Fair Deals for Watershed Services: Lessons from a Multi-country Action-learning Project

Payments for ecosystem services make good sense. In the case of watershed ecosystems, downstream beneficiaries of wise upstream land and water stewardship should compensate these upstream stewards. These 'payments for watershed services' (PWS) should contribute to the costs of watershed management and, if upstream communities are also characterised by poverty, these payments should contribute to local development and poverty reduction as well. Debates about both conservation and development have seen a wave of excitement about payments for watershed services in recent years. But on the ground an equivalent surge of action is harder to see. IIED and its partners have been building on earlier international case study work to set up new PWS schemes - to 'learn by doing' and to improve our understanding of the opportunities and the challenges.This report is about the complex business of trying to put a simple conservation and development idea into practice. The idea is that watershed degradation in developing countries might be better tackled than it currently is if downstream beneficiaries of wise land use in watershed areas paid for these benefits. There are some examples around the world of this idea being put into practice - this report reviews these and describes what happened when teams in six developing countries set about exploring how the idea works on the ground

The role of religion in the longer-range future, April 6, 7, and 8, 2006

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Conference Series, a publication series that began publishing in 2006 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. This conference that took place during April 6, 7, and 8, 2006. Co-organized by David Fromkin, Director, Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and Ray L. Hart, Dean ad interim Boston University School of TheologyThe conference brought together some 40 experts from various disciplines to ponder upon the “great dilemma” of how science, religion, and the human future interact. In particular, different panels looked at trends in what is happening to religion around the world, questions about how religion is impacting the current political and economic order, and how the social dynamics unleashed by science and by religion can be reconciled.Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affair

Enterprise in the Undergrowth: Exploring the Ways Chinese Companies Operate in the Dja Forest in Cameroon

Chinese company activity in African forests is often portrayed in oversimplified terms --as a much-needed driver of development or an unwelcome and unconstrained free-for-all. The resulting weak understanding also leads to a low level of engagement by government and nongovernmental actors with the operations of these companies on the ground. By examining Chinese engagements in Cameroon's Dja forest area and avoiding seeing Chinese companies as a homogenous collective, we tease out the heterogeneity in their business profiles, operational practices, and impacts on local communities and the forests. We analyze how Chinese companies, in particular, smalland medium-sized timber enterprises, operate and engage with government. We find that business creativity, which could conceivably be the seedbed for sustainability, is in practice stifled by everyday operations embedded within and enabled by the informal rules and practices that condition the “real” functioning of forestry governance in Cameroon

Managing financial constraints: Undercapitalization and underwriting capacity in spanish fire insurance

Reinsurance is a vital financial device for enhancing underwriting capacity, ceding risks and mitigating financial distress. By supplying financial resources and services, reinsurance can facilitate growth and expansion in the insurance business. Focusing on the insurance sector in the emerging Spanish economy and using a novel dataset on fire insurance companies, this paper examines the role of fire insurance in the capital formation, the importance of reinsurance as a vehicle for expanding the country’s domestic underwriting capacity, and how the capital import impacted on the balance of payment, from the introduction of the first comprehensive legislation regarding insurance in 1908 to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936. Considering the situation of undercapitalization, the singularities of the insurance market, and the changes in regulatory schemes, we find that foreign reinsurance became a key financial vehicle for increasing the underwriting capacity in Spain. We also show the struggle for an emerging market to find ways to keep balance of current accounts and raise capital when the financial infrastructure is underdeveloped. The diffusion of reinsurance networks from the core of industrial Western countries towards emerging economies was one of the mechanisms for financial modernization on a global scale

Laura Villalobos (CATIE). Additional material was prepared by Andrea

Nicolas Bertrand of UNEP managed the chapter, including the handling of peer reviews, interacting with the coordinating authors on revisions, conducting supplementary research and bringing the chapter to final production. Derek Eaton reviewed and edited the modelling section of the chapter. Sheng Fulai conducted preliminary editing of the chapter. Five Background Technical Papers were prepared for this chapte

Existential Loneliness and end-of-life care: A Systematic Review

Contains fulltext : 88662.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)Patients with a life-threatening illness can be confronted with various types of loneliness, one of which is existential loneliness (EL). Since the experience of EL is extremely disruptive, the issue of EL is relevant for the practice of end-of-life care. Still, the literature on EL has generated little discussion and empirical substantiation and has never been systematically reviewed. In order to systematically review the literature, we (1) identified the existential loneliness literature; (2) established an organising framework for the review; (3) conducted a conceptual analysis of existential loneliness; and (4) discussed its relevance for end-of-life care. We found that the EL concept is profoundly unclear. Distinguishing between three dimensions of EL-as a condition, as an experience, and as a process of inner growth-leads to some conceptual clarification. Analysis of these dimensions on the basis of their respective key notions-everpresent, feeling, defence; death, awareness, difficult communication; and inner growth, giving meaning, authenticity-further clarifies the concept. Although none of the key notions are unambiguous, they may function as a starting point for the development of care strategies on EL at the end of life.1 april 201

Efficacy of Short-Course AZT Plus 3TC to Reduce Nevirapine Resistance in the Prevention of Mother-to-Child HIV Transmission: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Neil Martinson and colleagues report a randomized trial of adding short-course zidovudine+lamivudine to reduce drug resistance from single-dose nevirapine used to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV

The redmapper galaxy cluster catalog from DES Science Verification data

We describe updates to the redMaPPer algorithm, a photometric red-sequence cluster finder specifically designed for large photometric surveys. The updated algorithm is applied to 150 {{deg}}2 of Science Verification (SV) data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), and to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR8 photometric data set. The DES SV catalog is locally volume limited and contains 786 clusters with richness lambda \gt 20 (roughly equivalent to {M}{{500c}}≳ {10}14 {h}70-1 {M}o ) and 0.2\lt z\lt 0.9. The DR8 catalog consists of 26,311 clusters with 0.08\lt z\lt 0.6, with a sharply increasing richness threshold as a function of redshift for z≳ 0.35. The photometric redshift performance of both catalogs is shown to be excellent, with photometric redshift uncertainties controlled at the {sigma }z/(1+z)~ 0.01 level for z≲ 0.7, rising to ~0.02 at z~ 0.9 in DES SV. We make use of Chandra and XMM X-ray and South Pole Telescope Sunyaev--Zeldovich data to show that the centering performance and mass--richness scatter are consistent with expectations based on prior runs of redMaPPer on SDSS data. We also show how the redMaPPer photo-z and richness estimates are relatively insensitive to imperfect star/galaxy separation and small-scale star masks

Mass variance from archival X-ray properties of dark energy survey year-1 galaxy clusters

For abstract see published article