ALBERT

Beschreibung: While there is great potential in the chief values and prospects of a circular economy, this alone will not bring the circular economy to market or scale. In order for a circular economy to materialize, an integrated approach that focuses on a long-term system change or transition is required. To set the change process in motion, many (public and private) players (companies, authorities, citizens, and research institutions) need to be involved. Among the many stakeholders, a genuine enabler to implement a successful and sustainable circular strategy is the logistics industry. Given that The Netherlands is used as a case study, in this paper, we focus on the Dutch logistics industry and how this industry can contribute to the broader Dutch agenda to realize a more circular economy. It implies looking at the specific transition agenda for the logistics industry in relation to a circular economy, what barriers may exist that might hamper such a transition, and how public policy-makers are dealing with and can tackle these barriers.

Beschreibung: Payments for Environmental Services (PES) are praised as innovative policy instruments and they influence the governance of forest restoration efforts in two major ways. The first is the establishment of multi-stakeholder agencies as intermediary bodies between funders and planters to manage the funds and to distribute incentives to planters. The second implication is that specific contracts assign objectives to land users in the form of conditions for payments that are believed to increase the chances for sustained impacts on the ground. These implications are important in the assessment of the potential of PES to operate as new and effective funding schemes for forest restoration. They are analyzed by looking at two prominent payments for watershed service programs in Indonesia—Cidanau (Banten province in Java) and West Lombok (Eastern Indonesia)—with combined economic and political science approaches. We derive lessons for the governance of funding efforts (e.g., multi-stakeholder agencies are not a guarantee of success; mixed results are obtained from a reliance on mandatory funding with ad hoc regulations, as opposed to voluntary contributions by the service beneficiary) and for the governance of financial expenditure (e.g., absolute need for evaluation procedures for the internal governance of farmer groups). Furthermore, we observe that these governance features provide no guarantee that restoration plots with the highest relevance for ecosystem services are targeted by the PES.

Beschreibung: Water, Vol. 10, Pages 35: Spatiotemporal Characteristics of Extreme Precipitation Regimes in the Eastern Inland River Basin of Inner Mongolian Plateau, China Water doi: 10.3390/w10010035 Authors: Wei Li Limin Duan Yanyun Luo Tingxi Liu Buren Scharaw In this work, we use the gridded precipitation dataset (with a resolution of 0.5° × 0.5°) of the eastern part of inland river basin of Inner Mongolian Plateau from 1961–2015 as the basis and adopt the methods of climatic diagnosis (e.g., the Modified Mann-Kendall method, principal component analysis, and correlation analysis) to analyze the spatial and temporal variations of six extreme precipitation indices. Furthermore, we analyzed the relationship between El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events and the observed extreme precipitation. The results indicated that the gridded dataset can be used to describe the precipitation distribution in our study area. In recent 55 years, the inter-annual variation trends of extreme precipitation indices are generally dominated by declination except for the maximum precipitation over five days (RX5DAY) and the heavy precipitation (R95P), in particular, the decreasing regions of consecutive dry days (CDD) accounts for 91% of the entire basin, 17.28% of which is showing the significant downward trend. Contrary to CDD, the spatial distribution of the other five indices is gradually decreasing from northeast to southwest, and the precipitation intensity (SDII) ranges from 3.8–5.3 mm·d−1, with relatively small spatial differences. To some extent, CDD and R95P can used to characterize the extreme precipitation regimes. Moreover, the number of days with heavy precipitation (RR10), SDII, and R95P are more susceptible to the ENSO events. In addition, the moderate El Niño event may increase the probability of CDD, while the La Niña events may increase the risk of the heavy rainfall regime in the study area.