The impact of carbon revenue on the profitability of agroforestry systems in comparison to monocultures is unexplored in regard to Sub-Saharan Africa. This study creates a multivariate model to evaluate the impact of carbon revenue on the profitability of agroforestry relative to the dominant monocultures in Ethiopia by using stylized plots. Yields and carbon stock changes of eight agroforestry systems were modeled based on data from agroforestry plots in the Ethiopian Central Rift Valley. According to our model, agroforestry was, on average, four times more profitable than the main monoculture systems (wheat, barley, maize, teff, sorghum, sugarcane and lentil) even when carbon revenues were excluded, primarily due to the higher prices of fruit produce. Carbon revenues were estimated using a plausible carbon price ranging from US$8/tCO2e to $40/tCO2e and carbon sequestration rates of 0.59 to 17.2 Mg C ha−1 year−1. The possibility of receiving carbon revenue increased the profitability of agroforestry by 0.5% when using the lowest utilized carbon price and carbon sequestration rate, by 20% when using the carbon price of $20 and the average carbon sequestration rate, and by 70% when using the highest price and highest sequestration rate of carbon. On average, carbon revenue increased the profitability of agroforestry by 150% in comparison to monoculture farming. We conclude that carbon income may have significant potential to motivate smallholders to convert to agroforestry when there is a proper management system, a sufficiently high carbon price and effective institutional support to mitigate the transition and transaction costs.

Animal agriculture is shifting toward larger farms and regional agglomerations in many countries. In step with this development, manure nutrients have started accumulating regionally, and are leading to increasing eutrophication problems. Nevertheless, the same trend may also prompt innovations in manure treatment. For example, Valio Ltd (the largest dairy processer in Finland) is planning a network of facilities that would remove water from manure, fraction the nutrients in it, and produce biogas from the excess methane. One of the main hurdles in developing this technology is that the current regulatory framework does not support a shift from diffuse loading, which is seen in the traditional application of manure on fields, to point-source loading; the regulations may even prevent such a change. This article analyzes a governance framework that addresses this dilemma in EU–Finland, and discusses how the governance described could curtail the nutrient loading of agriculture to waters. The approach is based on adaptive governance theory. We argue that traditional top–down regulation, which emphasizes food security, contains serious shortcomings when it comes to managing agricultural nutrient loading to waters, and that the current regulatory framework does not necessarily have the adaptive capacity to facilitate new, bottom–up solutions for manure treatment. Interestingly, the strict water quality requirements of the EU Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC) open new windows of opportunity for such solutions, and thus for improving the overall sustainability of animal agriculture.

In boreal commercial forests, carbon sequestration, climate change adaptation, and biodiversity conservation can be promoted through various measures. This study examines the factors affecting non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners' preferences for such forest management practices. A systematic literature review serves as a reference for the empirical analysis of a survey data on the Finnish NIPF owners' stated willingness to adopt thirteen distinct forest management practices. Binary logit models reveal socio-demographic factors, site-specific characteristics, previous forest management, and motivations for forest ownership that are associated with the stated adoption of management practices. Especially, environmental and financial motivations play an important role in decisions concerning forest management practices. Statistically significant factors vary depending on the forest management practice, reflecting the NIPF owner heterogeneity. Younger and highly educated forest owners are more supportive for various management practices that promote biodiversity, while older forest owners are reluctant towards deadwood retention. The results underline the importance of accounting for heterogeneous preferences regarding forest management practices when designing and implementing policies and advisory services aiming at enhancing carbon sequestration, climate change adaptation, or biodiversity in boreal commercial forests.

Law & economics scholars claim, among other things, to provide explanations of how law impacts behaviour. The aim of this article is to shed light on the conceptual and methodological difficulties related to analysis of the impact that law has on behaviour. The analysis advanced in the paper takes as its starting point a commentary on Richard Posner's interpretation of Hans Kelsen's pure theory of law. The work of Kelsen is treated as a meta-theoretical analysis that reveals some of the presumptions of theoretical approaches to law that claim to be scientific and, in particular, that claim to scientifically analyse the law's influence on behaviour. The article concludes with a methodological proposal on how to approach the identified methodological challenges and conceptual tensions that law & economics contends with.

We solve a stochastic high-dimensional optimal harvesting problem by using reinforcement learning algorithms developed for agents who learn an optimal policy in a sequential decision process through repeated experience. This approach produces optimal solutions without discretization of state and control variables. Our stand-level model includes mixed species, tree size structure, optimal harvest timing, choice between rotation and continuous cover forestry, stochasticity in stand growth, and stochasticity in the occurrence of natural disasters. The optimal solution or policy maps the system state to the set of actions, i.e., clear-cutting, thinning, or no harvest decisions as well as the intensity of thinning over tree species and size classes. The algorithm repeats the solutions for deterministic problems computed earlier with time-consuming methods. Optimal policy describes harvesting choices from any initial state and reveals how the initial thinning versus clear-cutting choice depends on the economic and ecological factors. Stochasticity in stand growth increases the diversity of species composition. Despite the high variability in natural regeneration, the optimal policy closely satisfies the certainty equivalence principle. The effect of natural disasters is similar to an increase in the interest rate, but in contrast to earlier results, this tends to change the management regime from rotation forestry to continuous cover management.

This article aims to reconcile tensions around 'the Anthropocene' by reviewing and integrating the discourses on the new geological epoch. It is argued that the Anthropocene discourses based on natural and social sciences are complementary. The anthropogenic epoch detrimental to the Earth's biodiversity, however, does not reduce to any discourse. Instead of calling to reject discourses that do not accept this limitation of language or alternatively do not show sensitivity to contextual matters, the article demonstrates how different Anthropocene discourses can be combined. The study concludes that in order to exit the epoch, anthropocentric discourses on the Anthropocene remain ineffective unless complemented by non-anthropocentric discourses.

We analyze how the content of ecosystem service research has evolved since the early 1990s. Conducting a computational bibliometric content analysis we process a corpus of 14,118 peer-reviewed scientific article abstracts on ecosystem services (ES) from Web of Science records. To provide a comprehensive content analysis of ES research literature, we employ a latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm. For three different time periods (1990-2000, 2001-2010, 2011-2016), we derive nine main ES topics arising from content analysis and elaborate on how they are related over time. The results show that natural science-based ES research analyzes oceanic, freshwater, agricultural, forest, and soil ecosystems. Pollination and land cover emerge as traceable standalone topics around 2001. Social science ES literature demonstrates a reflexive and critical lens on the role of ES research and includes critiques of market-oriented perspectives. The area where social and natural science converge most is about land use systems such as agriculture. Overall, we provide evidence of the strong natural science foundation, the highly interdisciplinary nature of ES research, and a shift in social ES research towards integrated assessments and governance approaches. Furthermore, we discuss potential reasons for observable topic developments.