Zoekresultaten

Production in peatlands

The majority of Dutch peatlands are drained and used intensively as grasslands for dairy farming. This delivers high productivity but causes severe damage to the provisioning of ecosystem services. Peatland rewetting is the best way to reverse the damage, but high water levels do not fit with intensive dairy production. Paludiculture, defined as crop production under wet conditions, provides viable land use alternatives, but these alternatives are rarely compared to conventional drainage-based systems. Here, we compare ecosystem services of six theoretical production systems on peatland following a gradient of low, medium, and high water levels. This includes conventional and organic drainage-based dairy farming, low-input grasslands for grazing and mowing, and high-input paludiculture systems with reed and Sphagnum cultivation. For each production system, a theoretical 1 ha unit was designed using data from literature. Four aspects of ecosystem services were quantified and monetized, including agricultural productivity, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, water storage, and biodiversity potential. Results show that drainage-based dairy farming systems only support high milk production without any of the other ecosystem services included, even with organic farming practices. Biomass producing paludiculture systems have high ecosystem services value, but do not lead to production values comparable to the present dairy farming. Capitalizing GHG reduction and other ecosystem services from peatland rewetting with carbon credits or other payment schemes would close this production and income gap. However, standard practice to monetize provision of ecosystem service is currently unavailable. Sustainable use of peatlands urges more fundamental changes in land and water management along with the financial and policy support required.

An ecosystem services analysis of oil palm and alternative land use systems on peat in Malaysia

In this article, we assess the potential of alternative land use systems using non-drainage peatland species which could eventually phase out or partly replace oil palm plantations on undrainable peatlands. We have used the ecosystem services approach to analyse what scenarios using drainage-free peatland species could be suitable alternatives for oil palm cultivation on peat and how these scenarios compare to oil palm plantations in terms of selected ecosystem services. Our results indicate that alternative paludiculture systems will provide more direct and indirect ecosystem services than oil palm plantations on peat. We also found that stakeholders were aware of issues with growing oil palm on peat, and that there was a general intention for sustainable use of peatlands amongst several groups of stakeholders. Replacing oil palm with alternative systems such as paludiculture in Malaysia is not yet realistic. The most important impediments are a lack of knowledge on potential of non-drainage peatland species and its associated value chains, as well as the technical difficulty for smallholders to implement such a system. We recommend starting experimental plantings with paludiculture systems to further test species performance, life cycle analysis, growth, intercropping limitations and possibilities, yields and improvements in the value chain.

The interplay between land use, travel behaviour and attitudes: a quest for causality.

Assessing tourism's global environmental impact 1900–2050

This paper pioneers the assessment of tourism's total global resource use, including its fossil fuel consumption, associated CO2 emissions, fresh water, land, and food use. As tourism is a dynamic growth system, characterized by rapidly increasing tourist numbers, understanding its past, current, and future contributions to global resource use is a central requirement for sustainable tourism assessments. The paper introduces the concept of resource use intensities (RUIs), which represent tourism's resource needs per unit of consumption (e.g. energy per guest night). Based on estimates of RUIs, a first assessment of tourism's global resource use and emissions is provided for the period 1900–2050, utilizing the Peeters Global Tourism Transport Model. Results indicate that the current (2010) global tourism system may require c.16,700 PJ of energy, 138 km3 of fresh water, 62,000 km2 of land, and 39.4 Mt of food, also causing emissions of 1.12 Gt CO2. Despite efforts to implement more sustainable forms of tourism, analysis indicates that tourism's overall resource consumption may grow by between 92% (water) and 189% (land use) in the period 2010–2050. To maintain the global tourism system consequently requires rapidly growing resource inputs, while the system is simultaneously becoming increasingly vulnerable to disruptions in resource flows.

Ten new insights in climate science 2022

We summarize what we assess as the past year's most important findings within climate change research: limits to adaptation, vulnerability hotspots, new threats coming from the climate–health nexus, climate (im)mobility and security, sustainable practices for land use and finance, losses and damages, inclusive societal climate decisions and ways to overcome structural barriers to accelerate mitigation and limit global warming to below 2°C.

The global footprint of tourism

This chapter discusses tourism’s impacts on global environmental change. Tourism affects four key Earth-system processes under threat: biodiversity loss, freshwater availability, land-use change, and climate change. On a global scale, tourism impacts on climate change are most significant. However, on a local or regional scale, tourism can be a considerable driver of change in the other processes, sometimes to an extent of global proportions. The various components of tourism act differently in these processes. Tourism mobility as a whole is generally the most problematic. The causes of tourism impacts are explored per system process and mitigation priorities are addressed. Mitigation of impacts is essential, also for the sustainable development of tourism. Strategy development needs an integrated approach, as measures to solve one issue can be counterproductive for other processes and goals.