Innovation and Development in the Age of Climate Change Adaptation: Open or Closed?

Change Adaptation: Open or Closed? Paper read at the Second African International Economic Law Network Conference, 7-8 March 2013, Wits School of Law, Johannesburg, South Africa. In a time of rapid convergence of technologies, goods, services, hardware, software, the traditional classifications that informed past treaties fail to remove legal uncertainty, or advance welfare and innovation. As a result, we turn our attention to the role and needs of the public domain at the interface of existing intellectual property rights and new modes of creation, production and distribution of goods and services. The concept of open culture would have it that knowledge should be spread freely and its growth should come from further developing existing works on the basis of sharing and collaboration without the shackles of intellectual property. Intellectual property clauses find their way into regional, multilateral, bilateral and free trade agreements more often than not, and can cause public discontent and incite unrest. Many of these intellectual property clauses raise the bar on protection beyond the clauses found in the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). In this paper we address the question of the protection and development of the public domain in service of open innovation in accord with Article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in light of the Objectives (Article 7) and Principles (Article 8) set forth in TRIPS. Once areas of divergence and reinforcement between the intellectual property regime and human rights have been discussed, we will enter into options that allow for innovation and prosperity in the global south. We then conclude by discussing possible policy developments.

Castration of lambs: a welfare comparison of different castration techniques in lambs over 10 weeks of age

Seventy male lambs over 10 weeks of age were castrated using Burdizzo, rubber rings, or surgery to assess the acute and long-term effects of castration. All castrations were performed under local anaesthesia. The surgically castrated lambs were additionally sedated with xylazine and the sedation reversed with tolazoline. The frequency of abnormal postures and immediate behavioural responses indicated that surgically castrated lambs were most distressed; the lambs castrated using Burdizzo and rubber rings were not dissimilar to those of the control group. Between 1.5 and 9h after castration, signs of pain and distress were at a lower level in lambs anaesthetised with bupivacaine compared with those treated with lidocaine. Due to the markedly faster wound healing, Burdizzo castration seemed to be preferable (fewer signs of long-term pain) when compared to the rubber ring technique. It was concluded that local anaesthesia with bupivacaine, followed by the Burdizzo method is the preferable technique for the castration of lambs older than 10 weeks of age.

Functional traits determine plant co-occurrence more than environment or evolutionary relatedness in global drylands

Plant-plant interactions are driven by environmental conditions, evolutionary relationships (ER) and the functional traits of the plants involved. However, studies addressing the relative importance of these drivers are rare, but crucial to improve our predictions of the effects of plant-plant interactions on plant communities and of how they respond to differing environmental conditions. To analyze the relative importance of - and interrelationships among - these factors as drivers of plant-plant interactions, we analyzed perennial plant co-occurrence at 106 dryland plant communities established across rainfall gradients in nine countries. We used structural equation modelling to disentangle the relationships between environmental conditions (aridity and soil fertility), functional traits extracted from the literature, and ER, and to assess their relative importance as drivers of the 929 pairwise plant-plant co-occurrence levels measured. Functional traits, specifically facilitated plants' height and nurse growth form, were of primary importance, and modulated the effect of the environment and ER on plant-plant interactions. Environmental conditions and ER were important mainly for those interactions involving woody and graminoid nurses, respectively. The relative importance of different plant-plant interaction drivers (ER, functional traits, and the environment) varied depending on the region considered, illustrating the difficulty of predicting the outcome of plant-plant interactions at broader spatial scales. In our global-scale study on drylands, plant-plant interactions were more strongly related to functional traits of the species involved than to the environmental variables considered. Thus, moving to a trait-based facilitation/competition approach help to predict that: (1) positive plant-plant interactions are more likely to occur for taller facilitated species in drylands, and (2) plant-plant interactions within woody-dominated ecosystems might be more sensitive to changing environmental conditions than those within grasslands. By providing insights on which species are likely to better perform beneath a given neighbour, our results will also help to succeed in restoration practices involving the use of nurse plants. (C) 2014 Geobotanisches Institut ETH, Stiftung Ruebel. Published by Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.