DIE ERDE – Journal of the Geographical Society of Berlin
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You Cannot Shift an Old Tree Without it Dying—Home Swapping as a Suitable Strategy for Older Downsizers?
Full text linkThe current global trend of increasing per capita living space in combination with more and smaller households will intensify resource and energy consumptions in the housing sector. Scientific scholars, thus, unanimously plead for a reduction of per capita living consumption. Since the demographic trend of aging will further contribute to a high increase of single households and cause further under-occupation of living space, the potential to spatially downsize is particularly high among those older age cohorts. However, the often-limited housing choices for seniors do not allow for a large-scale downsizing development. Beyond that, the discourse on housing downsizing lacks a discussion of distinct strategies of how to effectively offer options for older people to do so. Hence, the paper at hand presents the distinct instrument of home swapping which has lately been introduced by several German municipalities to more adequately allocate the existing housing space. Since a profound scientific debate of this approach is still pending, this contribution discusses home swapping as a suitable strategy to incentivize older households to downsize on their living space. In order to do so, the home swapping schemes of four German cities have been analyzed to add scientific evidence on the potentials and challenges of the instrument to downsize housing consumptio
Conceptualizing Sustainability and Resilience in Value Chains in Times of Multiple Crises—Notes on Agri-food Chains
Full text linkGlobal and regional agri-food value chains feed societies and are an income source for hundreds of millions of farmers around the world. They are also target areas for action to achieve a global sustainability transformation. Agri-food chains are highly vulnerable in the context of multiple crises, including the global environmental crisis, geopolitical fragmentation, armed conflicts and wars, and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Measures to increase chain resilience are widely discussed; however, some such measures contradict sustainability measures. While there has been considerable research on the sustainability and resilience of agri-food chains, few studies have integrated both perspectives or outlined potential synergies and trade-offs. Therefore, this interdisciplinary literature review sketches possible contours for a synthesized research agenda on sustainability and resilience for agri-food chains during multiple crises. We argue that such an agenda should include, amongst others,• a more differentiated and critical perspective on the importance of value chain characteristics and developments (e.g., power structures, capabilities, up- and downgrading, and the borders of chain internalities and externalities)• a more comprehensive perspective that includes global and regional contexts and relations (e.g., whole-chain perspectives that integrate agro-input supply)• an actor-oriented approach that interrogates aspects of inequality, cost-sharing, and the potential benefits of sustainability and resilience for different actors along a value chain (i.e., sustainability and resilience for whom?
How and When Does International Migration Policy Travel Across Scales? Understanding the Limits to Migration as Adaptation Through the Lens of Thailand
Full text linkClimate change and migration are increasingly becoming a part of policy discussions. One concept, migration as adaptation, has become popularized as a tangible way forward. While some studies focus on how this framing came to be at the international level, few have actually traced how it has traveled across administrative scales to the national and sub-national level. This paper looks to fill this gap and explores migration as adaptation policy in Thailand, a climate-vulnerable country with a highly mobile population. It finds that there is limited discussion of the issue for ideational and institutional reasons, including because migration is seen as negative or a “last resort” by Thai policymakers, limited leverage by relevant policy actors such as IOM within climate change adaptation policymaking arenas, and short-term and short-sighted policy reactions based on disruptive events. Given this, this paper questions the ability of migration as adaptation to travel to lower governance scales in particularly constrained contexts
Gendered Dimensions of Labor and Living Incomes Among Coffee Farmers in Southern Mexico
Full text linkThe Fairtrade Standard for Small-Scale Producer Organizations was recently adjusted to reflect core International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions on good working conditions. The standards require smallholders to offer permanent and temporary workers training on labor rights as well as gradual salary increases to close the gap between existing wages and living income targets. However, many smallholder coffee producers depend on inexpensive labor sources like wage laborers, household members, or other community members who engage in reciprocal or collective labor exchanges to meet quality demands and comply with certification standards. Coffee producers in southern Mexico face labor-intensive farm renovations, tight labor markets, and the advancing age (and declining size) of farm families. These shifting labor burdens have differential gender impacts, and farmers find it difficult to finance long-term farm investments at current Fairtrade prices. Thus, a living income—whether for farmers or laborers—remains a distant dream, not an achievable, short-term objective. Using data from nearly 500 smallholder coffee producers in Oaxaca, Mexico, this article explores i) how Fairtrade-certified smallholders manage the labor demands of coffee production and ii) how these practices are specifically gendered. We explore how smallholders meet labor demands and the rationales underpinning their methods, noting the constraints, opportunities, and why these labor practices matter for smallholders, their communities, and long-term Fair Trade supply chain resilience
The Living Wage Debate in the Kenyan Cut-Flower Industry
Full text linkOver the past three decades, the Kenyan cut-flower industry has come under intense scrutiny for its environmental impacts and poor labor conditions, including low wages. A multitude of certification schemes have been introduced to address this criticism, each with its own regulations and standards. However, these certifications have had little impact on industry wages. Even though the most well-known standard, Fairtrade, explicitly targets living wages, wage levels remain well below living wage calculations for Kenya’s flower-producing hubs. This article explores this discrepancy. First, I discuss local experiences with wage levels in the major flower-growing hub at Lake Naivasha.This discussion indicates that local evaluations of wage levels in the flower industry are more differentiated than global discussions on the living wage suggest. Secondly, I argue that certifications, including their measures to support living wages have a depoliticizing effect and side-line local mechanisms for setting wage levels. Consequently, living wages in the Kenyan flower industry are still a long way from materializing
Subjectivity and Social Positions Shape Habitability in the Context of Environmental Change: a Qualitative Case Study in Northern Ghana
Full text linkThe loss of habitable land is increasingly recognized in climate risk assessments, mainly stemming from material approaches based on concepts of loss and damage. While this generalizes people’s experience of environmental change and habitability, the lived realities of environmental change impacts are not homogeneous within one place. Adaptation measures building on such homogenous notions of habitability run risk to not only reproduce but also to increase existing inequalities. Contrasting that, the perception of habitability differs between individuals and is thus subject to multiple claims of truth. Our work aims to add to a more nuanced conceptualization of the habitability concept by showing the socially differentiated perceptions of habitability in a given place. We build our work on a qualitative field study in rural Northern Ghana, drawing on an intersectional understanding of habitability. Our results show how the intersection of gender, age, socio-economic status, and household composition translates into social practices that shape a socially differentiated experience of perceived habitability in places exposed to environmental change. This perception is further influenced by the connectivity of places, as well as by very personal notions of habitability related to changes in social networks and aspects of place attachment. Contrasting material and noncontext based understandings of habitability, we conclude that the habitability of a place exposed to environmental change is subjective, characterized through an actor’s position within a social-ecological system. Understanding this position as embedded in space and time, it is the interplay of various social categories and the social practices emerging from them that shape an actor’s position, and perceived habitability. Understanding this, and consequently avoiding generalizing assessments and statements about habitability, is crucial to implementing policies that enable empowering change, rather than reproducing existing inequalities through climate change adaptation. Those affected by environmental change need to be included when defining habitability
The Impact of COVID-19 in Protected Areas Management: A Review of Emerging Challenges, Responses, and Future Research Lines in the Post-Pandemic Context
Full text linkThe COVID-19 pandemic and the multiple associated changes in human activities and mobilities have implied the emergence of (new) challenges for the sustainable management of protected areas. With the objective of identifying and categorizing these emerging challenges, the responses implemented to address them, and their future implications, we developed a systematic literature review on the implications of COVID-19 crisis for protected areas management. Based on 56 articles published in 2020 and 2021, our findings offer (a) descriptions of the studies conducted, (b) multiscale effects of the pandemic on Protected Areas, (c) changes in the public use of Protected Areas during the pandemic, (d) managerial adaptation during the pandemic, (e) rethinking Protected Areas management both midand long-term, (f) and an emerging research agenda on Protected Areas. Overall, our results show broad agreement about the pandemic’s early cascading effects, both positive and negative, on the management of Protected Areas, and the behavioral and mobility patterns of their users. Three years have passed since the start of the pandemic, from which decision makers can leverage several lessons to be prepared for future crises; especially when it comes to achieving compatible levels of resilience and adaptability between the users of these areas and the institutions in charge of Protected Areas management
Living Wages as Life Boat to Rescue Fairtrade’s Values for Hired Labour? The Case of Indian Tea Plantations
Full text linkFair Trade is a normative concept for creating more “ just” trading relations between producers in the Global South and consumers in the Global North. It aims to foster the sustainable development of producers through instruments like minimum prices, long-term partnerships, and labor and environmental standards. However, as a market-based instrument, Fair Trade cannot fully escape capitalist logics like price competition. This is especially true of “Fairtrade”-certified products that compete with conventional products in supermarkets. Furthermore, as more large-scale enterprises like plantations are certified, questions emerge about how much workers actually benefit from certification. We understand Fairtrade’s recent living wages policy as a response to this critique and examine how Fairtrade attempts to address the contradictions between its alternative, moral mission and conventional market logic through the instrument of living wages play out in the hired labor context. We draw on moral geography to frame our understanding of fairness as the outcome of a contested process in which different actors assume responsibility. We combine this process-oriented approach to fairness with an understanding of shared responsibility derived from differently situated actors’ capacity to generate change. We illustrate the practical challenges of implementing universal concepts like fairness in the arena of wage setting at certified Indian tea plantations. The case reveals Fairtrade’s limited capacity to make a difference, especially pertaining to workers’ representation. The question of who is responsible for establishing fairness and on what level it should be done remains unsolved
Editorial note – Hartmut Leser für die ERDE-Herausgeber*innen / Editorial note – Hartmut Leser on behalf of the editors of DIE ERDE: Nachruf für Prof. Dr. Werner Eugster / Obituary for Prof. Dr. Werner Eugster
No full textNachruf für Werner Eugster verfasst von Hartmut Leser / Obituary for Werner Eugster written by Hartmut Lese
Soil erosion in the Xiangxi River Basin based on the RUSLE model
Full text linkThe Xiangxi River basin is the largest branch in the upper reaches of Three Gorges Reservoir located in the Hubei prov- ince of China, and it has a significant effect on the storage of the Three Gorges Reservoir. However, soil erosion of the Xiangxi River basin often leads to a series of problems. To minimize the impact of soil erosion on crop production and ecological life, the objective of this study was to evaluate soil erosion of the study area based on the soil and water loss model (RUSLE) with average monthly rainfall data for many years, land-use maps, soil maps, and the remote sensing (RS) images of the Xiangxi River basin and to analyze the spatial characteristics of soil erosion of the study area by geographic information system (GIS) methods in ArcGIS 10.2. The results showed that the areas of a lower grade of ero- sion increased dramatically while the number of the areas of a higher erosion grade decreases relatively compared with the previous study in 2011. This conclusion illustrated that the engineering measures taken by relevant departments affect high grade soil erosion. However, the slope zone of [30, 40) still suffered from high erosion due to mountains with heavy rainfall. It is suggested that more attention should be paid to reduce erosion in mountains, because the Xiangxi River basin belongs to early karst development and large areas of soil are covered with limestone soil. Existing measures to enclose the land for reforestation were not strong enough, thus other measures like planting grass in mountainous areas to alleviate soil erosion should be taken. Meanwhile, for the yellow-brown soil with high erosion, it is necessary to protect soil from stagnant water