Political Ecology

A Tool for Sustainability Impact Assessment (ToSIA) has been developed for assessing sustainability impacts of forest-wood-chains (FWCs). Sustainability is determined by analysing environmental, economic, and social sustainability indicators for all the production processes along the FWC. Results of the tool can be analysed at an aggregated level for complete FWCs, but for some applications it [...]

One of the truths brought home by the Gulf gusher has been the need for a re-organization of the way we address environmental policy and issues in the US. Was anyone else taken aback by the fact that somehow Secretary Napolitano was given the role of top administration official in charge due to the Coast [...]

The most detailed national vegetation U.S. land-cover map to date has been released by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The map will enable conservation professionals to identify places in the country with sufficient habitat to support wildlife. “These data are critical for determining the status of biodiversity, as baseline data for assessing climate change impacts, [...]

Biomass conversion and expansion factors were applied to convert the growing stock classification results to carbon stock in above-ground biomass. As results of the classification, coniferous and broadleaved growing stock as well as carbon stock of the above-ground biomass is mapped on a wall-to-wall basis with a spatial resolution of 500 m × 500 m [...]

Uncertainties remain in the potential of forest plantations to sequestrate carbon (C). We synthesized 86 experimental studies with paired-site design, using a meta-analysis approach, to quantify the differences in ecosystem C pools between plantations and their corresponding adjacent primary and secondary forests (natural forests). Totaled ecosystem C stock in plant and soil pools was 284 [...]

The world’s 10 worst environmental performers according to the proportional environmental impact index (relative to resource availability) are: Singapore, Korea, Qatar, Kuwait, Japan, Thailand, Bahrain, Malaysia, Philippines and Netherlands.In absolute global terms, the 10 countries with the worst environmental impact are (in order, worst first): Brazil, USA, China, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, India, Russia, Australia and [...]

Community timber enterprises, forest tourism, agro-forestry, marine tourism and the exploitation of fish spill-over from protected zones into adjacent fisheries emerged as the most effective conservation activities from a review of more than 400 peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed documents.Another four activities were found to reduce poverty to a lesser degree but not to the extent [...]