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Children empowerment should be a core component of any responsible tourism initiatives and their involvement and support is required to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Drawing o...

In the face of the rapidly dwindling carbon budgets, negative emission technologies are widely suggested as required to stabilize the Earth’s climate. However, finding cost-effective, socially acceptable, and politically achievable means to enable such technologies remains a challenge. We propose solutions based on negative emission technologies to facilitate wealth creation for the stakeholders while helping to mitigate climate change. This paper comes up with suggestions and guidelines on significantly increasing carbon sequestration in coffee farms. A coffee and jackfruit agroforestry-based case study is presented along with an array of technical interventions, having a special focus on bioenergy and biochar, potentially leading to “negative emissions at negative cost.” The strategies for integrating food production with soil and water management, fuel production, adoption of renewable energy systems and timber management are outlined. The emphasis is on combining biological and engineering sciences to devise a practically viable niche that is easy to adopt, adapt and scale up for the communities and regions to achieve net negative emissions. The concerns expressed in the recent literature on the implementation of emission reduction and negative emission technologies are briefly presented. The novel opportunities to alleviate these concerns arising from our proposed interventions are then pointed out. Our analysis indicates that 1 ha coffee jackfruit-based agroforestry can additionally sequester around 10 tonnes of CO2-eq and lead to an income enhancement of up to 3,000–4,000 Euros in comparison to unshaded coffee. Finally, the global outlook for an easily adoptable nature-based approach is presented, suggesting an opportunity to implement revenue-generating negative emission technologies on a gigatonne scale. We anticipate that our approach presented in the paper results in increased attention to the development of practically viable science and technology-based interventions in order to support the speeding up of climate change mitigation efforts.

AbstractTemporal patterns in communities have gained widespread attention recently, to the extent that temporal changes in community composition are now termed “temporal beta-diversity”. Previous studies of beta-diversity have made use of two classes of dissimilarity indices: incidence-based (e.g., Sørensen and Jaccard dissimilarity) and abundance-based (e.g., Bray–Curtis and Ružička dissimilarity). However, in the context of temporal beta-diversity, the persistence of identical individuals and turnover among other individuals within the same species over time have not been considered, despite the fact that both will affect compositional changes in communities. To address this issue, I propose new index concepts for beta-diversity and the relative speed of compositional shifts in relation to individual turnover based on individual identity information. Individual-based beta-diversity indices are novel dissimilarity indices that consider individual identity information to quantitatively evaluate temporal change in individual turnover and community composition. I applied these new indices to individually tracked tree monitoring data in deciduous and evergreen broad-leaved forests across the Japanese archipelago with the objective of quantifying the effect of climate change trends (i.e., rates of change of both annual mean temperature and annual precipitation) on individual turnover and compositional shifts at each site. A new index explored the relative contributions of mortality and recruitment processes to temporal changes in community composition. Clear patterns emerged showing that an increase in the temperature change rate facilitated the relative contribution of mortality components. The relative speed of compositional shift increased with increasing temperature change rates in deciduous forests but decreased with increasing warming rates in evergreen forests. These new concepts provide a way to identify novel and high-resolution temporal patterns in communities.

AbstractInverse‐estimated net carbon exchange time series spanning two decades for six North American regions are analyzed to examine long‐term trends and relationships to temperature and precipitation variations. Results reveal intensification of carbon uptake in eastern boreal North America (0.1 PgC/decade) and the Midwest United States (0.08 PgC/decade). Seasonal cross‐correlation analysis shows a significant relationship between net carbon exchange and temperature/precipitation anomalies during the western United States growing season with warmer, dryer conditions leading reduced carbon uptake. This relationship is consistent with “global change‐type drought” dynamics which drive increased vegetation mortality, increases in dry woody material, and increased wildfire occurrence. This finding supports the contention that future climate change may increase carbon loss in this region. Similarly, higher temperatures and reduced precipitation are accompanied by decreased net carbon uptake in the Midwestern United States toward the end of the growing season. Additionally, intensified net carbon uptake during the eastern boreal North America growing season is led by increased precipitation anomalies in the previous year, suggesting the influence of “climate memory” carried by regional snowmelt water. The two regions of boreal North America exhibit opposing seasonal carbon‐temperature relationships with the eastern half experiencing a net carbon loss with near coincident increases in temperature and the western half showing increased net carbon uptake. The carbon response in the boreal west region lags the temperature anomalies by roughly 6 months. This opposing carbon‐temperature relationship in boreal North America may be a combination of different dominant vegetation types, the amount and timing of snowfall, and temperature anomaly differences across boreal North America.

Presentation of the Conference Paper: HYPERION: A Decision Support System for Improved Resilience and sustainable Reconstruction of historic areas in the Adapt Northern Heritage Conference 202 at Edinburgh, Scotland.

AbstractWith the exemption of Canada, the G‐7 countries have largely flourished at the detriment of their ecological sustainability bearing in mind that these countries' have remained ecologically deficit for several decades. Given the potential effect of environmental degradation associated with the trend of ecological deficit of these countries, this study attempts to understand the contribution of renewable energy dimensions through the measure of renewable energy efficiency and renewable energy use alongside evaluating the role of the four main aspects of economic freedom. By using empirical tools, the findings revealed that renewable energy aspects contribute to environmental sustainability among the countries through a significant mitigation of their ecological footprint. Importantly, the aspects of economic freedom, that is, government size, legal system and property rights, freedom to trade internationally, and regulation hampers environmental sustainability by increasing the countries ecological footprint. The elasticity of impact of this dimension of economic freedom is in the range of 0.19–0.21 at 1% statistically significant level. However, population of these countries does not show a detrimental effect, rather the finding revealed that population improves environmental quality by a statistically significant degree. Given these revelations, there are deducible policy take home from this study.