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Understanding the relationship between climate and crop productivity is a key component of projections of future food production, and hence assessments of food security. Climate models and crop yield datasets have errors, but the effects of these errors on regional scale crop models is not well categorized and understood. In this study we compare the effect of synthetic errors in temperature and precipitation observations on the hindcast skill of a process-based crop model and a statistical crop model. We find that errors in temperature data have a significantly stronger influence on both models than errors in precipitation. We also identify key differences in the responses of these models to different types of input data error. Statistical and process-based model responses differ depending on whether synthetic errors are overestimates or underestimates. We also investigate the impact of crop yield calibration data on model skill for both models, using datasets of yield at three different spatial scales. Whilst important for both models, the statistical model is more strongly influenced by crop yield scale than the process-based crop model. However, our results question the value of high resolution yield data for improving the skill of crop models; we find a focus on accuracy to be more likely to be valuable. For both crop models, and for all three spatial scales of yield calibration data, we found that model skill is greatest where growing area is above 10-15 %. Thus information on area harvested would appear to be a priority for data collection efforts. These results are important for three reasons. First, understanding how different crop models rely on different characteristics of temperature, precipitation and crop yield data allows us to match the model type to the available data. Second, we can prioritize where improvements in climate and crop yield data should be directed. Third, as better climate and crop yield data becomes available, we can predict how crop model skill should improve.

Fires have attracted interest and generated alarm since the early 1980s. This con- cern has been particularly evident in tropical forests of Southeast Asia and the Amazon, but disastrous fires in recent summers in Australia, Europe, and the United States have drawn worldwide attention. Concern about forest fires, and related air pollution and biodiversity impacts, led inter- national organisations and northern countries - such as the Asian Development Bank, the European Union, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank, and the government of Germany - to undertake fire assessments and provide technical assistance. Nongovernmental organisations, such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources and World Wide Fund for Nature, have also devoted increased attention to fires. Aiming at prevention of future fires, 40 fire projects and missions costing well over US$30 million have worked in Indonesia over the last 20 years. Despite the money and effort spent on them, fires continue to burn every year. It may appear to some that efforts to address the 'fire problem' have not been effective as fires still occur.

We propose an ethical analysis as a method to reflect on how companies’ decisions promote sustainable development. The method proceeds by first identifying the choice according to financial business interests, and by then scrutinizing this choice according to consequentialist and deontological ethics. The paper applies the method to the choice of an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) that a consortium of Brazilian companies (EGASUR) delivered as part of their project proposal for the realization of the Inambari hydropower dam in the Peruvian Amazon. We show that if an EIA is chosen based on the attempt to maximize the financial bottom line, it raises ethical issues both from a consequentialist perspective by involving negative consequences for various stakeholder groups, and from a deontological perspective by not complying with relevant rules, guidelines, and principles. The two ethical perspectives hence reveal where the consortium faces impediments to a genuine commitment to sustainability. Building on stakeholder interviews, observations of the project developments, and the executive summary of the actual EIA, we provide indications that EGASUR has indeed made a choice that resembles a decision based on financial interests.

Price floors in greenhouse gas emissions trading schemes can guarantee minimum abatement efforts if prices are lower than expected, and they can help manage cost uncertainty, possibly as complements to price ceilings. Provisions for price floors are found in several recent legislative proposals for emissions trading. Implementation however has potential pitfalls. Possible mechanisms are government commitments to buy back permits, a reserve price at auction, or an extra fee or tax on acquittal of emissions permits. Our analysis of these alternatives shows that the fee approach has budgetary advantages and is more compatible with international permit trading than the alternatives. It can also be used to implement more general hybrid approaches to emissions pricing.

The global community has been struggling with the issue of how to effectively respond to the threat of climate change for several decades. In 1992, the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro produced a landmark treaty on climate change that undertook to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. By focusing on stabilization, however, the treaty implicitly adopted the position that the risks posed by climate change require that emissions be reduced no matter what the cost. The agreement, signed and ratified by more than 186 countries, including the United States, spawned numerous subsequent rounds of climate negotiations aimed at rolling back emissions from industrialized countries to the levels that prevailed in 1990. To date, however, the negotiations have had little effect on greenhouse gas emissions and have not produced a detectable slowing in the rate of emissions growth. The treaty’s implementing protocol, the 1997 Kyoto agreement, has stalled after being heavily diluted at subsequent negotiations in Bonn and Marrakesh.2 The survival of the Kyoto Protocol in its current form is waiting for ratification from Russia. More than a decade of negotiations has produced a policy that is very strict in principle but completely ineffective in practice.

It is often said that innovations create winners and losers. All innovations are somewhat disruptive, but some have more distributed effects. We have a sense of who the winners are and how much they gain. Yet, how much do losers actually lose? Organic farmers frequently like to publicly announce that they are the losers following the commercialization of genetically modified (GM) crops, yet consumers in search of non-GM products have helped increase demand for organic products, something that would not have occurred in the absence of GM crops. Are organic farmers really losers? This article lays out the argument that were it not for the commercialization of GM crop varieties in the mid-1990s, organic production and food sectors would not be at the level they enjoy today. That is, the commercialization of GM crops has made the organic industry better off than had GM crops not been commercialized. Theoretical modelling of the organic benefits is complemented by supportive market data. The article concludes that in spite of numerous vocal offerings about the adverse impacts suffered by the organic industry due to GM crop production, the organic industry has gained significantly from that which they vociferously criticize.

Metal use and modern society are intrinsically linked and it is no surprise that global processes of industrialization and urbanization have led to ever increasing amounts of metal use. In recent decades, global supply and demand networks for metals have become increasingly complex. Industrial Ecology research is well placed to unpack this complexity and to explore potential resource efficiencies for metals. This is especially important during the current period of rising ore prices. We examine patterns of supply and demand for iron ore and bauxite, and recent trends in resource productivity of these two important metal ores. We introduce a consumption perspective and compare the material footprint of metal ores to the GDP of countries to look at how much economic benefit countries achieve per unit of metal footprint. We find that for the past two decades global amounts of iron ore and bauxite extractions have risen faster than global GDP, that both supply and demand of iron ore and bauxite have been concentrated in a handful of countries and that resource productivity from a consumption perspective has fallen in developed nations, as well as globally. The research shows no saturation of metal ore consumption at any level of income. Policies will be required to enhance both the productivity of metal production and the economic productivity of consumption (GDP per metal footprint) through more efficient mining, product design, reuse and recycling.