Understanding Causes of Conflict Over Common Village Pastures – A Comparative Analysis of Property Rights in Azerbaijan and Georgia

Abstract

Conflicts in the management of renewable natural resources are situations in which actors have diverging opinions on issues of natural resource use. In the literature, among the causal factors for conflicts discussed are resource wealth or scarcity and the role of governance. The evidence, however, is contradictory. In order to analyze the role of governance in more detail, we propose a combined analysis of property rights and conflicts. In this way, an improved understanding of the causes of local conflicts over renewable natural resources can be achieved. We use comparative case study data from pasture management in the Caucasus region, first, to classify conflicts according to the bundle of property rights approach and, second, to explore how the causal factors resource scarcity and current governance contribute to those conflicts.     

The simulation of European heat waves from an ensemble of regional climate models within the EURO-CORDEX project

The ability of a large ensemble of regional climate models to accurately simulate heat waves at the regional scale of Europe was evaluated. Within the EURO-CORDEX project, several state-of-the art models, including non-hydrostatic meso-scale models, were run for an extended time period (20 years) at high resolution (12 km), over a large domain allowing for the first time the simultaneous representation of atmospheric phenomena over a large range of spatial scales. Eight models were run in this configuration, and thirteen models were run at a classical resolution of 50 km. The models were driven with the same boundary conditions, the ERA-Interim re-analysis, and except for one simulation, no observations were assimilated in the inner domain. Results, which are compared with daily temperature and precipitation observations (ECA&D and E-OBS data sets) show that, even forced by the same re-analysis, the ensemble exhibits a large spread. A preliminary analysis of the sources of spread, using in particular simulations of the same model with different parameterizations, shows that the simulation of hot temperature is primarily sensitive to the convection and the microphysics schemes, which affect incoming energy and the Bowen ratio. Further, most models exhibit an overestimation of summertime temperature extremes in Mediterranean regions and an underestimation over Scandinavia. Even after bias removal, the simulated heat wave events were found to be too persistent, but a higher resolution reduced this deficiency. The amplitude of events as well as the variability beyond the 90th percentile threshold were found to be too strong in almost all simulations and increasing resolution did not generally improve this deficiency. Resolution increase was also shown to induce large-scale 90th percentile warming or cooling for some models, with beneficial or detrimental effects on the overall biases. Even though full causality cannot be established on the basis of this evaluation work, the drivers of such regional differences were shown to be linked to changes in precipitation due to resolution changes, affecting the energy partitioning. Finally, the inter-annual sequence of hot summers over central/southern Europe was found to be fairly well simulated in most experiments despite an overestimation of the number of hot days and of the variability. The accurate simulation of inter-annual variability for a few models is independent of the model bias. This indicates that internal variability of high summer temperatures should not play a major role in controlling inter-annual variability. Despite some improvements, especially along coastlines, the analyses conducted here did not allow us to generally conclude that a higher resolution is clearly beneficial for a correct representation of heat waves by regional climate models. Even though local-scale feedbacks should be better represented at high resolution, combinations of parameterizations have to be improved or adapted accordingly.     

Carbonatite magmatism and fenitization of the epiclastic caldera-fill at Gross Brukkaros (Namibia)

The Gross Brukkaros inselberg is a dome structure with a crater-shaped central depression within Precambrian/Cambrian country rocks which was active as a depocenter during the Late Cretaceous. The formation of the structure was due to the intrusion and subsequent intermittent depletion of a shallow magma reservoir. Juvenile material has not been recognized hitherto. This is the first account of juvenile lapilli from within the epiclastic fill of the caldera structure. The lapilli are calciocarbonatites and magnesiocarbonatites in composition, but are characteristically low in elements such as P, Nb, Ba and Sr, otherwise typical of carbonatites. This signature, however, is also characteristic of carbonatites from surrounding volcanic centers and necks. The Brukkaros sediments suffered strong metasomatic-hydrothermal alteration, which introduced in a first stage fluids rich in Fe, Ti, Na, Nb, V, K (Ca?, CO₂?), and in a second stage the Brukkaros sediments were silicified on a large scale and locally enriched in P, Th and Cr. Si is derived from desilication of the wall rocks (basement?, Nama sediments) of the magma reservoir. Cr was probably mobilized during alteration of the abundant doleritic detritus within the Brukkaros depocenter.     

Optimizing the Number of Double-Differenced Observations for GPS Networks in Support of Deformation Monitoring Applications

Deformation monitoring using GPS is usually carried out by installing and operating a local network of GPS receivers mounted on the deforming body, e. g., the flanks of a volcano. For continuous monitoring applications a near-real-time, epoch-by-epoch solution obtained from multi-baseline processing is desired in order to take into account between-baseline correlations and to detect movements over as short a period of time as possible. In the case of the volcano monitoring application, the sides of the volcano will block out part of the sky, hence the receivers are not likely to track a lot of satellites that are visible from all receiver stations at the same time. If the usual base-station/base-satellite approach is used in the baseline processing, only the common satellites are considered, resulting in the number of possible double-differenced observables being comparatively low; hence a ot of valuable information may be lost. The proposed method, based on the work by Saalfeld (1999), considers satellites that are visible from a small number of network stations only. Thus the number of independent double-differenced observables can be maximized in order to obtain a better solution. A numerical example is given that verifies the improved solutions that can be obtained using this data processing approach. ? 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Catchments as reactors: a comprehensive approach for water fluxes and solute turnover

Sustainable water quality management requires a profound understanding of water fluxes (precipitation, run-off, recharge, etc.) and solute turnover such as retention, reaction, transformation, etc. at the catchment or landscape scale. The Water and Earth System Science competence cluster (WESS, http://www.wess.info/) aims at a holistic analysis of the water cycle coupled to reactive solute transport, including soil–plant–atmosphere and groundwater–surface water interactions. To facilitate exploring the impact of land-use and climate changes on water cycling and water quality, special emphasis is placed on feedbacks between the atmosphere, the land surface, and the subsurface. A major challenge lies in bridging the scales in monitoring and modeling of surface/subsurface versus atmospheric processes. The field work follows the approach of contrasting catchments, i.e. neighboring watersheds with different land use or similar watersheds with different climate. This paper introduces the featured catchments and explains methodologies of WESS by selected examples.     

The formation of the first luminous objects in the universe

Paramount among the processes that ended the cosmic dark ages must have been the emergence of a first generation of stars. I review recent results on their formation out of metal-free gas, and discuss related open questions that still defy our understanding. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.