Suchergebnisse

The potential of agroforestry to improve livelihoods and mitigate climate change and environmental degradation has been widely recognized, especially within the context of climate-smart agriculture. However, agroforestry opportunities have not been fully exploited because of several reasons, among which are adverse policies and legislations. However, many countries do not have a full understanding of how their policy and institutional environment may affect agroforestry development. We aim to fill this gap by looking at the particular case of Chad. The method used included examining data from: (i) literature reviews of important national and international polices, strategies, and legislation governing access to land and trees, among which are 'La Loi 14', Chad's 2010 poverty reduction strategy paper, draft zero of the National Environmental Policy, (ii) interviews and focus group discussions with NGOs, government officials, and farmers, and (iii) surveys with 100 households. Results show that Chad has no specific agroforestry policy but opportunities for agroforestry can be found in some of the above-mentioned policy documents and government strategies. Most stakeholders interviewed had positive attitudes towards agroforestry, but uptake of the practice is handicapped by poor understanding of the forestry law by farmers and forestry officials. Gaps in existing laws give room for rent-seekers to collect individual (USD 272–909) and collective (USD 36–1818) access fees to trees on both forest and farmland. We propose that the government of Chad should unmask elements of agroforestry in existing policies and policy instruments to demonstrate its importance in responding to livelihood and environmental challenges in the country.

The potential of agroforestry to improve livelihoods and mitigate climate change and environmental degradation has been widely recognized, especially within the context of climate-smart agriculture. However, agroforestry opportunities have not been fully exploited because of several reasons, among which are adverse policies and legislations. However, many countries do not have a full understanding of how their policy and institutional environment may affect agroforestry development. We aim to fill this gap by looking at the particular case of Chad. The method used included examining data from: (i) literature reviews of important national and international polices, strategies, and legislation governing access to land and trees, among which are 'La Loi 14', Chad's 2010 poverty reduction strategy paper, draft zero of the National Environmental Policy, (ii) interviews and focus group discussions with NGOs, government officials, and farmers, and (iii) surveys with 100 households. Results show that Chad has no specific agroforestry policy but opportunities for agroforestry can be found in some of the above-mentioned policy documents and government strategies. Most stakeholders interviewed had positive attitudes towards agroforestry, but uptake of the practice is handicapped by poor understanding of the forestry law by farmers and forestry officials. Gaps in existing laws give room for rent-seekers to collect individual (USD 272–909) and collective (USD 36–1818) access fees to trees on both forest and farmland. We propose that the government of Chad should unmask elements of agroforestry in existing policies and policy instruments to demonstrate its importance in responding to livelihood and environmental challenges in the country.

To date, traffic remains a major source of societal costs in terms of safety and environment. In Flanders, as in other regions and Member States in the European Union, the government counts on current developments in cooperative, connected and autonomous mobility (CCAM) to achieve European societal objectives. However, the first set of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) services has overlapping objectives with the functionalities of present ITS infrastructure. Therefore, this paper provides a methodology for road authorities to determine, bottom-up, the incremental benefits C-ITS can bring for the highway segments they operate, given the presence of ITS gantries on those segments. This allows to prioritize segments for C-ITS roadside unit (RSU) deployments, taking into account legacy ITS infrastructure. Results show that segments with dense ITS deployments, though having high traffic volumes, should not be prioritized in RSU deployment selection.

A capacidade do algodoeiro de se recuperar após uma desfolha se faz em função do nível de redução da área foliar, estágio de desenvolvimento da planta em que ocorrer a injúria, condições climáticas e práticas do sistema de cultivo. O objetivo deste estudo foi avaliar os efeitos da desfolha no desenvolvimento, produtividade e qualidade de fibra do algodoeiro, nos sistemas de espaçamentos adensado e convencional. Para isso, conduziu-se experimentos em condições de campo, em Dourados (MS), utilizando-se a cultivar NuOpal RR®, em delineamento de blocos ao acaso (com parcelas subdivididas) e quatro repetições em dois sistemas de cultivo (adensado e convencional). Os tratamentos constituíram-se de cinco fases de desenvolvimento da cultura: V3, B1, F1, F5 e C1, (de acordo com a escala de Marur e Ruano (2001) e quatro níveis de desfolhamento artificial (0%, 33%, 66% e 99% da área foliar). O efeito da desfolha nos índices de produtividade e qualidade de fibras foi dependente do estádio do fenológico em que a cultura se encontrava independente do sistema de cultivo estudado. Já quando as plantas estavam nos estádios B1 e F1 e sofreram desfolha de 99%, este afetou os índices de qualidade de fibras, enquanto a redução de área foliar no estádio C1 não afetou os índices de qualidade e produtividade do algodoeiro.

Palavras chave: Área Foliar. Dano. Sistemas de Cultivo. Algodão.

Abstract
The ability of the cotton plant to recover after defoliation is a function of the level of reduction of the leaf area, stage of development of the plant in which injury occurs, climatic conditions and practices of the cultivation system. The objective of this study was to evaluate the behavior of cotton submitted to different levels and times of defoliation in systems of conventional and narrow row cultivation. Experiments were conducted in field conditions, in Dourados (MS), using the cultivar NuOpal RR® in a randomized block design (with subdivided plots) and four replications in two cultivation systems (narrow row and conventional). The treatments consisted of five stages of crop development: V3, B1, F1, F5 and C1, (according to the scale of Marur & Ruano (2001) and four levels of artificial defoliation (0%, 33%, 66 % and 99% of the leaf area artificially eliminated.) The effect of defoliation on the indexes productivity and fiber quality depends on the phenological stage in which the culture was, independent of the cultivation system studied. When the plants were in stages B1 and F1 and suffered defoliation of 99%, this affected the fiber quality indexes, while the reduction of leaf area in the C1 stage did not affect the quality and productivity indexes of the cotton.

Keywords: Leaf Area. Damage. Cultivation Systems. Cotton.

We present predictions for the total cross section for the production of a charged Higgs boson in the intermediate-mass range (m H ± ∼m t ) at the LHC, focusing on a type-II two-Higgs-doublet model. Results are obtained at next-to-leading order (NLO) accuracy in QCD perturbation theory, by studying the full process pp→H ± W ∓ bb¯ in the complex-(top)-mass scheme with massive bottom quarks. Compared to lowest-order predictions, NLO corrections have a sizeable impact: they increase the cross section by roughly 50% and reduce uncertainties due to scale variations by more than a factor of two. Our computation reliably interpolates between the low- and high-mass regime. Our results provide the first NLO prediction for charged Higgs production in the intermediate-mass range and therefore allow to have NLO accurate predictions in the full m H ± range. The extension of our results to different realisations of the two-Higgs-doublet model or to the supersymmetric case is also discussed. ; The work of RF is supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, in the framework of the Sofja Kovaleskaja Award Project "Event Simulation for the Large Hadron Collider at High Precision"; the work of VH is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) with grant PBELP2 146525; the work of MW is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) under contract 200020-141360; and the work of MZ is supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodovska-Curie grant agreement No. 660171 and in part by the ILP LABEX (ANR-10-LABX-63), in turn supported by French state funds managed by the ANR within the "Investissements d'Avenir" programme under reference ANR-11-IDEX-0004-02. MU is supported by a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellowship and partially supported by the STFC grant ST/L000385/1.

Following the decline of investments in government extension services in the 1980s and 1990s, community- based extension approaches have become increasingly important. One such approach is farmer-to-farmer extension (F2FE), which is defined here as the provision of training by farmers to farmers, often through the creation of a structure of farmer-trainers. We use 'farmer-trainer' as a generic term, even though we recognise that different names (e.g. lead farmer, farmer-promoter, community knowledge worker) may imply different roles. F2FE programmes date back considerably and have been used in the Philippines since the 1950s and in Central America since the 1970s. (1) F2FE programmes have grown tremendously in Africa in recent years (2) and are now quite common, with 78% of development organisations using the approach in Malawi (3) and one-third using it across seven regions of Cameroon. (4) As common as these programmes are, training materials on the use of the approach and analyses, and comparisons of F2FE programmes are scarce.

Innovation platforms (IPs) appear to be one of the most appropriate tools to operationalize research for development. Increasingly, agricultural research initiatives for development set up innovation platforms to facilitate the management and support of innovation processes. Yet, the mechanisms by which they operate are not well understood. This paper seeks to open the "black-box" and proposes a framework to analyze processes that occur in innovation platforms from inception to maturity. Firstly, we use a New Institutional Economics (NIE) based analytical framework for the M&E of IP performance. Secondly, from a review of the literature, we identify three ways through which research could be done within IPs: 1) soft transfer, when research has readily available results that could help solve jointly identified problems; 2) co-creation, when researchers and IP members develop research objectives and protocols together; and 3) community-based research, when IP members set up experiments on their own. We propose that both frameworks should be used to improve the monitoring of IP dynamics.

This paper analyses the profitability of cocoa farmers in the Centre region of Cameroon who wish to diversify their activity by associating inside their orchards several species of domestic fruit trees. Hence, by using linear programming and financial appraisal tools, eight agroforest systems are compared in order to deduct the most beneficial one. The results show that, priority should be given to the most enriched agroforest (Cocoa+Safout+Mango+Ndjansang) which is the most beneficial/productive one for resources use. It provides the highest Net Present Value (19,398 Euros/ha), Internal Rate of Return (52.7%) and Benefit Cost Ratio (8.20) as well as the shortest Pay Back Period (4 years), confirming that it is the most beneficial combination. Hence, to earn higher income, farmers should adopt the most diversified agroforest and the government should encourage trees' regeneration and cocoa farm extension.