the internet, networking, and communication system as one of the most valuable parts of our life. So people will be able to use high-speed satellite internet. In the modern world, people must consider how much data and internet speed are needed. When more people use internet service at the same time will be required more data and internet speed. Satellite-internet covered hard-to-reach rural areas where Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), a cable, may not exist yet. In the rural areas of Sri Lanka, one of the main problems is, supplying electrical power. In this paper, how to power up satellite connections by using solar energy will be discussed. Primarily, rural village areas of Sri-Lanka where there are no terrestrial internet services available can provide significant achievements for improving the villager's life standards of poor village people of Sri-Lanka. Here discusses how to get many opportunities such as e-learning, e-commerce, e-health, e-entertainment, e-banking and other internet opportunities.
ABSTRACT
Intensive agriculture and urbanization are putting pressure on natural capital in Aotearoa–New Zealand (NZ), with native ecosystems and water quality suffering degradation. As the population has increased, so development has pushed into the rural–urban fringe. Over the last 30 years, the number of lifestyle properties in NZ has increased dramatically. Many of these properties have been developed on some of NZ’s most productive soils, meaning a loss of provisioning services from this land. However, given their location, these developments present new opportunities for the enhancement and protection of other ecosystem services. This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study conducted on lifestyle block residents in peri-urban Palmerston North. The results showed that these residents have a good sense of environmental stewardship and a desire to plant native species, improve connectivity, and protect their land from the invasion of pests and weeds. These residents are also quite community-focused and protective of their special place. This creates an excellent basis from which to encourage greater collaborative action towards protecting and enhancing biodiversity and to put in place land management strategies that can enhance natural capital and assist in other ecosystem service protection serving to improve the landscape ecology of peri-urban environments.
ABSTRACT
Since COVID-19, the already fragile food system has become even more overburdened, and food security has become an urgent issue. Due to the excessive pursuit of efficiency and profit, the food system in the past has created various problems, the most prominent problem is the inability to find a balance between profit and ecological environment. Therefore, this article focuses on how to build a model that includes both aspects. In order to analyse the existing food system and introduce new ones, firstly, divide the food system into four subsystems of profitability, efficiency, sustainability, and equity, and set up several secondary indicators under each subsystem, and select appropriate countries as samples. Use the AHP, EWM, and CEM to calculate the corresponding index of each subsystem to form a new comprehensive evaluation model for the food system. © 2021 ACM.