Implementing REDD through community-based forest management: lessons from Tanzania

REDD (reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation) aims to slow carbon releases caused by forest disturbance by making payments conditional on forest quality over time. Like earlier policies to slow deforestation, REDD must change the behaviour of forest degrading actors. Broadly, it can be implemented with payments to forest users in exchange for improved forest management, thus creating incentives; through payments for enforcement, thus creating disincentives; or through addressing external drivers such as urban charcoal demand. In Tanzania, community-based forest management (CBFM), a form of participatory forest management, was chosen by the Tanzania Forest Conservation Group, a local NGO, as a model for implementing REDD pilot programmes. Payments are made to villages that have the rights to forest carbon. In exchange, the villages must demonstrably reduce deforestation at the village level. In this paper, using this pilot programme as a case study, combined with a review of the literature, we provide insights for REDD implementation in sub-Saharan Africa. We pay particular attention to leakage, monitoring and enforcement. We suggest that implementing REDD through CBFM-type structures can create appropriate incentives and behaviour change when the recipients of the REDD funds are also the key drivers of forest change. When external forces drive forest change, however, REDD through CBFM-type structures becomes an enforcement programme with local communities rather than government agencies being responsible for the enforcement. That structure imposes costs on local communities, whose local authority limits the ability to address leakage outside the particular REDD village.

Architectural enthusiasm: visiting buildings with The Twentieth Century Society

In this paper we put forward the concept of architectural enthusiasm—a collective passion and shared emotional affiliation for buildings and architecture. Through this concept and empirical material based on participation in the architectural tours of The Twentieth Century Society (a UK-based architectural conservation group), we contribute to recent work on the built environment and geographies of architecture in three ways: first, we reinforce the importance of emotion to people’s engagements with buildings, emphasising the shared and practised nature of these engagements; second, we highlight the role of architectural enthusiasts as agents with the potential to shape and transform the built environment; and third, we make connections between (seemingly) disparate engagements with buildings through a continuum of practice incorporating urbex, local history, architectural practice and training, and mass architectural tourism. Unveiling these continuities has important implications for future research into the built environment, highlighting the need to take emotion seriously in all sorts of professional as well as enthusiastic encounters with buildings, and unsettling the categories of amateur and expert within architectural practices.

Local richness and distribution of the lizard fauna in natural habitat mosaics of the Brazilian Cerrado

We investigate local lizard richness and distribution in central Brazilian Cerrado, harbouring one of the least studied herpetofaunas in the Neotropical region. Our results are based on standardized samplings at 10 localities, involving 2917 captures of 57 lizard species in 10 families. Local richness values exceeded most presented in earlier studies and varied from 13 to 28 species, with modal values between 19 and 28 species. Most of the Cerrado lizard fauna is composed of habitat-specialists with patchy distributions in the mosaic of grasslands, savannas and forests, resulting in habitat-structured lizard assemblages. Faunal overlap between open and forested habitats is limited, and forested and open areas may act as mutual barriers to lizard distribution. Habitat use is influenced by niche conservatism in deep lineages, with iguanians and gekkotans showing higher use of forested habitats, whereas autarchoglossans are richer and more abundant in open habitats. Contrary to trends observed in Cerrado birds and large mammals, lizard richness is significantly higher in open, interfluvial habitats that dominate the Cerrado landscape. Between-localities variation in lizard richness seems tied to geographical distance, landscape history and phylogenetic constraints, factors operating in other well-studied lizard faunas in open environments. Higher richness in dominant, open interfluvial habitats may be recurrent in Squamata and other small-bodied vertebrates, posing a threat to conservation as these habitats are most vulnerable to the fast, widespread and ongoing process of habitat destruction in central Brazil.

Negative Even Grade mKdV Hierarchy and its Soliton Solutions

In this paper we discuss the algebraic construction of the mKdV hierarchy in terms of an affine Lie algebra (s) over capl(2). An interesting novelty araises from the negative even grade sector of the affine algebra leading to nonlinear integro-differential equations admiting non-trivial vacuum configuration. These solitons solutions are constructed systematically from generalization of the dressing method based on non zero vacua. The sub-hierarchies admiting such class of solutions are classified.

Backlund transformation for integrable hierarchies: example - mKdV hierarchy

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Quantum confinement in hydrogen bond of DNA and RNA

The hydrogen bond is a fundamental ingredient to stabilize the DNA and RNA macromolecules. The main contribution of this work is to describe quantitatively this interaction as a consequence of the quantum confinement of the hydrogen. The results for the free and confined system are compared with experimental data. The formalism to compute the energy gap of the vibration motion used to identify the spectrum lines is the Variational Method allied to Supersymmetric Quantum Mechanics.

A new karyotype for the spiny rat Clyomys laticeps (Thomas, 1909) (Rodentia, Echimyidae) from Central Brazil

Clyomys Thomas, 1916 is a semifossorial rodent genus of spiny rats represented by only one species, C. laticeps, which inhabits the tropical savannas and grasslands of central Brazil and eastern Paraguay. Here we describe a new karyotype of C. laticeps found in populations of Emas National Park, Goias state, Brazil. The four analyzed specimens had a diploid number (2n) of 32 and a fundamental autosome number (FN) of 54. Cytogenetic data include conventional staining, CBG and GTG-banding. The karyotype presents 12 meta/submetacentric pairs (1 to 12) and 3 pairs of acrocentrics (13 to 15) with gradual decrease in size. The X chromosome is a medium submetacentric and the Y is a medium acrocentric. The semifossorial habits together with habitat specificity could have contributed to the karyological variations found on this genus.

Rhodolith Beds Are Major CaCO3 Bio-Factories in the Tropical South West Atlantic

Rhodoliths are nodules of non-geniculate coralline algae that occur in shallow waters (<150 m depth) subjected to episodic disturbance. Rhodolith beds stand with kelp beds, seagrass meadows, and coralline algal reefs as one of the world's four largest macrophyte-dominated benthic communities. Geographic distribution of rhodolith beds is discontinuous, with large concentrations off Japan, Australia and the Gulf of California, as well as in the Mediterranean, North Atlantic, eastern Caribbean and Brazil. Although there are major gaps in terms of seabed habitat mapping, the largest rhodolith beds are purported to occur off Brazil, where these communities are recorded across a wide latitudinal range (2 degrees N - 27 degrees S). To quantify their extent, we carried out an inter-reefal seabed habitat survey on the Abrolhos Shelf (16 degrees 50' - 19 degrees 45'S) off eastern Brazil, and confirmed the most expansive and contiguous rhodolith bed in the world, covering about 20,900 km(2). Distribution, extent, composition and structure of this bed were assessed with side scan sonar, remotely operated vehicles, and SCUBA. The mean rate of CaCO3 production was estimated from in situ growth assays at 1.07 kg m(-2) yr(-1), with a total production rate of 0.025 Gt yr(-1), comparable to those of the world's largest biogenic CaCO3 deposits. These gigantic rhodolith beds, of areal extent equivalent to the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, are a critical, yet poorly understood component of the tropical South Atlantic Ocean. Based on the relatively high vulnerability of coralline algae to ocean acidification, these beds are likely to experience a profound restructuring in the coming decades.

Ethical considerations for a global concept of sustainable land use

The paper gives an overview of current land husbandry problems in different agro-ecological zones of the world. It then lists four ethical principles, conceived at the global level, needed to achieve sustainable land use (SLU). Finally, it develops guidelines which can be used to facilitate a more effective implementation and realization of SLU. In the year of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), such recommendations are important for improving the competence of political and economic decision-makers in taking action at national and international levels.

A Competitive assessment of the U.S. textile machinery industry /

Item 231-B-1.

A Competitive assessment of the U.S. transformer industry /

Item 231-B-1

A competitive assessment of the renewable energy equipment industry /

Item 231-B-1