From risk assessment to in-context trajectory evaluation - GMOs and their social implications
In: Environmental sciences Europe: ESEU, Band 23, Heft 1
ISSN: 2190-4715
9 Ergebnisse
Sortierung:
In: Environmental sciences Europe: ESEU, Band 23, Heft 1
ISSN: 2190-4715
Abstract Background Over the past 20 years, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have raised enormous expectations, passionate political controversies and an ongoing debate on how these technologies should be assessed. Current risk assessment procedures generally assess GMOs in terms of their potential risk of negatively affecting human health and the environment. Can this risk-benefit approach deliver a robust assessment of GMOs? In this paper, we question the validity of current risk assessment from both a social and an ecological perspective, and we elaborate an alternative approach, namely in-context trajectory evaluation. This paper combines frame analysis, context analysis and ecosocial analysis to three different case studies. Results Applying frame analysis to Syngenta's recent campaign 'Bring plant potential to life', we first de-construct the technosocial imaginaries driving GMOs innovation, showing how the latter endorses the technological fix of socioeconomic problems whilst reinforcing the neoliberal sociopolitical paradigm. Applying context analysis to biopharming in New Zealand, we then explore local practices and knowledge, showing that particularities of context typically omitted from risk assessment processes play a key role in determining both the risks and the potential benefits of a technology. Finally, drawing from the Italian case, we outline through ecosocial analysis how the lack of long-term studies, further aggravated by current methodological deficiencies, prevent risk assessment from considering not only how GMOs affect the environmental context but also, and most importantly, the way people live in, and interact with, this context. Conclusion Incorporating frame analysis, context analysis and ecosocial analysis, in the form of in-context trajectory evaluation, into the assessment of GMOs can improve the social compatibility, political accountability and ecological sustainability of its outcomes. ; Peer Reviewed
BASE
In: http://www.enveurope.com/content/23/1/3
Abstract Background Over the past 20 years, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have raised enormous expectations, passionate political controversies and an ongoing debate on how these technologies should be assessed. Current risk assessment procedures generally assess GMOs in terms of their potential risk of negatively affecting human health and the environment. Can this risk-benefit approach deliver a robust assessment of GMOs? In this paper, we question the validity of current risk assessment from both a social and an ecological perspective, and we elaborate an alternative approach, namely in-context trajectory evaluation . This paper combines frame analysis, context analysis and ecosocial analysis to three different case studies. Results Applying frame analysis to Syngenta's recent campaign 'Bring plant potential to life', we first de-construct the technosocial imaginaries driving GMOs innovation, showing how the latter endorses the technological fix of socioeconomic problems whilst reinforcing the neoliberal sociopolitical paradigm. Applying context analysis to biopharming in New Zealand, we then explore local practices and knowledge, showing that particularities of context typically omitted from risk assessment processes play a key role in determining both the risks and the potential benefits of a technology. Finally, drawing from the Italian case, we outline through ecosocial analysis how the lack of long-term studies, further aggravated by current methodological deficiencies, prevent risk assessment from considering not only how GMOs affect the environmental context but also, and most importantly, the way people live in, and interact with, this context. Conclusion Incorporating frame analysis, context analysis and ecosocial analysis, in the form of in-context trajectory evaluation, into the assessment of GMOs can improve the social compatibility, political accountability and ecological sustainability of its outcomes.
BASE
Purpose: Over the past twenty years, GMOs have raised enormous expectations, passionate political controversies, and an on-going debate on how should these technologies be assessed. Current risk-assessment procedures generally assess GMOs in terms of their potential risk of negatively affecting human health and the environment. Yet, is this risk-benefit approach appropriate to a deliver a robust assessment of GMOs? In this paper, we question the validity of current risk-assessment from both a social and an ecological perspective, and we elaborate an alternative approach, namely in-context trajectory evaluation Methods: This paper combines frame analysis, context analysis and eco-social analysis to three different case studies. Results: Applying frame analysis to Syngenta´s recent campaign "Bring plant potential to life", we first de-construct the techno-social imaginaries driving GMOs innovation, showing how the latter endorses the technological fix of socio-economic problems while reinforcing the neoliberal socio-political paradigm. Applying context analysis to biopharming in New Zealand, we then explore local practices, rules and formal and informal procedures, showing that to assess how safe is a technology it is necessary to address how "safe" is the context. Finally, drawing from the Italian case, we outline through eco-social analysis how the lack of long-term studies, further aggravated by current methodological deficiencies, prevent risk-assessment from considering not only how GMOs affect the environmental context but also, and most importantly, the way people live in, and interact with, this context. Conclusions: Whilst it emerges that there might be a number of socio-political reasons to support a moratorium on GMOs in Europe even if they come to be considered technically safe, these results suggest that the integration of in-context trajectory evaluation with traditional risk assessment procedures may help promoting social compatibility, political accountability and ecological sustainability. ; Peer reviewed
BASE
Peer reviewed ; Purpose: Over the past twenty years, GMOs have raised enormous expectations, passionate political controversies, and an on-going debate on how should these technologies be assessed. Current risk-assessment procedures generally assess GMOs in terms of their potential risk of negatively affecting human health and the environment. Yet, is this risk-benefit approach appropriate to a deliver a robust assessment of GMOs? In this paper, we question the validity of current risk-assessment from both a social and an ecological perspective, and we elaborate an alternative approach, namely in-context trajectory evaluation Methods: This paper combines frame analysis, context analysis and eco-social analysis to three different case studies. Results: Applying frame analysis to Syngenta´s recent campaign "Bring plant potential to life", we first de-construct the techno-social imaginaries driving GMOs innovation, showing how the latter endorses the technological fix of socio-economic problems while reinforcing the neoliberal socio-political paradigm. Applying context analysis to biopharming in New Zealand, we then explore local practices, rules and formal and informal procedures, showing that to assess how safe is a technology it is necessary to address how "safe" is the context. Finally, drawing from the Italian case, we outline through eco-social analysis how the lack of long-term studies, further aggravated by current methodological deficiencies, prevent risk-assessment from considering not only how GMOs affect the environmental context but also, and most importantly, the way people live in, and interact with, this context. Conclusions: Whilst it emerges that there might be a number of socio-political reasons to support a moratorium on GMOs in Europe even if they come to be considered technically safe, these results suggest that the integration of in-context trajectory evaluation with traditional risk assessment procedures may help promoting social compatibility, political accountability and ecological ...
BASE
In: Future City Ser. v.17
Intro -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Contributors -- About the Editors -- Chapter 1: Urban Services to Ecosystems: An Introduction -- 1.1 Green Infrastructure, Urban Ecology and Vegetation Science -- 1.2 Planning and Implementation of Green Infrastructure -- 1.3 Nature-Based Solutions and Innovative Design Approaches -- 1.4 Concluding Remarks -- References -- Part I: Green Infrastructure, Urban Ecology and Vegetation Science -- Chapter 2: Improving Extensive Green Roofs for Endangered Ground-Nesting Birds -- 2.1 Introduction -- 2.1.1 Extensive Green Roofs: An Unexpected Space for Wildlife -- 2.1.2 The Role of Vegetation Patterns on Green Roofs -- 2.1.3 The Northern Lapwing: An Emblematic Endangered Ground-Nesting Bird -- 2.1.4 Aims of the Research -- 2.2 Material and Methods -- 2.2.1 Roof Shaping and Environmental Improvements -- 2.2.2 Vegetation Surveys -- 2.2.3 Arthropod Monitoring -- 2.2.4 Bird Monitoring -- 2.3 Results and Discussion -- 2.3.1 Effects of Roof Enhancements and Plant Species Transfer on Vegetation and Invertebrates -- 2.3.2 Trends of the Northern Lapwing Reproductive Performance on Green Roofs -- 2.4 Conclusions -- References -- Chapter 3: A Plant Sociological Procedure for the Ecological Design and Enhancement of Urban Green Infrastructure -- 3.1 Introduction -- 3.2 Materials and Methods -- 3.2.1 Study Case -- 3.2.2 Vegetation Survey, Preliminary Ecological Assessment and Shadow Analysis -- 3.2.3 Automatic Plant Species Selection -- 3.2.4 Further Screening and Expert-Based Assessment -- 3.2.5 Habitat Connectivity and Microclimatic Design (Where to Sow/Plant What?) -- 3.3 Results -- 3.3.1 Vegetation Survey and Ecological Assessment of the Green Roof -- 3.3.2 Expert-Based Plant Species Selection and Assemblage -- 3.3.3 Habitat Connectivity -- 3.3.4 Microclimatic Planting (Where to Sow/Plant What?) -- 3.4 Discussion.
The aim of this book is to bring together multidisciplinary research in the field of green infrastructure design, construction and ecology. The main core of the volume is constituted by contributions dealing with green infrastructure, vegetation science, nature-based solutions and sustainable urban development. The green infrastructure and its ecosystem services, indeed, are gaining space in both political agendas and academic research. However, the attention is focused on the services that nature is giving for free to and for human health and survival. What if we start to see things from another perspective? Our actions shall converge for instance to turn man-made environment like cities from heterotrophic to autotrophic ecosystems. From landscape ecology to urban and building design, like bricks of a wall, from the small scale to the bigger landscape scale via ecological networks and corridors, we should start answering these questions: what are the services that are we offering to Nature? What are we improving? How to implement our actions? This book contains four Open Access chapters, which are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
BASE
International audience Aims: Aeolian islands form an active volcanic archipelago. By using updated vascular plant checklists for islands and islets, we tested four hypotheses: (i) Island speciesarea relationship (ISAR) of alien species has lower c-and higher z-values than native species, (ii) islands with active volcanoes have lower species richness than expected for native and alien species, (iii) ISAR of native species shows lower c-and higher z-values than ISARs of Mediterranean land bridge archipelagos and (iv) species richness of smaller islets is independent of area.Location: Aeolian Archipelago, Mediterranean Basin.Taxon: Vascular plants, identified and named according to the Flora of Italy (Pignatti et al., 2017– 2019).Methods: Checklists of native and alien plant species were obtained for eight islands and 24 islets. ISARs were fitted by the Arrhenius power function (S = c ⋅ Az) and used to test the first two hypotheses. The third hypothesis was tested by comparing ISAR of Aeolian Archipelago to those from other central and eastern Mediterranean archipelagos. The fourth hypothesis was tested by fitting models defining the presence and limit of the small- island effect.Results: The checklists included 894 species — 749 native and 145 alien. ISARs fitted well for native and alien species and resulted in typical values of c and z parameters. The first and second hypotheses were supported by model fitting. The third hypothesis was not confirmed by the comparison of the ISAR of the Aeolian Archipelago with other archipelagos. The small- island effect predicted by the fourth hypothesis was supported using S versus LogA for both native and alien species, while for native species it was supported also using the log transformation of the Arrhenius model.Main conclusions: We reported a first comprehensive analysis of plant species richness in the unique Aeolian Archipelago, verifying typical ISARs, no peculiarity with respect to land bridge archipelagos and a somewhat unclear signal for the small- island effect.
BASE
© 2021 The Authors. ; Aims: Understanding fine-grain diversity patterns across large spatial extents is fundamental for macroecological research and biodiversity conservation. Using the GrassPlot database, we provide benchmarks of fine-grain richness values of Palaearctic open habitats for vascular plants, bryophytes, lichens and complete vegetation (i.e., the sum of the former three groups). Location: Palaearctic biogeographic realm. Methods: We used 126,524 plots of eight standard grain sizes from the GrassPlot database: 0.0001, 0.001, 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, 100 and 1,000 m and calculated the mean richness and standard deviations, as well as maximum, minimum, median, and first and third quartiles for each combination of grain size, taxonomic group, biome, region, vegetation type and phytosociological class. Results: Patterns of plant diversity in vegetation types and biomes differ across grain sizes and taxonomic groups. Overall, secondary (mostly semi-natural) grasslands and natural grasslands are the richest vegetation type. The open-access file "GrassPlot Diversity Benchmarks" and the web tool "GrassPlot Diversity Explorer" are now available online (https://edgg.org/databases/GrasslandDiversityExplorer) and provide more insights into species richness patterns in the Palaearctic open habitats. Conclusions: The GrassPlot Diversity Benchmarks provide high-quality data on species richness in open habitat types across the Palaearctic. These benchmark data can be used in vegetation ecology, macroecology, biodiversity conservation and data quality checking. While the amount of data in the underlying GrassPlot database and their spatial coverage are smaller than in other extensive vegetation-plot databases, species recordings in GrassPlot are on average more complete, making it a valuable complementary data source in macroecology. ; GrassPlot development has been supported by the Bavarian Research Alliance (BayIntAn_UBT_2017_58), the Eurasian Dry Grassland Group (EDGG) and the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS); IB, CorM, JAC, IGM, DGM, MHe, DL and MTo were supported by the Basque Government (IT936‐16); CorM, IAx, MCh, JDa, PD, MHá, ZL, ZPr, EŠ and LT were supported by the Czech Science Foundation (19‐28491X); TR was supported by the Estonian Research Council (PUT1173); RJP was funded by the Strategic Research Programme of the Scottish Government's Rural and Environmental Science and Analytical Services Division"; SBa was supported by the GINOP‐2.3.2‐15‐2016‐00019 project; GFi was partially supported by the MIUR initiative "Department of excellence" (Law 232/2016)"; BJA was funded by the Spanish Research Agency (grant AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033); AK, VB, IM, DS, IV and DV were supported by the National Research Foundation of Ukraine (2020.01/0140); MP and AH were supported by the Estonian Research Council (PRG874, PRG609), and the European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence EcolChange); Data collection of HCP was funded by FORMAS (Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Science and Spatial Planning) and The Swedish Institute; JR was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (grant No. 20‐09895S) and the long‐term developmental project of the Czech Academy of Sciences (RVO 67985939); ATRA was funded by the Grant of Excellence Departments, MIUR‐Italy (ARTICOLO 1, COMMI 314 – 337 LEGGE 232/2016); JMA was supported by Carl Tryggers stiftelse för vetenskaplig forskning and Qatar Petroleum; AAli was supported by the Jiangsu Science and Technology Special Project (Grant No. BX2019084), and Metasequoia Faculty Research Startup Funding at Nanjing Forestry University (Grant No. 163010230), and he is currently supported by Hebei University through Faculty Research Startup Funding Program; ZB was supported by the NKFI K 124796 grant; The GLORIA‐ Aragón project of JLBA was funded by the Dirección General de Cambio Climático del Gobierno de Aragón (Spain); MCs and LDem were supported by DG Environment through the European Forum on Nature Conservation and Pastoralism and Barbara Knowles Fund, in collaboration with Pogány‐havas Association, Romania; JDa was partially supported by long‐term research development project no. RVO 67985939 of the Czech Academy of Sciences; BD and OV were supported by the NKFI KH 126476, NKFI KH 130338, NKFI FK 124404 and NKFI FK 135329 grants; BD, OV and AKe were supported by the Bolyai János Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; BE was funded by the Environmental Department of the Tyrolean Federal State Government, the MAB Programme of the Austrian Academy of Science, the Mountain Agriculture Research Unit and the Alpine Research Centre Obergurgl of Innsbruck University. The GLORIA projects of BE were funded by the EU project no. EVK2‐CT‐2000‐00056, the Earth System Sciences Program of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (project MEDIALPS), the Amt für Naturparke, Autonome Provinz Bozen‐Südtirol, the Südtiroler Wissenschaftsfonds and the Tiroler Wissenschaftsfonds; RGG was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Research to sample GLORIA sites in central Spain (CGL 2008‐00901/BOS) and present works by the Autonomous Region of Madrid (REMEDINAL TE‐CM, S2018/EMT‐4338); MJ was supporteLatviaed by Latvia Grant No. 194051; NP and SŠ were partly supported by the Slovenian Research Agency, core fundings P1‐0403 and J7‐1822.
BASE