Feature Article

The Guassa area of Menz in the Central Highlands of Ethiopia is an Afro-alpine ecological community with an indigenous resource management system. The local community harvest different resources including collecting grass and firewood from the Guassa area. Cattle and other livestock are also grazed in the Guassa area, especially during the dry season. Several sympatric species of endemic rodents dominate the small mammal ecological communities in the Guassa area, and form most of the diet of the endangered Ethiopian wolf.

The investigation on phytomedicine was conducted in order to asses the traditional uses and exact distribution of medicinal flora of arid areas of Pakistan. It was found that in a total of 59 plant species belonging to 50 genera and 30 families are reported to be used for different diseases as asthma, piles, cancer, skin diseases, as astringent, spermatorrhea, as refrigerant and diabetes. It was investigated that conservation of medicinally important plants and traditional folk knowledge is necessary in order to save them from extinction.

Following the rapid development of carbon markets, little attention has been devoted to what precisely is being traded. Some authors have speculated that carbon can be considered as a form of money (Button; House and Victor). Not only is making money from carbon possible via several market devices but this process has also enabled the construction of carbon as a form of money.

To provides an overall framework for thinking about the construction of carbon markets, we adopt James Der Derian's ‘virtuous war’ theory to develop an argument about carbon as a virtuous commodity. This refers to the close affinity between virtuality and virtue – the technological and the ethical – in the construction of carbon markets.

To investigate the ‘promiscuous history’ of the efficiency of emissions trading markets, I draw from Actor Network Theory and specifically the work of Bruno Latour, highlighting how the commonly made claim to efficiency was constructed as a ‘fact’. I trace the processes, beginning in the early 1970s, that constructed first the inefficiency of command-and-control regulation through the distinction between the means and the ends of regulation, and the conversion of the specific 1970 Clean Air Act regulations into the archetypal form of command-and-control.

Creating a mechanism for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD+) in tropical developing countries has become, from 2005 onward, a central element in international climate protection discourse. The goal is to create financial incentives for forest protection by making avoided deforestation a tradable good that can be sold on the carbon market or to government funds. A discourse-analytical perspective on the process of commodification and market creation is developed in order to assess how avoided deforestation is being made tradable.

Successive New Zealand governments have failed to adopt effective climate change policies. A positive, albeit limited, step was taken with the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme in 2008, a scheme founded on a framework of comprehensive coverage, applying to all sectors of the economy and all Kyoto gases, addressing the challenge of creating an emissions trading scheme tailored for a country characterised by large forest sinks and substantial agricultural emissions. Amendments in 2009 created significant changes in the way the scheme operates.

Pragmatism has recently taken up the ‘practice turn’ in order to overcome the neglect of agency in poststructuralist accounts. To explore potential advantages if such an approach is used for an analysis of carbon markets, it is first asked whether a practice approach could allow us to go beyond the dichotomy of agents vs. structures and thus lead to an understanding of carbon assets as a specific configuration of power and authority.

Flow of the river is its master variable which affects many other variables like water quality, sedimentation, biodiversity,
etc. Dams profoundly affect this natural flow. Unfortunately, in India there are very few studies which systematically
analyse impacts of a dam on a river and its biodiversity in the pre and post dam situation. This is especially true for dams
built in 1960s, 70s and 80s. We have limited database and nearly no biodiversity studies of river richness prior to and after

The present study was carried out on stored rice variety PAU 201 in Punjab that was not permitted for milling and public distribution due to the presence of damaged grains at levels exceeding the regulatory limits of 4.75 per cent. The aim of the study was to determine fungal and aflatoxin contamination in the rice samples to assess hazard from the presence of damaged grains.
Presence of iron in discoloured rice grains was also assessed.