Journal Articles
azaroa 11, 2019
The program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is one of the major attempts to tackle climate change mitigation in developing countries. REDD+ seeks to provide result-based incentives to promote emission reductions and increase carbon sinks in forest land while promoting other cobenefits, such as the conservation of biodiversity.
urria 22, 2019
The Paris Agreement introduced an ambitious goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. Here we combine a review of modelled pathways and literature on mitigation strategies, and develop a land-sector roadmap of priority measures and regions that can help to achieve the 1.5 °C temperature goal. Transforming the land sector and deploying measures in agriculture, forestry, wetlands and bioenergy could feasibly and sustainably contribute about 30%, or 15 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) per year, of the global mitigation needed in 2050 to deliver on the 1.5 °C target, but it will require substantially more effort than the 2 °C target
iraila 18, 2019
Environmental externalities call for the use of environmental taxes to get prices right and thereby reduce environmental pressures. To date, however, the Spanish government makes only limited use of environmental taxes. One major reason for the policy reluctance are concerns on the regressive impacts of environmental taxes. We argue that policy can hedge against these concerns by means of revenue recycling. More specifically, we assess the impacts of a green tax reform where additional revenues are redistributed lump-sum to Spanish households on an equal-per-capita basis. Based on quantitative evidence from coupled microsimulation and computable equilibrium analyses we find that such a green tax reform leads to a substantial reduction in harmful emissions while having a progressive impact.
abuztua 7, 2019
There is increased interest in the role of trees to reduce air pollution and thereby improve human health and well-being. This study determined the removal of air pollutants by dry deposition of trees across the Basque Country and estimated its annual economic value. A model that calculates the hourly dry deposition of NO2, O3, SO2, CO and PM10 on trees at a 1 km x 1 km resolution at a regional scale was developed.
apirila 5, 2019
Science should provide solutions for societal transformations toward sustainability in the face of global environmental change. Land system science, as a systemic science focused on complex socio-ecological interactions around land use and associated trade-offs and synergies, is well placed to contribute to this agenda.
apirila 3, 2019
Enhancing the governance of social-ecological systems for more equitable and sustainable development is hindered by inadequate knowledge about how different social groups and communities rely on natural resources. We used openly accessible national survey data to develop a metric of overall dependence on natural resources. These data contain information about households' sources of water, energy, building materials and food.
apirila 2, 2019
Woody encroachment is a widespread phenomenon resulting from the abandonment of mountain agricultural and pastoral practices during the last century. As a result, forests have expanded, increasing biomass and necromass carbon (C) pools. However, the impact on soil organic carbon (SOC) is less clear. The main aim of this study was to investigate the effect of woody encroachment on SOC stocks and ecosystem C pools in six chronosequences located along the Italian peninsula, three in the Alps and three in the Apennines.
urtarrila 25, 2019
Freshwater ecosystems are under a constant risk of being irreversibly damaged by human pressures that threaten their biodiversity, the sustainability of ecosystem services (ESs), and human well‐being. Despite the implementation of various environmental regulations, the challenges of safeguarding freshwater assets have so far not been tackled successfully.
urtarrila 17, 2019
While every society can be exposed to heatwaves, some people suffer far less harm and recover more quickly than others from their occurrence. Here we project indicators of global heatwave risk associated with global warming of 1.5 and 2 °C, specified by the Paris agreement, for two future pathways of societal development representing low and high vulnerability conditions.
urtarrila 8, 2019
Tree mortality is a key driver of forest dynamics and its occurrence is projected to increase in the future due to climate change. Despite recent advances in our understanding of the physiological mechanisms leading to death, we still lack robust indicators of mortality risk that could be applied at the individual tree scale. Here, we build on a previous contribution exploring the differences in growth level between trees that died and survived a given mortality event to assess whether changes in temporal autocorrelation, variance, and synchrony in time-series of annual radial growth data can be used as early warning signals of mortality risk.
