Search Results (10)

How to coordinate the relationship between nature reserves and surrounding communities to achieve a win–win situation for protection and development has become an urgent issue that governments around the world need to address. The concept of community co-management emerged in this context, aiming to promote cooperation and interaction between protected areas and surrounding communities, achieve sustainable use of natural resources, and promote the healthy development of the community economy. This study conducted empirical analysis using the Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve and surrounding communities in China as a case study. This study aims to reveal the key factors affecting the perception of the households in the surrounding communities of the national nature reserve through an in-depth analysis of their perceptions, attitudes, and actual effects on the innovative management model of community co-management. At the same time, it provides empirical evidence and theoretical support for the construction of a more reasonable, efficient, and win–win nature reserve management model. Based on field research and interviews, combined with a questionnaire survey of stakeholders, this study utilized the Q method to conduct a comprehensive analysis of household perceptions under community co-management. The research results indicate that community co-management is an effective path to promote the coordinated development of the local economy, society, and ecology. Specifically, this model not only significantly promotes employment and entrepreneurship among community residents but also achieves economic self-sufficiency and steady growth by cultivating characteristic industries and building distinctive brands. Further analysis reveals that improving residents’ well-being is the core value of community co-management. Meanwhile, system reform is seen as the key to promoting the deepening development of community co-management. This study not only helps to enhance households’ understanding and participation in ecological protection and promotes the deep integration of ecological protection and community development but also provides valuable experience and inspiration for the management of nature reserves in other regions around the world. Full article

Cooking with firewood in inefficient stoves primarily affects the rural population in poor and developing countries, usually lacking access to clean and modern energy sources. La Guajira, Colombia, is especially affected, with 40% to 60% of the departmental households relying on firewood, which increases to 80% in rural areas. In the department, only 40.4% of the population have access to natural gas, which drops to 6% in the indigenous reservations, while 68.4% have access to electricity, which reduces to 22% in indigenous reservations. Rural areas with agricultural production in the department can benefit from biomass wastes to address firewood consumption. This study quantified the agricultural biomass waste inventory in La Guajira to assess their availability for energy valorization as cooking fuel or, when possible, for electricity generation. The geolocalization of biomass wastes and rural communities was developed to overlap biomass production with the demand for firewood. Moreover, briquetting, anaerobic digestion, and direct combustion were considered small- and medium-scale options for the energy valorization of biomass wastes. Results highlighted the department’s yearly production of 292,760 to 522,696 t of agricultural biomass wastes between 2010 and 2023. These wastes could yield an estimated 381 to 521 TJ/year of electricity using direct combustion, coinciding with some 21% to 28% of the electricity demand in 2022 in La Guajira. Furthermore, this electricity potential could replace 57% to 78% of the demand for firewood in the department using electric stoves. Moreover, anaerobic digestion could produce from 8.6 to 10 million m³/year, enough to replace between 16% and 18% of the demand for firewood using biogas stoves. Finally, briquettes could replace between 28% and 49% of the firewood demand, considering the adoption of improved biomass stoves. Considering that direct combustion and anaerobic digestion technologies would be efficient on the medium scale, briquettes surfaced as the most viable approach at the small scale to take advantage of agricultural wastes to replace firewood in households in rural areas. Full article

In 2019, the voluntary initiative “Kajve” was established to improve the quality of life of smallholders in Chiapas, a hotspot for Mexican production where coffee often represents the main income source yet low production often keeps households below the poverty line. The initiative’s ambition is to jointly address the issues of low incomes, climate change vulnerability, and yield-threatening diseases, as well as ecosystem degradation due to deforestation, to promote more sustainable supply chains while respecting the legacy of indigenous communities. To date, Kajve has reached over 1500 growers across 37 indigenous communities partly situated within biosphere reserves. The initiative’s efforts rest upon collaboration with institutional and private partners and participatory dialog with growers and their communities. Trainings and extension visits covering Good Agricultural Practices, environmental education, and plantation renovation were offered in cooperation with UNESCO and value chain partners. The former characterized the value of traditional coffee farming practices in a baseline assessment, ensuring culturally appropriate methods that respect the ethnic components underlying coffee cultivation. The initial results highlight up to a 35% increase in coffee yields, a 98% reduction in rust incidence, and an improvement of over two points in cup quality. The initiative currently works with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and Solidaridad Network to implement and assess high-productivity agroforestry system design; complementary interventions for multifunctional landscapes, including replanting native species and water retention structures; circular resource management (e.g., composting, efficient inorganic nutrient application, and coffee wastewater treatment); and the management of pests and diseases leveraging BASF technology. The current challenge is to complete the Kajve intervention model with commitment by actors in the value chain—creating the economic incentive to empower growers to secure their own prosperity while achieving truly sustainable coffee production. Full article

Family reserves are an important part of national reserves, and how to do a good job in family reserves is a common concern of the government and society. Under the non-normal conditions of major accidents and disasters, wars, plagues, social unrest, etc., urban food supply mainly depends on external supply guarantee, and urban residents’ risk perception is more sensitive. Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior and Norm Activation Model, this study constructs an analytical framework for the risk perception, perceived behavior control, and family reserve efficacy of urban residents under non-normal conditions from the perspectives of rationality and sensibility, self-interest, and altruism. The perceived behavior control of household food reserves in non-normal conditions is affected by risk perception, subjective norms, and personal norms. On this basis, countermeasures and suggestions are put forward: Urban residents should strengthen their sense of risk and responsibility for storing food at home, reserve food appropriately, and develop a good habit of family saving. On the other hand, it is necessary to pay attention to personal norms, reduce the negative impact of subjective norms on residents, and avoid excessive food storage and food waste. Full article

With increasing consumption of primary energy and deterioration of the global environment, clean energy sources with large reserves, such as natural gas, have gradually gained a higher proportion of the global energy consumption structure. Monitoring and predicting consumption data play a crucial role in reducing energy waste and improving energy supply efficiency. However, owing to factors such as high monitoring device costs, safety risks associated with device installation, and low efficiency of manual meter reading, monitoring natural gas consumption data at the household level is challenging. Moreover, there is a lack of methods for predicting natural gas consumption at the household level in residential areas, which hinders the provision of accurate services to households and gas companies. Therefore, this study proposes a gas consumption monitoring method based on the K-nearest neighbours (KNN) algorithm. Using households in a residential area in Xi’an as research subjects, the feasibility of this monitoring method was validated, achieving a model recognition accuracy of 100%, indicating the applicability of the KNN algorithm for monitoring natural gas consumption data. In addition, this study proposes a framework for a natural gas consumption prediction system based on a backpropagation (BP) neural network. Full article

In modern society, frequent use of synthetic materials in the household and industry presents a great challenge to environmental and water quality. As such, numerous types of research have been conducted for potential removal of emerging contaminants from water using advanced materials. Earth materials, due to their low costs and vast reserves, have also been evaluated in great details for contaminant removal. In this study, a naturally occurring carbonate mineral dolomite (Dol) was assessed for the removal of an anionic dye alizarin red S (ARS) from aqueous solution before and after heat treatment to increase its performance. The ARS-removal capacities increased from 80 to 130 mmol/kg after heat treatment based on the isotherm study. And the ARS-removal efficiency rose by a factor of four as the partitioning coefficient increased from 1.5 to 6 L/mmol after heat treatment. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) analyses showed minute conversion of dolomite into calcite after samples being heated at 800 °C for 3 h. However, there were no phase changes for ARS before and after its sorption. Fourie transform infra-red (FTIR) results also showed a minute appearance of calcite after heating. Thus, the increase in ARS sorption could be due to surface reactivation of Dol after heating or due to formation of a minute amount of amorphous MgO in the system as a result of the conversion of Dol to calcite. The results from this study will add new perspectives to the utilization of Earth materials for environmental application. Full article

Battery systems are extensively used in smart energy systems in many different applications, such as Frequency Containment Reserve or Self-Consumption Increase. The behavior of a battery in a particular operation scenario is usually summarized using different key performance indicators (KPIs). Some of these indicators such as efficiency indicate how much of the total electric power supplied to the battery is actually used. Other indicators, such as the number of charging-discharging cycles or the number of charging-discharging swaps, are of relevance for deriving the aging and degradation of a battery system. Obtaining these indicators is very time-demanding: either a set of lab experiments is run, or the battery system is simulated using a battery simulation model. This work instead proposes a machine learning (ML) estimation of battery performance indicators derived from time series input data. For this purpose, a random forest regressor has been trained using the real data of electricity grid frequency evolution, household power demand, and photovoltaic power generation. The results obtained in the research show that the required KPIs can be estimated rapidly with an average relative error of less than 10%. The article demonstrates that the machine learning approach is a suitable alternative to obtain a very fast rough approximation of the expected behavior of a battery system and can be scaled and adapted well for estimation queries of entire fleets of battery systems. Full article

The contradiction between environmental protection and livelihood development is becoming increasingly serious for most protected areas in developing countries. Livelihood diversification is an efficient way to increase household income to alleviate poverty related to environmental protection. However, its impacts on household welfare in protected areas have rarely been quantitatively explored. This article investigates the determinants of four livelihood strategies in the Maasai Mara National Reserve and explores the association between livelihood diversification and household income and its heterogeneities. Based on the sustainable livelihoods framework and the information collected from 409 households through face-to-face interviews, this study adopted multivariate regression models to obtain consistent results. Results show that the determinants of the four strategies differed. Natural capital, physical capital, and financial capital had significant associations with the probability of adopting the strategy of livestock breeding. Physical capital, financial capital, human capital, and social capital were associated with the probability of adopting the joint strategy of livestock breeding and crop planting and the joint strategy of livestock breeding and off-farm activities. The probability of adopting the joint strategy of livestock breeding, crop planting, and off-farm activities was associated with all five kinds of livelihood capital except for financial capital. Diversification strategies, especially those involving off-farm activities, played greater roles in raising household income. The findings indicate that the government and management authority of Maasai Mara National Reserve should provide the households around the protected area with more off-farm employment opportunities to increase the welfare of local residents as well as to utilize natural resources appropriately, especially for those located far away from the protected area. Full article

A large community of scientists has demonstrated that millions of people located in tropical zones derive a significant proportion of their livelihoods from the extraction of non-timber forest products (NTFPs). Despite these results, questions remain as to whether the valorisation of NTFPs can sustainably contribute to the improvement of the livelihood assets of the extractors. This study therefore evaluated the contribution of NTFP valorisation to the livelihood assets of local people around the northern periphery of the Dja Faunal Reserve (DFR), East Cameroon. To achieve this objective, data collected from 215 households in 32 villages were analyzed using factor analysis, Mann–Whitney U tests, and structural equation modelling. The results suggest that NTFP valorisation significantly contributes to the livelihood assets of local people at the periphery of the DFR. However, NTFP revenue was not significant in predicting their livelihood assets. Moreover, the local conservation management practices were not significant in predicting the livelihood assets in the long run. The results also revealed that individuals who received training and capacity building on good practices such as efficient collection techniques, effective drying techniques, and good conservation techniques earned better revenues and the impact on their livelihood was more significant than for those who did not. These results therefore recommend that the way forward for NTFP valorisation lies at the level of improving its quality and the market. Full article

Small-scale farming in Ghana is typically associated with synthetic fertilizer dependence and soil degradation. The farmers often rely on wood fuel for cooking imported from outside the farmland, a practice that is associated with deforestation. Integration of food and energy production may be a holistic approach to solving these issues. We study four approaches to providing food and fuel for cooking in a small-scale farming community. Present practice (PP) of synthetic fertilizer based food production and provision of wood fuel from outside the farming area is compared to three modeled, integrated technology options: integrated food and household-scale biogas production (HH Biogas), integrated food and village-scale biogas production (Village Biogas), and integrated food and wood fuel production (Agroforestry). Integrated approaches are able to eliminate the import of wood fuel, reduce synthetic fertilizer use by 24%, 35% and 44% and soil loss by 15%, 20% and 87%, respectively, compared to present practice. An Emergy Assessment (EmA) shows that integrated approaches are relevant substitutes to present practice considering biophysical efficiency indicated by Unit Emergy Value (in solar emjoules (sej) per J of output) and dependence on renewable inputs indicated by the Global Renewability Fraction (in %): 2.6–3.0 × 10⁵ sej/J and 38%–48% (PP), 2.5–2.8 × 10⁵ sej/J and 41%–46% (HH Biogas), 2.4–2.6 × 10⁵ sej/J and 45%–47% (Village Biogas), 1.7–2.4 × 10⁵ sej/J and 49%–66% (Agroforestry). Systematic recycling and use of local resources may play a pivotal role in reducing the dependence on non-renewable resources in Ghanaian farming, ensuring long-term soil fertility and stemming the current deforestation of wood reserves. Full article