Assessing the implications of water harvesting intensification on upstream-downstream ecosystem services: A case study in the Lake Tana basin.

Water harvesting systems have improved productivity in various regions in sub-Saharan Africa. Similarly, they can help retain water in landscapes, build resilience against droughts and dry spells, and thereby contribute to sustainable agricultural intensification. However, there is no strong empirical evidence that shows the effects of intensification of water harvesting on upstream-downstream social-ecological systems at a landscape scale.

The quadruple squeeze: defining the safe operating space for freshwater use to achieve a triply green revolution in the anthropocene.

Humanity has entered a new phase of sustainability challenges, the Anthropocene, in which human development has reached a scale where it affects vital planetary processes. Under the pressure from a quadruple squeeze-from population and development pressures, the anthropogenic climate crisis, the anthropogenic ecosystem crisis, and the risk of deleterious tipping points in the Earth system-the degrees of freedom for sustainable human exploitation of planet Earth are severely restrained. It is in this reality that a new green revolution in world food production needs to occur, to attain food security and human development over the coming decades.

Modeling carbon turnover in five terrestrial ecosystems in the boreal zone using multiple criteria of acceptance.

Estimates of carbon fluxes and turnover in ecosystems are key elements in the understanding of climate change and in predicting the accumulation of trace elements in the biosphere. In this paper we present estimates of carbon fluxes and turnover times for five terrestrial ecosystems using a modeling approach. Multiple criteria of acceptance were used to parameterize the model, thus incorporating large amounts of multi-faceted empirical data in the simulations in a standardized manner.