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This working paper summarizes the findings of a portfolio review conducted to explore the gender and youth responsiveness of climate-smart agriculture technologies tested across climate-smart villages. The innovative and integrative aspect of the Climate-Smart Village (CSV) approach can provide useful insights into how to decrease the gender gap in the context of climate change. The diverse settings of CSVs (across East and West Africa, South and Southeast Asia and Latin America) and long program timeline, present a unique opportunity to gather learnings for the broader agriculture research for development community and practitioners. Toward these points, this paper aims to assess how gender and youth responsiveness was integrated into the process of identifying, testing, promoting, and scaling suitable CSA practices and technologies in the context of the implementation of the CSV approach. The review found that collective action and local partner engagement has proved to be very successful in the CSVs in regards to gender outcomes. To improve the gender and youth responsiveness of CSVs, it is essential taking those considerations into account from the very beginning of the project design, as well as having a GSI expert involved.

COVID-19 has changed the permeability of borders in transboundary environmental governance regimes. While borders have always been selectively permeable, the pandemic has reconfigured the nature of cross-border flows of people, natural resources, finances and technologies. This has altered the availability of spaces for enacting sustainability initiatives within and between countries. In Southeast Asia, national governments and businesses seeking to expedite economic recovery from the pandemic-induced recession have selectively re-opened borders by accelerating production and revitalizing agro-export growth. Widening regional inequities have also contributed to increased cross-border flows of illicit commodities, such as trafficked wildlife. At the same time, border restrictions under the exigencies of controlling the pandemic have led to a rolling back and scaling down of transboundary environmental agreements, regulations and programs, with important implications for environmental democracy, socio-ecological justice and sustainability. Drawing on evidence from Southeast Asia, the article assesses the policy challenges and opportunities posed by the shifting permeability of borders for organising and operationalising environmental activities at different scales of transboundary governance.

ABSTRACTThis article assesses students’ understanding of global climate change (GCC) and social factors affecting it. It was hypothesized that students who demonstrate pro-environmental attitudes are more likely to possess higher knowledge of GCC. It was further hypothesized that trust and personal efficiency would have a positive effect on the knowledge of GCC. To this end, 816 students of several universities in the Iranian Mazandaran province were randomly selected for a survey. Results show that the level of students’ understanding of the GCC phenomenon is moderate and the social factors, environmental attitude, trust and personal efficiency have influence on their knowledge of GCC. Furthermore, the study shows that male students possess more knowledge of GCC than female ones.

The project has set a mandate to work on eight neglected and underutilized mountain crops that are nutrient dense, climate resilient, and indigenous to the Nepal Mountains (Table 1). These crops are: amaranth (Amaranthus hypochondriacus, A. caudatus and A. cruentus), barley and naked barley (Hordeum vulgare and H. vulgare var. nudum), common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum and F. tararicum), finger millet (Eleusine coracana), foxtail millet (Setaria italica), proso millet (Panicum miliaceum) and cold tolerant rice (Oryza sativa).

This paper aims to unpack the equity implications of ‘climate-smart agriculture’ (CSA). The CSA approach has gained considerable traction in recent years, but remains highly contested. One of the principal areas of contestation relates to CSA’s contribution to social equity, yet equity is rarely defined in the CSA literature. To fill this gap, we apply an equity framework to four discourses that are commonly encountered in debates on the challenges and opportunities for applying CSA in different contexts and for different purposes. From this, we identify three important equity issues: First, distributive equity implies a need to acknowledge how CSA may transfer the burden of responsibility for climate change mitigation to marginalized producers and resource managers. Second, a procedural equity perspective reveals how CSA discourses generally fail to confront entrenched power relations that may constrain or block the emergence of more ‘pro-poor’ forms of agricultural development, adaptation to climate change, or carbon sequestration and storage. Third, to improve CSA outcomes, a focus on contextual equity means the need to pay more attention to the institutions that underpin the bargaining power of the poorest and most vulnerable groups, as well as a deeper acknowledgement of the political nature of transformations that are needed to address challenges around the agricultural sector in a changing climate.

Destabilization of the water cycle threatens human lives and livelihoods. Meanwhile our understanding of whether and how changes in vegetation cover could trigger abrupt transitions in moisture regimes remains incomplete. This challenge calls for better evidence as well as for the theoretical concepts to describe it. Here we briefly summarise the theoretical questions surrounding the role of vegetation cover in the dynamics of a moist atmosphere. We discuss the previously unrecognized sensitivity of local wind power to condensation rate as revealed by our analysis of the continuity equation for a gas mixture. Using the framework of condensation-induced atmospheric dynamics, we then show that with the temperature contrast between land and ocean increasing up to a critical threshold, ocean-to-land moisture transport reaches a tipping point where it can stop or even reverse. Land-ocean temperature contrasts are affected by both global and regional processes, in particular, by the surface fluxes of sensible and latent heat that are strongly influenced by vegetation. Our results clarify how a disturbance of natural vegetation cover, e.g., by deforestation, can disrupt large-scale atmospheric circulation and moisture transport. In view of the increasing pressure on natural ecosystems, successful strategies of mitigating climate change require taking into account the impact of vegetation on moist atmospheric dynamics. Our analysis provides a theoretical framework to assess this impact. The available data for Eurasia indicate that the observed climatological land-ocean temperature contrasts are close to the threshold. This can explain the increasing fluctuations in the continental water cycle including droughts and floods and signifies a yet greater potential importance for large-scale forest conservation. 25 pages, 5 figures, and 1 table