Mahesh Kumar Singh

Ecological-economic analysis of climate change on food system and agricultural vulnerability: A brief overview

The agricultural sector is critical to social and economic progress, particularly with regard to the eradication of hunger and poverty, the creation of employment and livelihood-earning opportunities, and the generation of trade and foreign exchange earnings. Agriculture is also at the core of environmental concerns over the management of natural resources land degradation, water scarcity, deforestation, and the threat to biodiversity. And yet agriculture has been marginalized, at both national and international levels. Agriculture essentially concerns the relationship between the natural environment and human society. With rapid population growth, securing the inherent vulnerability of this relationship, whether social, economic, or environmental, has to be central to efforts to achieving sustainable development. The focus on people their scope, rights, capabilities, limitations, and opportunities has multiple benefits for individuals and society; yet it is the rural population that has to be central in agricultural development efforts (FAO, 2001). Land-use and land-cover change are significant to a range of themes and issues central to global environmental change. Alterations in the earths surface hold major implications for the global radiation balance and energy fluxes, contribute to changes in biogeochemical cycles, alter hydrological cycles, and influence ecological balances and complexity. Through these environmental impacts at local, regional, and global levels, land-use and land-cover changes driven by human activity have the potential to significantly affect food security, renewable fresh-water resources, and the ecological sustainability of the agricultural supply systems. Increases in the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases are leading to future climate change. A consensus has emerged that developing countries are more vulnerable to climate change than developed countries, because of the predominance of agriculture in the economies of these countries, the scarcity of capital for adaptation measures, their warmer baseline climates, and their exposure to extreme events. Agricultural vulnerability divided into three major parts e.g. social vulnerability, economic vulnerability, environmental vulnerability.

Agriculture land use changes and the dynamics of climate system: A sustainable approach

Atmospheric and ocean circulation patterns and their subsequent involvement within the planet’s climate are dynamic, variable and difficult to predict. This limits the ability to predict the impact of land-use change and landscape dynamics on climate patterns. As a result, manipulating land-surface conditions for the purpose of carbon sequestration under the Kyoto Protocol could have a variety of unanticipated impacts on global and regional climate (Dobo, 2006, Jolankai, 2005). The Kyoto Protocol uses only the GWPs of the regulated greenhouse-gas molecules listed in its Annex A as its mitigation currency. A more complete indication of human contributions to climate change will require the climatic influences of land-surface conditions and other processes to be factored into climate-change-mitigation strategies. Many of these processes will have strong regional effects that are not represented in a globally averaged metric (Czovek et al, 2006, Tamas et al. 2005). The currency of global and regional human-caused changes in terms of a regional climate change potential could offer a new metric useful for developing a more inclusive protocol. This concept would also implicitly provide a way to monitor potential local-scale environmental changes that could influence biodiversity.

The development of the agricultural production structure in the Visegrad Group

Introduction The agriculture in the four Visegrad Countries plays diverse role. In Hungary and Poland the share of agriculture in the national economy, external trade and in the employed civilian working population is higher than in Czech Republic and Slovakia. The structure of the holdings is also different in the examined countries. While in Czech Republic and Slovakia the bigger corporate and private farms prevail, till then in Hungary and Poland the most of the farms are private farms with smaller size. Besides this the structure of the production is important also. Inside of agriculture the share of the plant production 1 and the animal husbandry is determinative. The accession could change the function of the plant production and the animal husbandry primarily because of the direct payments and in the second place because of the high animal welfare and environmental protection rules. The authors primarily examined the function of the agriculture in the Visegrad Group and circumstantially analysed the relation between the plant production and the animal husbandry in the past 15 years.

Changing climate struck biodiversity in Asia and the Pacific: An overview

Two over-riding trends characterize the beginning of the third millennium. First, the global human ecosystem diversity is threatend by grave imbalances in productivity and in the distribution of goods and service. The unsustainable progression of extremes of wealth and poverty threatens the stability of the whole human system, and with it the global environment. Secondly, the world is undergoing accelerating change, with internationally-coordinate environmental stewardship lagging behind economic and social development. While each part of the Earths surface is endowed with its own combination of environmental attributes, each area must also contend with a unique, but interlinked, set of current and emerging problems. Forests, woodlands and grasslands are still being degraded or destroyed, marginal lands turned into deserts, and natural ecosystems reduced or fragmented, further threatening biodiversity (Dearden, P. 1996).