加强地质科技项目管理 助力新时期找矿突破

找矿突破战略行动自实施以来,取得了一系列成果,重要和紧缺矿种新增资源储量保持较快增长,国内矿产资源保障能力增强。通过近5年的探索和努力,找矿效果显著,新发现一批重要矿产地,新增一批矿产资源,发现并查明了大湖塘钨矿床、大营铀矿床、沙坪沟钼矿床等一批世界级矿床,西藏甲玛铜矿床、多龙铜矿床、青海夏日哈木镍矿床等一批超大型矿床,并有望形成西藏扎西康铅锌矿床、贵州铜仁锰矿床等一批新的资源基地,对于立足国内资源保障,优化矿产资源格局具有重要的推动作用。2015年,全国地质勘查投资总额为899.3亿元,新发现主要固体矿产大中型矿产地144处。     

The (ir)relevance of transaction costs in climate policy instrument choice: an analysis of the EU and the US

This article assesses the relevance of ex post transaction costs in the choice of climate policy instruments in the EU (focusing mainly on the example of Germany) and the US. It reviews all publicly available empirical ex post transaction cost studies of climate policy instruments broken down by the main private and public sector cost factors and offers hypotheses on how these factors may scale depending on instrument design and other contextual factors. The key finding from the evaluated schemes is that it is possible to reject the hypothesis that asymmetries in ex post transaction costs across instruments are large and, thus, play a pivotal role in climate policy instrument choice. Both total and relative ex post transaction costs can be considered low. This conjecture differs from the experience in other areas of environmental policy instruments where high total transaction costs are considered to be important factors in the overall assessment of optimal environmental policy choice. Against this background, the main claim of this article is that in climate policy instrument choice, ex post transaction cost considerations play a minor role in large countries that feature similar institutional characteristics as the EU and the US. Rather, the focus should be on the efficiency properties of instruments for incentivizing abatement, as well as equity and political economy considerations (and other societally relevant objectives). In order to inform transaction cost considerations in climate policy instrument choice in countries that adopt new climate policies, more data would be desirable in order to enable more robust estimates of design- and context-specific transaction-cost scaling factors.

Policy relevance

The findings of this study can help inform policy makers who plan to set up novel climate policy instruments. The results indicate that ex post transaction costs play a minor role for large countries that feature similar institutional characteristics as the EU and the US. For instrument design the focus should rather be on efficiency properties of instruments in incentivizing abatement, as well as equity and political economy considerations (and other societally relevant objectives).     

‘Selling Our Own Skin:’ Social dispossession through microcredit in rural Bangladesh

In this paper, I articulate a notion of ‘social dispossession,’ an optic that extends current theorizing on agrarian dispossession into the realm of social reproduction, by examining the testimonies of microcredit borrowers in rural Bangladesh. In recent years, research on microcredit has highlighted new forms of subject-making employed by microcredit and other NGO entrepreneurship development programs. These developments have received insufficient attention in scholarship on agrarian change, both globally and in specific places. I correct this by arguing that microcredit drives social dispossession through three specific mechanisms: the confiscation of assets necessary to social reproduction (as well as to production); the construction of debt relations within a community which reshape what reproduction can look like; and the re-configuration of women’s social status and subjectivities in relation to their communities.     

How effective is inclusive innovation without participation?

The last few years have seen an upsurge in the field of innovation studies especially ‘inclusive innovation’, aiming not only at economic but social development. In developing countries, like India, inclusive innovation must incorporate governance and for governance to be inclusive, it should encompass participation by all, especially the marginalized, to make public policies efficacious and deliverable. I argue that any model of inclusive innovation needs to take cognizance of participation by all stakeholders. The objective of innovation must be to enable and empower people at the periphery through awareness, accessibility and democratic deliberations rather than solely aiming at economic outcomes. There is a need to debate on the ‘inclusiveness’ of innovation and make it more participative. Such an endeavour may help promote United Nation’s sustainable development goals by making governance participatory and expediting the process of social justice.     

Family ties,preconceived images and trust: How local community defines market collaboration in the Dutch fish chain

Vertical chain collaboration is a strategy for customers’ value creation. However, Dutch fishermen are hardly participating in integrated value chains. While supply chain literature describes factors that contribute to successful chain partnerships, scarce research has been done on the dynamics of the sociocultural context for chain collaboration.In 10 semi-structured interviews, representatives of supply chain parties were asked for their perceptions on chain collaboration, trust, and the role of the local community. The interviews were directed at obtaining so-called ‘tacit’ knowledge, the non-spoken codified truths of social networks. Without generalizing, this research provides benchmarks to monitor how the different domains, laid out in this study, impact chain collaboration: community values, network participation and company competences. An overview is given of socio-economic factors blocking and enhancing chain collaboration at company and community level. Factors such as the strong bonding of family with business in tightly knit networks, a high level of social control, entrepreneurial autonomy, and loyalty as community norm hamper collaboration within the supply chain.Respondents’ discourse demonstrates that cultural codes and identity form the very core of the entrepreneur, driving rather than ‘embedding’ economic behavior. Kinship, religion and peer pressure determine ‘windows on the world’ when engaging in chain collaboration. Consequently, any analysis of economics that does not integrate sociological and psychological methodology is flawed from the outset.     

Dams and population displacement on China’s Upper Mekong River: Implications for social capital and social–ecological resilience

China is home to nearly half of the world’s 50,000 large dams, which provide irrigation, flood protection, and hydroelectricity. Most of these projects involve substantial population displacement, which can disrupt social capital, the webs of interdependence and support that community members maintain with one another through relationships of trust and reciprocity. We use new empirical evidence to examine the association between dam-induced displacement and social capital in China and interpret our findings in the context of social–ecological resilience theory. Our focus is on agricultural households on the Upper Mekong River, where four large hydropower dams have been constructed over the past twenty years.Our broad finding is that resettlement is associated with diminished social capital, as measured by two key indicators: inter-household exchange of financial resources, and inter-household exchange of agricultural labor. These effects differ across the four dam sites in the study based on local economic conditions and changes in resettlement policy. We find that population resettlement is associated with markedly lower levels of agricultural labor exchange. In an economically under-developed setting, this reduces the depth and breadth of social support that agricultural households rely on to produce crops for subsistence and income. This in turn diminishes social–ecological resilience because social capital is a key factor that helps agricultural or resource-dependent communities manage risk and adapt to changes and stressors.We consider the policy implications of our findings in the context of scientific and industry efforts to minimize social harm, promote economic vitality, and improve the sustainability of hydropower as a form of renewable energy.     

Multi-causal pathways of public opposition to dam projects in Asia: A fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA)

Scholars overwhelmingly adopt the case study method when analyzing causal conditions inducing anti-dam-protests. We have carried out the first medium-N-study on this topic analyzing public opposition to 12 dam projects in Asia. For this purpose, we employ a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) which is based on a thorough review of scholarly writings and press reports on the dam projects at question as well as an online survey and semi-structured interviews. We identify two causal recipes sufficient for the emergence of significant anti-dam-protests. First, lacking social safeguards in combination with the presence of political opportunity structures and higher levels of development are sufficient for significant anti-dam-protests to emerge. Second, lacking social safeguards in combination with rampant corruption and environmental risk induce these protests. Current scholarly literature particuarly emphasizes political opportunity structures and development as causal conditions inducing significant protests. Our findings build on this literature to highlight the importance of project-specific conditions.     

Catching sea cucumber fever in coastal communities: Conceptualizing the impacts of shocks versus trends on social-ecological systems

Research on vulnerability and adaptation in social-ecological systems (SES) has largely centered on climate change and associated biophysical stressors. Key implications of this are twofold. First, there has been limited engagement with the impacts of social drivers of change on communities and linked SES. Second, the focus on climate effects often assumes slower drivers of change and fails to differentiate the implications of change occurring at different timescales. This has resulted in a body of SES scholarship that is under-theorized in terms of how communities experience and respond to fast versus slow change. Yet, social and economic processes at global scales increasingly emerge as ‘shocks’ for local systems, driving rapid and often surprising forms of change distinct from and yet interacting with the impacts of slow, ongoing ‘trends’. This research seeks to understand the nature and impacts of social shocks as opposed to or in concert with trends through the lens of a qualitative case study of a coastal community in Mexico, where demand from international seafood markets has spurred rapid development of a sea cucumber fishery. Specifically, we examined what different social-ecological changes are being experienced by the community, how the impacts of the sea cucumber fishery are distinct from and interacting with slower ongoing trends and how these processes are affecting system vulnerability, adaptations and adaptive capacity. We begin by proposing a novel framework for conceptualizing impacts on social systems, as comprised of structures, functions, and feedbacks. Our results illustrate how the rapid-onset of this fishery has driven dramatic changes in the community. New challenges such as the ‘gold-rush-style’ arrival of new actors, money, and livelihoods, the rapid over-exploitation of fish stocks, and increases in poaching and armed violence have emerged, exacerbating pressures from ongoing trends in immigration, overfishing and tourism development. We argue that there is a need to better understand and differentiate the social and ecological implications of shocks, which present novel challenges for the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of communities and the sustainability of marine ecosystems.     

Assessing the social context of wildfire-affected areas. The case of mainland Portugal

Wildfires cause different impacts, depending on the conditions and resilience level of the exposed communities. Wildfire occurrence in mainland Portugal was assessed with regard to socioeconomic and demographic parameters, to identify the most distinctive conditions of fire-affected areas, without implying the existence of causal relationships. The latest population and agriculture census data were used to retrieve conditions at the civil parish level, regarding demographic patterns, social and labor conditions, physical structures and agricultural activities. To identify differences between parishes, two groups were created with the communities that showed the highest and lowest 20% of wildfire incidence between 2007 and 2014, separately for density of fire events and for burned area. A stepwise approach based on classification trees and random Forest methods was applied to identify the best discriminant variables between the groups. First, irrelevant variables were removed by an interactive process based on misclassification rates. The second step used random Forest analysis to the remaining variables to evaluate their importance in distinguishing the groups. In the final step, cluster analysis was applied to test the correspondence between the clusters created with the selected variables and the initial groups. Results showed that parishes with higher fire density have higher population density, higher proportion of young and educated people, larger families and more overcrowded buildings. On the contrary, parishes with larger burned area are less populated, less attractive to foreigners, have a higher proportion of elderly people, more degraded housing conditions and agricultural activities, visible in the density of sheep and goat and pastures, are still relevant. The cluster analysis demonstrated a better performance of the model for wildfire density, revealing a strong association with socioeconomic dynamics with an agreement above 0.85, much higher than for burned areas which is 0.29. Overall, the spatial distribution of wildfire impacts is framed by societal settings and particular conditions must be further understood to improve the coping capacity of affected communities.     

A First Generation Stochastic Bioeconomic Analysis of Algal Bloom Control in a Coastal Lagoon (Sacca di Goro, Po River Delta)

Abstract. In this work we have developed a very simple stochastic mathematical model of Ulva spp. growth to quantitatively evaluate the economic costs of algal harvesting and the related benefits in terms of avoided'economic loss'of clam production due to an effective prevention of algal blooms and the consequent anoxic crises. Algal growth was simulated by means of a discrete time difference equation of Ulva biomass where the finite growth rate depends only upon water temperature. In order to explicitly include environmental variability, a seasonal autoregressive model calibrated on available data was used to simulate water temperature. Different harvesting scenarios were analysed in terms of the number of harvesting vessels employed and the threshold biomass of Ulva at which vessels start to operate. Costs of algal harvesting and disposal, as well as monetary damages resulting from the collapse of clam production as a consequence of algal blooms, were assessed by interviewing the managers of the Clam Fishermen's Union of Goro. A Monte Carlo approach was used to estimate the mean and total statistical distribution of costs and benefits of different harvesting strategies. Our analysis shows that the most cost-effective management policy is attained with 4–6 vessels operating at low algal density able to harvest as much Ulva as possible with intensive and short interventions at the beginning of the seasonal growth.