natural resources
The links between human rights and biodiversity and natural resource conservation are many and complex. The conservation community is being challenged to take stronger measures to respect human rights and is taking opportunities to further their realisation. ‘Rights-based approaches’ (RBAs) to conservation are a promising way forward,...
Within three weeks of the call for papers being released, the workshop organisers decided to engage the Challenge Dialogue System (CDS) of Innovation Expedition Inc. (www.innovationexpedition.com). The CDS is an eight-step process for “improving the organisational and innovative performance of diverse groups,” and had been used successfully at ILRI in several complex virtual team...
All human beings must satisfy their basic needs. When they cannot do so, they compete with their fellow beings, get involved in conflicts, and sometimes exert violence. In many parts of the Himalayas, the potential for conflicts linked to the use of natural resources to satisfy basic needs is high because traditional livelihoods depend very much on agricultural land, pastures, and forests. A...
Human wellbeing relies on our ability to exploit our diverse and often fragile natural environment sustainably and into the far distant future. If there is no such thing as environmentally neutral economic growth, there is certainly an increasing number of options for sustainable human and social development. Such new approaches are essential to the achievement of the United Nations Millennium...
The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) recently prepared a short orientation paper, entitled Addressing Climate Change Through Development Cooperation, with a focus on natural resource management, livelihoods, and food security. This document illustrates how the issue of climate change can be addressed and integrated into the work of an agency. In SDC's...
This case study focuses on the rights of marginalised indigenous peoples to access and control natural resources (land, water and forest) underpinning their livelihood and traditional occupations. Nepal is a diverse society but the rights of the indigenous populations to their traditionally used resources have been curtailed through various policies, regulations and practices,...
The author examines progress made in farming systems research since the early 1970s, tracing its development up to the present.
He describes how the greatest progress was made in the 1980s, where land use systems were starting to be considered as variables in research and therefore subject to optimisation.
The 1990s brought an important change in farming systems research, with a...
The challenge of global climate change is engaging scientists across a wide range of disciplines and has become an important issue for politicians and environmental agencies around the world. Modeling scenarios predict not only a range of temperature increases, but also critical changes in precipitation, over the next century. Regional variations in these climatic parameters will be of great...
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