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The Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol display a broad international consensus for biodiversity conservation and equitable benefit sharing. Yet, the Aichi biodiversity targets show a lack of progress and thus indicate a need for additional action such as enhanced and better targeted financial resource mobilization. To date, no global financial burden-sharing instrument has
Tropical tree crops such as cacao and coffee are produced around the tropics in diverse, multistrata agroforests as well as monoculture plantations Box 16.1 and references therein). The smallholders cultivating these systems battle pests and diseases that differ regionally and change over time, but often take a significant part of their yield, and therefore their revenue. In these perennial system
Amazonia is an environmentally heterogeneous and biologically megadiverse region, and its biodiversity varies considerably over space. However, existing knowledge on Amazonian biodiversity and its environmental determinants stems almost exclusively from studies of macroscopic above-ground organisms, notably vertebrates and trees. In contrast, diversity patterns of most other organisms remain elusi
Intensive agricultural management negatively affects both natural enemies of pests and pollinators. Such management also has the potential to adversely affect the ecosystem services that these communities confer. Organic management has been proposed as an alternative method to mitigate such problems by restoring the services provided by arthropod communities. We evaluated the effect of organic
This paper presents an object-based, global climatology (1979-2014) of strong large-scale ocean evaporation (SLOE) and its associated climatic properties. SLOE is diagnosed using an ''atmospheric moisture uptake efficiency'' criterion related to the ratio of surface evaporation and integrated water vapor content in the near-surface atmosphere. The chosen Eulerian identification procedure focuses o
The EU's farmers are no longer required to produce commodities to receive direct payments as long as they keep their land in good condition. Some believe this is bad for development because it encourages passive farming. We evaluate, using a real options approach, the implications of decoupled payments for the desirability and optimal timing of agricultural land development when considering sunk i
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has provided periodic assessments of the state of knowledge on climate change for 30 years. While these assessments have been central to the making of international climate policy, their relevance has been questioned in the post-Paris era. Can the IPCC's global kinds of knowledge match the demands of an increasingly decentralized and polycentric
Background. Knowledge on the globally outstanding Amazonian biodiversity and its environmental determinants stems almost exclusively from aboveground organisms, notably plants. In contrast, the environmental factors and habitat preferences that drive diversity patterns for micro-organisms in the ground remain elusive, despite the fact that micro-organisms constitute the overwhelming majority of li
Bumblebees are important pollinators for a wide range of crops and wild plants. Performance of their colonies depends on pollen and nectar as food resources, but flowering plants are scarce in modern agricultural landscapes. It is well-known that semi-natural habitats can enhance floral resources and bumblebee abundance, but the impact of different crop types and their heterogeneity at the landsca
Climate models provide the means of making projections of the future climate, under assumptions on alternative future land-use changes and greenhouse gas emissions. The basis for such climate projections is discussed in this chapter,´together with the presentation of overall climate scenario results of relevance for agriculture. The focus is on the period until 2050.
The European Energy production system is in transition towards renewable energy sources (RES). Concrete targets have been set through the European Union “Energy Roadmap 2050”. The transition has started by national states but concrete action towards the targets has been mainly taken up at a local level. In this context, this research work aims at exploring how can a community trigger and drive an
The indoor climate conditions in buildings have changed in the last decade due to more efficient climatic systems, floor heating systems and larger open floor areas with more natural light. These factors all give increased annual variations in the humidity and the temperature in parquet floors. Such variations can result in troublesome deformations, glue line delamination and development of cracks
In the use of articial neural networks (ANN) for real-life applications there is a need for determining the importance of each input variable for the decisions of the articial neural network. By comparing more complex ANN:s with the simple perceptron, a basic method to determine some form of importance is found. This is tested on three dierent datasets of which one is based on a real life dataset
Combinatorial auctions allow buyers to express preferences over bun- dles of items. The Primal-Dual (PD) auction developed by de Vries et al. (2007) is an efficient ascending combinatorial auction which, given certain conditions on buyers valuations, achieves Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) payments. The Universal Competitive Equilibrium (UCE) auction by Mishra and Parkes (2007) is a generalization of
Almost 90% of the international trade is managed by ship, which has being dominated the international transportation over hundreds of years. The role of Documents in international trade, has turned the “money and goods” transaction into later “money and documents” transaction and in the process of improving international trade, a lot of by-products have formed at the mean time, one such being docu
Due to intercultural encounters becoming more and more frequent in times of globalization, the importance of successful intercultural conflict management has increased. In intercultural conflict, cultural differences in conflict management styles (CMS) can lead to misunderstandings and poorer negotiation outcomes. However, it is yet to be understood if and how individuals overcome CMS discrepancie
Due to the lack of a commonly required education amongst street-level bureaucrats in supported housing, the focus of this study was to analyse how the street-level bureaucrats in supported housing experienced their work and education. We were also interested in how they felt their knowledge and skills were utilized in their organizations. In the last decade, the number of supported housing efforts
