Resources
Displaying 1931 - 1935 of 2258Exploring Long-Term Livelihood and Landscape Change in Two Semi-Arid Sites in Southern Africa: Drivers and Consequences for Social–Ecological Vulnerability
This paper investigates the drivers and dynamics of livelihood and landscape change over a 30-year period in two sites in the communal drylands of Zimbabwe (Marwendo) and South Africa (Tshivuhulani). Of particular interest to us was how access to social protection and a wider range of options may mitigate increased vulnerability under a changing climate. A mixed methods approach (using household surveys, focus group discussions, life history interviews, transect walks and secondary sources of data) was applied to develop human–environment timelines for each study site.
Merging Small Scattered Pastures into Large Pasture-Forest Mosaics Can Improve Profitability in Swedish Suckler-Based Beef Production
A scattered structure of small pastures has negative effects on profitability in beef enterprises because small enclosures result in high labor costs per livestock unit. Moreover, larger enterprises distribute the costs across more livestock units and hence achieve lower operating costs. Creating larger coherent pastures makes it easier to increase herd size and yields positive effects due to economies of scale. This study on five Swedish organic cow-calf enterprises examined how profitability is affected by creating larger pastures from small scattered pastures and adjacent forest land.
Evaluating Public Attitudes and Farmers’ Beliefs towards Climate Change Adaptation: Awareness, Perception, and Populism at European Level
The scientific understanding of climate change is firmly established; it is occurring, it is primarily due to human activities, and it poses potentially serious risks to human and natural systems. Nevertheless, public understanding of this phenomenon varies widely among farmers and the public, the two-target audience of this paper. This paper introduces two research questions: (1) How climate change is perceived by public-farmers’ nexus; and (2) How perception and populism (as a thin-ideology moved by social forces) interact?
Re-Placing the Desert in the Conservation Landscape: Charisma and Absence in the Gobi Desert
Across the Gobi Desert in China and Mongolia, millions of newly planted trees struggle to survive amid adverse ecological conditions. They were planted by a wide variety of actors in an attempt to protect, restore, or modify the local environment, despite evidence of their negative consequences upon local ecosystems. This paper investigates how these afforestation projects both challenge and affirm recent theoretical work on conservation, while also providing key insights into the decision-making framework of land management across the world’s third largest desert region.
‘Un-Central’ Landscapes of NE-Africa and W-Asia—Landscape Archaeology as a Tool for Socio-Economic History in Arid Landscapes
Arid regions in the Old World Dry Belt are assumed to be marginal regions, not only in ecological terms, but also economically and socially. Such views in geography, archaeology, and sociology are—despite the real limits of living in arid landscapes—partly influenced by derivates of Central Place Theory as developed for European medieval city-based economies. For other historical time periods and regions, this narrative inhibited socio-economic research with data-based and non-biased approaches.