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This paper investigates the effects of crop biodiversity on farm income and production risk using a large panel dataset of rural households in Kenya. We consider three different metrics of in situ (on-farm) crop diversification (richness, evenness and concentration). We apply a partial moments-based model to test the effects of each strategy on welfare defined as expected crop income, variability (variance) and downside risk (skewness). Our comprehensive econometric approach differentiates climatic shocks, weather and climate change. The results suggest that the benefits from greater diversification in terms of enhanced land productivity and lower production costs could surpass the foregone benefit from greater efficiency associated with more concentrated production systems. Crop richness and evenness each reduce exposure to crop income risk, especially for more vulnerable farmers who produce below the expected revenue threshold. Farmers who rely on greater crop specialization, on the contrary, are more exposed to crop income risk.

Abstract The fishermen ecological knowledge (FEK) encompasses information on biology of species and climatic and oceanographic changes, all related with schools of fish and its capture. It incorporates a complex set of codes and signs, which are constantly updated and transmitted orally thorough generations. In this sense, FEK presents characteristics such as diversity and ability to learn from experience, which are in conformity with the definition of a complex adaptive system (CAS). Based on this assumption, this work proposes to structure and interpret FEK as a CAS. It is supported that such approach can promote the exchange of information among areas, which are other way considered incommensurable (anthropology, oceanography, marine biology, meteorology etc.), and also among formal sciences and the FEK. However, CAS is a structure designed with heuristic goals associated with mathematical modeling what is beyond the aims of this work, which uses CAS only as a structuring metaphor.

In the study of Quaternary deposits of the Crimea selected two phases. In the first stage (since the late XIX century to the sixties of XX century) stratigraphic description of the Quaternary strata was based on the allocation of terraced complexes (a marine terraces - in the coastal part and synchronous them alluvial ones - in continental part of the Crimean peninsula). In the second stage description of the Quaternary deposits is made on the basis of their climatic and stratigraphic dissection under the leading role of the loess-soil formation structure. The basis for stratigraphic subdivision of Quaternary deposits of the Crimea was the structure of the valleys of the paleo-Dnieper and paleo-Dniester. It is shown that the nonlinear, reversible character of Black sea level changes that took place in the Quaternary can be broken a rule "the lower the hypsometrically level of the terrace is, the younger this terrace is".

Abstract
In urban areas, water often flows along a partially closed water cycle in which treated municipal wastewater is discharged into surface waters which are one source of raw waters used for drinking water supply. A number of organic micro-pollutants (OMP) can be found in different water compartments. In the near future, climatic and demographic changes will probably contribute to an increase of OMP and antibiotic-resistant pathogens in aquatic ecosystems. The occurrence of OMP, possible adverse effects on aquatic organisms and human health and the public perception must be carefully assessed to properly manage and communicate potentially associated risks and to implement appropriate advanced treatment options at the optimum location within the water cycle. Therefore, the interdisciplinary research project ASKURIS focuses on identification and quantification, toxicological assessment and removal of organic micro-pollutants and antibiotic-resistant pathogens in the Berlin water cycle, life cycle-based economic and environmental assessment, public perception and management of potential risks.

Despite the scale and importance of the beef industry in the north of Australia, recent political and environmental disruptions have highlighted the vulnerability of the supply chain. Ensuring that the supply chain remains resilient to climatic events as well as to unexpected decisions by the stakeholders will require careful planning and investment in logistics. In this paper, we outline an integrated methodology based on tactical and operational dynamic models, for assessing the effect of changes in the supply chain. Emphasis is on the development of an optimisation model that covers the ow of cattle from properties to agistment farms and feedlots to abattoirs/ports, and the selection of rest areas (spelling yards) along the path. The model selects the optimal location of spelling yards along the road network, subject to budget, site capacity, and service requirements. We show preliminary results for a case study comprising Western Australia and the Northern Territory. ; Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa

In recent years, rural households throughout Indonesia have faced a variety of crises, including severe drought, smoke from forest fires, and floods - all of which have affected subsistence farming. Simultaneous with these problems has been the wider Asian economic crisis that destabilized Indonesia both economically and politically. For rural people, it has affected cash-earning opportunities and prices of basic goods. Focusing on the Iban of West Kalimantan, this paper explores the impacts these various crises have had on Iban farming and wage labor, and how the Iban have coped. It touches on the successful strategies from the past as well as recent local developments that have appeared to cushion the continuing economic uncertainty. This paper contributes to the growing literature on the impact of climatic fluctuation and economic change on the livelihoods of local people in Southeast Asia and other parts of the Third World.

"This paper considers the role of incentive based climate adaptation policies. It uses the early literature on pricing and capacity choices under demand uncertainty to describe how revised price structures for the substitutes for climate services can be treated as anticipatory adaptation. In many situations the policies determining the prices of these services make them difficult to adjust. Thus, excess demand will not be managed through price adjustment. This situation is important because it implies that the rationing rules determining who is served influence both capacity planning and pricing decisions. The lesson drawn from these models is that reform of pricing policy for climate substitutes offers a ready basis for incentive based adaptation policy. The last part of the paper offers some empirical evidence on how the price elasticity of the residential demand for water changes with variations in seasonal precipitation. The findings suggest marked differences between normal and dry conditions for the Phoenix metropolitan area. These results reinforce the need to co-ordinate changes in pricing policy with any capacity planning developed for water supplies as part of anticipatory climate adaptation. Similar relationships may well apply for other substitutes for climatic services"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

AbstractDeliberations are underway to utilize increasingly radical technological options to help address climate change and stabilize the climatic system. Collectively, these options are often referred to as "climate geoengineering." Deployment of such options, however, can create wicked tradeoffs in governance and require adaptive forms of risk management. In this study, we utilize a large and novel set of qualitative expert interview data to more deeply and systematically explore the types of risk–risk tradeoffs that may emerge from the use of 20 different climate geoengineering options, 10 that focus on carbon dioxide or greenhouse gas removal, and 10 that focus on solar radiation management and reflecting sunlight. We specifically consider: What risks does the deployment of these options entail? What types of tradeoffs may emerge through their deployment? We apply a framework that clusters risk–risk tradeoffs into institutional and governance, technological and environmental, and behavioral and temporal dimensions. In doing so, we offer a more complete inventory of risk–risk tradeoffs than those currently available within the respective risk‐assessment, energy‐systems, and climate‐change literatures, and we also point the way toward future research gaps concerning policy, deployment, and risk management.

This article offers three lessons for a post-pandemic democratic politics. First, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the deep ontological entanglements of human and non-human systems: A submicroscopic agent jumping from an animal to a human host impacts human societies across the world. In the process, the virus has revealed a second lesson: Public responses to the pandemic have exacerbated already existing inequalities and fuelled anti-democratic desires for national and individual fortification. In a world where political emergencies like the pandemic are becoming more prevalent due to climatic and ecological destabilizations, there is an urgent need to promote new countervailing democratic forces. Together, these two insights motivate a third lesson: In order to address the ecological and political challenges of the so-called Anthropocene, democratic activism and political organizing must itself become more like the virus, more viral. Inspired by swarming behaviour in complex systems, a democratic politics of transformative change must give up illusions of simple solutions and central control, and instead rely on dispersed multi-sited actions happening at many scales at once, while working towards the improbable but necessary goal that these actions might, eventually, come together and bring about change at a planetary scale.

'Climate change law' is considered by a number of legal scholars as an emergent novel discipline. The question, then, is whether the advent (and future prospect) of climate change has resulted in a coherent autonomous new body of law, be it a nascent one; or is it nothing more or less than the application of existing national and international environmental law to climatic problems? It is perhaps worth recalling that international environmental law itself only ascended to the rank of a recognized discipline of its own in the 1990s, over considerable academic scepticism at the time. Not un-similarly, the ongoing new project of the UN International Law Commission (ILC) for the drafting of guidelines on "protection of the atmosphere" has met with resistance from a few powerful States claiming that there is no need for further codification of international law in this field. Yet, considering our common interest in conserving the quality of the Earth's atmosphere and climate, the ILC project may indeed encourage further development of a concept of inter-generational "planetary trusteeship", owed by States as public trustees to present and future citizens as the beneficiaries.

Projections of climatic and environmental changes have generated a growing effort to assess their implications for human migration. Because migration is always a multicausal phenomenon, this study aims to disentangle the impact of environmental factors from other migration-inducing factors to shed some light on the complex relationship between the environment and migration. Thus, we conducted quantitative microlevel studies in low-lying communities in two high-mobility countries - Ghana and Indonesia - that are particularly exposed to coastal hazards like erosion, land subsidence, storm surges and an increasing sea level, and are prone to flooding on a regular basis. Different measures of environmental threats were collected, ranging from individual perceptions over the household's distance to the coast to expert opinions. We analyzed the relationships using logistic regressions and controlled for contextual factors on multiple levels. No statistically significant direct impacts of slow-onset environmental events on migration decisions could be detected. Perceptions of storms, a clearly sudden-onset event, however, were found to be significantly linked to out-migration decisions in Ghana. These findings support the hypothesis that environmental factors are generally not a primary cause of migration and their effects are rather context specific - especially for slow-onset changes.

The environment affects agriculture, via soils, weather, etc. and agriculture affects the environment locally at farm level and via its impact on climate change. Locating agriculture within its spatial environment is thus important for farmers and policy makers. Within the EU countries collect detailed farm data to understand the technical and financial performance of farms ; the Farm Accountancy Data Network. However, knowledge of the spatial-environmental context of these farms is reported at gross scale. In this paper, Irish farm accounting data is geo-referenced using address matching to a national address database. An analysis of the geographic distribution of the survey farms, illustrated through a novel 2D ranked pair plot of the coordinates, compared to the national distribution of farms shows a trend in the location of survey farms that leads to a statistical difference in the climatic variables associated with the farm. The farms in the survey have significantly higher accumulated solar radiation values than the national average. As a result, the survey may not be representative spatially of the pattern of environment x farm system. This could have important considerations when using FADN data in modelling climate change impacts on agri-economic performance.

The developed system of retail electricity price formation factors is presented in this paper. It allows understanding retail electricity price formation process. Factors having impact on electricity cost, profit and electricity volume consumed are analyzed. Factors allowing explaining the volume of electricity consumed are grouped under the economic, social, climatic, technical-technological, political and demographical criteria. Analysis of Lithuanian retail electricity price is performed. Retail electricity price structure, its development in Lithuania is presented. Overview of regulating environment is done. The results of correlation analysis disclosed the positive and negative relationships between electricity price for household and 55 indicators. Three multiple linear regression equations, enabling to link electricity price for household and its factors into a single set, are prepared. The equations are assigned to: describe electricity price for household by macroeconomic factors and factors that impact on electricity production costs; assess the impact of changes of electricity production structure on electricity price for household; assess the impact of quantities and prices of electricity production factors and macroeconomic indicators on electricity price for household, as well impact of changes of electricity production structure on electricity price for household.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.em.17.1.2259

Abstract. Flash floods in the Ondara River have caused many fatalities and damages in the town of Tàrrega in the last 400 yr. Unfortunately, no flow records are available. However, floods can sometimes be reconstructed thanks to available historical information: limnimarks, written accounts and archaeological surveys. Indeed, from these data and using the retromodelling method on three different scenarios to take into account morphology changes, the peak flows of the seven greatest floods occurred in Tàrrega since the 17th century were estimated. The results showed that the heaviest flood's specific peak flow (10.7 m3 s−1 km−2) ranks among the highest ever modelled or measured in similar-sized catchments in the Western Mediterranean region. The results pointed out, as well, that the changes in channel's morphology (mainly, the disappearance of a mediaeval bridge under sediment) caused by one of the floods increased the hydraulic capacity of a crucial cross-section. All this resulted in modest floods invading the town less often, but with much faster and, thus, more destructive flows. A preliminary estimation of the results' uncertainty was 4% for great floods and 18% for modest floods. The reconstructed peak flows will be introduced in a database for a future use in climatic and hydrological studies.

This study was supported by the projects CGL2013-47038-R and CGL2017-85415-R funded by Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of Spain and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER; Seneca Project 20788/PI/18; Junta de Andalucia FEDER Project B-RNM-144-UGR18, Proyectos I + D + i del Programa Operativo FEDER 2018 and the research group RNM-190 (Junta de Andalucia). Alejandro Lopez Aviles acknowledges the PhD funding, BES-2018-084293, provide by Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of the Spanish Government. Antonio Garcia-Alix acknowledges the Ramon y Cajal fellowship, RYC-2015-18966, provided by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of the Spanish Government. R. Scott Anderson acknowledges travel support from Northern Arizona University. ; Several organic and inorganic geochemical analyses have been carried out in the sedimentary record of the Borreguil de los Lavaderos de la Reina (BdlR-03), an alpine peat bog located on the north face of the Sierra Nevada (southern Iberian Peninsula). This study permitted a high-resolution reconstruction of paleoenvironmental evolution for the last similar to 2700 cal yr BP in the highest mountain range of southern Iberian Peninsula. An overall trend towards a climatic aridification and a reduction of aquatic environments is observed in this record. Insolation and long-term positive North Atlantic Oscillation trends were the most important factors controlling this aridification, forcing regional and local environmental changes. Four phases are differentiated within the paleoenvironmental evolution of BdlR-03: (1) a pre-bog environment from 2700 to 2600 cal yr BP with important siliciclastic sedimentation and low organic content; (2) a bog environment with important presence of terrestrial vascular plant, water availability and maximum humid conditions between similar to 2600 and similar to 1870 cal yr BP, coinciding with the Iberian-Roman Humid Period; (3) a subsequent drier bog environment, between similar to 1870 and similar to 300 cal yr BP during the Dark Ages, the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the first stages of the Little Ice Age, characterized by lower productivity that affected the development of terrestrial vascular plants and aquatic environments; and (4) a wetland environment with an increase of aquatic algae, development of ephemeral pools and unstable climate conditions between similar to 300 cal yr BP and the present, coinciding with the final stages of the Little Ice Age and the Modern Global Warming. This recent environmental pattern, which is opposite to the general aridification trend in the western Mediterranean, is likely explained by the gradual melting of the perennial ice and/or snow packs at higher elevations in the last centuries. Aeolian inputs would have continuously contributed nutrients to these nutrient-impoverished alpine environments. High dust inputs are especially noticed during the last similar to 200 years, which can be explained by human-induced enhanced aridification and the development of the commercial agriculture in some North African regions. In addition, the environmental signal in the last century seems to be significantly affected by human activities. ; Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of Spain CGL2013-47038-R CGL2017-85415-R ; European Commission ; Junta de Andalucia FEDER Project B-RNM-144-UGR18 ; Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of the Spanish Government BES-2018-084293 ; Ramon y Cajal fellowship by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of the Spanish Government RYC-2015-18966 ; Fundacion Seneca 20788/PI/18 ; Junta de Andalucia ; Proyectos I + D + i del Programa Operativo FEDER 2018