1,720,964 research outputs found
No farmer left behind in sustainable biofuel production
No full textSocietal concerns about the social and environmental impacts of biofuel production are driving producers to adopt better management practices. Existing certification schemes for sustainable biofuel production are, however, biased towards industrial-scale producers that have the financial capital and economies of scale to meet sustainability and certification objectives. Smallholder farmers in developing countries, by contrast, often lack the means and capacity to do so. Some of the challenges faced by smallholders include high certification costs, insufficient institutional capacity, inadequate financial and social incentives, poor group organization and lack of external support. Drawing lessons from existing certification programs, we argue that proponents of sustainable practices and standards must fully appreciate the complex realities of smallholder production systems. We provide policy recommendations for ensuring that no farmer is left behind in the quest to increase sustainable biofuel production. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.Janice Ser Huay Lee, Lucy Rist, Krystof Obidzinski, Jaboury Ghazoul, Lian Pin Ko
Environmental impacts of large-scale oil palm enterprises exceed that of smallholdings in Indonesia
No full textAbstract
The expansion of large‐scale oil palm plantations in Indonesia has taken a heavy toll on forests, biodiversity, and carbon stocks but little is known about the environmental impacts from the smallholder sector. Here, we compare the magnitude of forest and carbon loss attributable to smallholdings, private enterprises, and state‐owned oil palm plantations in Sumatra. During 2000–2010, oil palm development accounted for the loss of 4,744 ha of mangrove, 383,518 ha of peat swamp forest, 289, 406 ha of lowland forest, and 1,000 ha of lower montane forest. Much of this deforestation was driven by private enterprises (88.3%) followed by smallholdings (10.7%) and state‐owned plantations (0.9%). Oil palm‐driven deforestation in Sumatra resulted in 756–1,043 Mt of total gross carbon dioxide emissions, of which ∼90% and ∼9% can be attributed to private enterprises and smallholdings, respectively. While private enterprises are responsible for the bulk of environmental impacts, the smallholder oil palm sector exhibits higher annual rates of expansion (11%) compared to private enterprises (5%). Both sectors will need careful monitoring and engagement to develop successful strategies for mitigating future environmental impacts of oil palm expansion.Janice Ser Huay Lee, Sinan Abood, Jaboury Ghazoul, Baba Barus, Krystof Obidzinski, & Lian Pin Ko
Framing the food poverty question: Policy choices and livelihood consequences in Indonesia
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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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