Effects of “Grain for Green” reforestation program on rural sustainability in China: an AHP approach to peasant consensus of public land use policies

Climate change will affect the regional ability to achieve the poverty reduction and sustainable development (SD) objectives. Thus, any action plans to achieve these objectives should make climate change policies an integral part of the development planning process. The best practices and measures of climate change policies should be implemented to ensure regional or community sustainability. In this paper, a case study that promotes the integration of carbon sequestration into sustainable forest management and rural development plan with multi-stakeholders participation is introduced. To achieve SD goals, appropriate tools and methods are required to address impacts of alternative forest land uses on carbon sequestration and rural sustainability, and to prioritise land use options. A range of forest land use scenarios that address various aspects of the forest carbon sequestration rate and rural sustainability are evaluated against a SD indicator system. Planting vegetation is one of the practical approaches in mitigating global warming by sequestrating carbon from the atmosphere to plant matter and soil. In order to protect environment, reduce excessive soil erosion, and decrease the propensity and frequency of flooding and other natural disasters, China has initiated nationwide pivotal projects such as “Grain for Green” to mitigate exacerbated environmental deterioration and degradation. Such ecological programs may affect the socio-economic livelihoods of peasants and the economic activities of the whole region. The impact and economic uncertainty associated with such projects urge policy makers to include all stakeholders in the decision making process so that an agreeable solution towards sustainable rural development can be identified. This study uses Liping County in Guizhou province as a case study to identify a consensus among peasants regarding planting selected tree-species. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used as a multicriteria decision making tool to rank sustainability criteria and determine the priority of options. The method helps policy makers to understand what the peasants want to achieve by participating in a Grain for Green program and what their priorities are with respect to particular types of vegetation. The case study finds that economic and financial concerns are the most important drivers of the decision of which trees to plant among the peasants who took part in the implementation of the Grain for Green program. As a result of this, Gingko, redpine, and Chinese chestnut were the predominant trees planted under the program. The integrated assessment based on the AHP method provides an effective tool to help understand how economic, social and environmental factors are related to each other in affecting the nature of rural sustainability.     

Systematics in the fission track annealing of minerals

A linear relationship exists between annealing temperatures and activation energies of fission tracks for different minerals. The temperature and activation energy needed to erase 50% of the tracks in minerals depend on the lattice energy per mole. These relationships make possible predictions about the stability of tracks in silicates, provided their chemical composition is known or a few isochronal annealing data are available.     

Survey of garnets for fossil fission tracks

Andradites and spessartines contain enough uranium to make these minerals interesting for fission track dating. Almandines and pyropes usually are not favourable.     

The importance of health co-benefits in macroeconomic assessments of UK Greenhouse Gas emission reduction strategies

We employ a single-country dynamically-recursive Computable General Equilibrium model to make health-focussed macroeconomic assessments of three contingent UK Greenhouse Gas (GHG) mitigation strategies, designed to achieve 2030 emission targets as suggested by the UK Committee on Climate Change. In contrast to previous assessment studies, our main focus is on health co-benefits additional to those from reduced local air pollution. We employ a conservative cost-effectiveness methodology with a zero net cost threshold. Our urban transport strategy (with cleaner vehicles and increased active travel) brings important health co-benefits and is likely to be strongly cost-effective; our food and agriculture strategy (based on abatement technologies and reduction in livestock production) brings worthwhile health co-benefits, but is unlikely to eliminate net costs unless new technological measures are included; our household energy efficiency strategy is likely to breakeven only over the long term after the investment programme has ceased (beyond our 20 year time horizon). We conclude that UK policy makers will, most likely, have to adopt elements which involve initial net societal costs in order to achieve future emission targets and longer-term benefits from GHG reduction. Cost-effectiveness of GHG strategies is likely to require technological mitigation interventions and/or demand-constraining interventions with important health co-benefits and other efficiency-enhancing policies that promote internalization of externalities. Health co-benefits can play a crucial role in bringing down net costs, but our results also suggest the need for adopting holistic assessment methodologies which give proper consideration to welfare-improving health co-benefits with potentially negative economic repercussions (such as increased longevity).     

The Meteoritical Bulletin,No. 96, September 2009

Abstract— The Meteoritical Bulletin No. 96 contains a total of 1590 newly approved meteorite names with their relevant data. These include 12 from specific locations within Africa, 76 from northwest Africa, 9 from the Americas, 13 from Asia, 1 from Australia, 2 from Europe, 950 from Antarctica recovered by the Chinese Antarctic Research Expedition (CHINARE), and 527 from the American Antarctic program (ANSMET). Among these meteorites are 4 falls, Almahata Sitta (Sudan), Sulagiri (India), Ash Creek (United States), and Maribo (Denmark). Almahata Sitta is an anomalous ureilite and is debris from asteroid 2008 TC3 and Maribo is a CM2 chondrite. Other highlights include a lunar meteorite, a CM1 chondrite, and an anomalous IVA iron.     

Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Linear Inversion for Geophysical Inverse Problems

A Bayesian linear inversion methodology based on Gaussian mixture models and its application to geophysical inverse problems are presented in this paper. The proposed inverse method is based on a Bayesian approach under the assumptions of a Gaussian mixture random field for the prior model and a Gaussian linear likelihood function. The model for the latent discrete variable is defined to be a stationary first-order Markov chain. In this approach, a recursive exact solution to an approximation of the posterior distribution of the inverse problem is proposed. A Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm can be used to efficiently simulate realizations from the correct posterior model. Two inversion studies based on real well log data are presented, and the main results are the posterior distributions of the reservoir properties of interest, the corresponding predictions and prediction intervals, and a set of conditional realizations. The first application is a seismic inversion study for the prediction of lithological facies, P- and S-impedance, where an improvement of 30% in the root-mean-square error of the predictions compared to the traditional Gaussian inversion is obtained. The second application is a rock physics inversion study for the prediction of lithological facies, porosity, and clay volume, where predictions slightly improve compared to the Gaussian inversion approach.     

Rb-sr dating of epithermal vein mineralization stages in the eastern Harz Mountains (Germany) by paleomixing lines

A method is evaluated that enables the dating of binary isotopic paleomixing in hydrothermal alteration assemblages by iterative reconstruction and regression of corresponding two-component mixing lines from conventional Rb-Sr data. The model has been applied to illite-bearing granulometric fractions of hydrothermally altered sedimentary rocks associated with epithermal vein mineralization in the eastern Harz Mountains, Germany. These veins are characterized by a principal quartz-sulfide stage containing quartz, base metal sulfides, and siderite and a subsequent dominant calcite-fluorite-quartz stage. Rb-Sr analyses were performed on untreated granulometric fractions, HCl-treated residues, corresponding HCl leachates, and cogenetic vein minerals obtained from two silicified rock samples related to the quartz-sulfide and the calcite-fluorite-quartz mineralization, respectively.Neither the untreated nor the HCl-leached fractions of these rock samples yield statistically robust and geochronologically meaningful isochrons. When applying the binary mixing model, however, two well-defined paleomixing lines can be reconstructed for the HCl-treated fractions of the rock samples and associated vein minerals at model ages of 226 ± 1 Ma (quartz-sulfide alteration) and 209 ± 2 Ma (calcite-fluorite-quartz alteration). We examine the significance and reliability of these model ages and the corresponding paleomixing lines by means of statistical and geological criteria and discuss the effects of leaching experiments performed on the granulometric fractions using 1 N HCl as well as the nature and origin of the components dissolved in the acid leachates.Our results suggest that the mixing model provides a successful dating concept for isotopic disequilibrium processes during low-temperature hydrothermal events that produce binary mixtures among newly formed alteration phases.