Conservation agriculture in Africa: climate smart agricultural development

This book is about Conservation Agriculture (the use of no tillage systems) to preserve soil structure and integrity. It has become an increasingly important step towards sustainable farming. This publication brings together conservation agriculture and climate smart decision making processes for the first time, focusing on Africa. This book brings to the fore scientific and empirical evidence about Conservation Agriculture in Africa, articulated by the Second Africa Congress on Conservation Agriculture (2ACCA) held in Johannesburg in 2018. It describes how farmers in Africa are successfully adopting Conservation Agriculture as an alternative to the unsustainable conventional farming practices and as a solution to loss of agricultural productivity, soil erosion and land degradation, climate change challenges and ever-increasing food insecurity. This work discusses how Conservation Agriculture can support the implementation of the African Union's Malabo Declaration and Agenda 2063 which calls for climate smart agricultural development. It provides development-oriented case studies and scientific evidence relevant to all stakeholders in the public, private and civil sectors who are engaged in building policy, institutional and human capacity to accelerate the mainstreaming of Conservation Agriculture across Africa.

Road Weather Monitoring System Shows High Cost-Effectiveness in Mitigating Malfunction Losses

Understanding the environmental impacts of road networks and the success of policy initiatives is crucial to a country’s socioeconomic development. In this study, we propose a comprehensive approach to quantitatively assessing whether a given response is effective in mitigating the impacts of environmental shocks on roads. Our approach includes factor analysis, direct and indirect loss quantification, and cost-benefit analysis. Using nationwide data on road malfunctions and weather service performance in China, we found that the macro-level indirect economic losses from road malfunctions were more than the direct losses in multiples ranging from 11 to 21, and that information provided by the weather service could reduce losses, with benefits exceeding costs by a ratio of 51. The results of our study provide a quantitative tool as well as evidence of the effectiveness of sustainability investment, which should provide guidance for future disaster mitigation, infrastructure system resilience, and sustainability-building policy-making.

Co-evolution of Construction Waste Recycling Industrial Chain Based on Lotka–volterra Model

Under the green building policy, the recycling of construction waste has become an important issue. However, many obstructions in the industrial chain of construction waste recycling, slow integration of production elements in the chain, and inefficient resource allocation hinder the development of the construction waste recycling industry. In this study, a co-evolution model of the industrial chain of construction waste recycling is constructed based on the Lotka–Volterra model, and the Jacobian matrix is used for stability analysis. Finally, a numerical simulation is performed. The simulation results indicate that: (1) There is a high product correlation between upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain of construction waste recycling; (2) The conversion coefficient of supply and demand of upstream and downstream enterprises has a higher impact on and is more sensitive to the evolution of this industrial chain; (3) The co-evolution of upstream and downstream enterprises promotes the added value of products and maximizes the overall benefits of the industrial chain, which provides reference value and theoretical basis for the development of the industrial chain of construction waste recycling.

Committees and the legislature

This chapter explores the historical and contemporary role of parliamentary and other political committees in policy analysis, and the institutional supports which enable their function in policy making. While the dearth of assistance and resources available to Teachtaí Dála (TDs) has contributed to underwhelming legislative performance, developments since 2011 provide an important context for amending relative deficiencies in earlier reform initiatives and the systemic policy failures highlighted by the 2008 crisis. The agenda to introduce political-administrative reform post 2011 included building policy analysis capacity within the Oireachtas and addressing the significant imbalances in executive-legislative relations.

Nation-Building and Education

Democracies and dictatorships have different incentives when it comes to choosing how much and by what means to homogenise the population, i.e., ‘to build a nation’. We study and compare nation-building policies under the transition from dictatorship to democracy in a model where the type of government and borders of the country are endogenous. We find that the threat of democratisation provides the strongest incentive to homogenise. We focus upon a specific nation-building policy: mass primary education. We offer historical discussions of nation-building across time and space, and provide correlations for a large sample of countries over the 1925–2014 period.

Nagrobek Stanisława Staszica a polityka wizerunkowa Towarzystwa Warszawskiego Przyjaciół Nauk

Stanisław Staszic’s Tombstone and the Image-Building Policy of the Warsaw Society of Friends of Sciences The article is devoted to the artistic setting of Stanisław Staszic’s (1755–1826) burial place, for which his main heir, the Warsaw Royal Society of the Friends of Sciences (TKWPN), was responsible. The inspiration to raise this topic was the discovery of two previously unknown Jakub Tatarkiewicz’s designs of Staszic’s unrealized neoclassical tombstone in the collections of the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw (AGAD). However, the projects were never commissioned by TKWPN but were the sculptor’s proposal. By analysing the relationship between these artistic projects and the initiatives concerning Staszic’s tomb which stemmed directly from the Society (a big raw stone as memorial), the article highlights the problem of TKWPN’s participation in creating the posthumous cult of its long-time president and most important benefactor. The TKWPN’s seemingly paradoxical reluctance to glorify Staszic by means of traditional (artistic) forms of commemoration can be interpreted as a logical action calculated to benefit the Society’s image. Therefore, focusing on this single aspect of the posthumous cult of Staszic, directly related to the TKWPN, this article refers to the image-building policy of this institution, and thus to the ways of building its social status. At the same time, it tackles the issue of the prestige of science and scientific patronage as a new (from the early 19th-century perspective) form of public merit.

Current Situation of Building Energy Conservation and Green Building Development and its Transformation and Upgrading Countermeasure in Henan Province

In national environment of energy conservation and emission reduction and green building in China, the development of green building has been gradually promoted in Henan Province. During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, the green building had developed for several decades in Henan Province, and the application of its technology is developing from a diversified perspective. From the analysis of the current development status, although the energy efficiency level of green building has increased by 20% compared with the 12th Five-Year Plan period, green buildings develop in varying degrees in various cities in Henan province. Due to the high cost of green building, the green building policy is not thoroughly implemented in the whole process. It is urgent to improve the current industrial structures in such a state, change the traditional architectural structures, transform and upgrade the construction industry.

Investigating the Dynamics of China’s Green Building Policy Development from 1986 to 2019

China has enacted numerous green building policies (GBPs) to promote green building (GB) development in the past decades. Investigating the evolution characteristics of China’s GBPs is significant for the future optimization of the GBP system. However, few studies on this topic have been conducted. To bridge this research gap, this paper adopted the methods of bibliometric analysis and text mining to probe the dynamic evolution of the GBPs in China. Firstly, a total 199 collected policies from 1986 to 2019 were grouped into five stages according to the Five-Year Plan. Then, the topics emphasized in different stages and the cooperative relationships among policymaking agencies were discovered by mapping and visualizing the co-word network and co-author network. Based on the derived results, an in-depth discussion was further conducted from five aspects: targets, objects, instruments, GB performance indicators, and the collaboration structure of policymaking agencies. It was revealed that the topics of GBPs evolved from macro to specific, and the types of policy targets, objects, instruments, and GB performance indicators evolved from few to multiple. Additionally, the collaboration structure of policymaking agencies went from dispersive to centralized. This study sheds lights on the dynamic evolution of China’s GBPs and provides valuable references for other countries in need.