Climate change and environmental degradation are increasingly threatening rice production in the coastal regions of the developing world, where the goals of raising productivity and building resilience became a joint priority. Climate smart agriculture offers a portfolio of practices that serve both goals, yet knowledge on how farmers in saline rice systems combine these practices, and why adoption remains often partial, is still limited. This study jointly examines the factors associated with the adoption of five common climate smart practices (i.e., crop diversification, agroforestry, integrated soil fertility management, small scale irrigation, and integrated pest management) among modern rice farmers in southwest Bangladesh, using a multivariate probit model. The analysis draws on 493 farm households randomly selected from complete household lists in three purposively selected villages, one in each of three districts spanning the region’s salinity gradient. Results show that adoption decisions are interdependent, and most households maintain a portfolio of three or four practices. Soil improving practices complement one another, whereas small scale irrigation substitutes for diversification and soil and pest management. Education, farm size, livestock ownership, and climatic exposure are associated with specific individual practices, while access to credit, extension services, and market information are associated with adoption across the portfolio. The findings highlight the important roles of institutional access and climate-related factors in the adoption of climate smart agricultural practices, particularly advisory services, credit access, and support for investment-intensive practices.
In recent decades, collective approaches to food provisioning have garnered increasing attention in agri-food studies and on the ground. A wide range of community-oriented food practices, including community gardens, urban allotments, community kitchens, social supermarkets, surplus redistribution networks and more have been documented and theorized in the academic literature. Urban food sharing, understood here as collective acts across the food system, describes any activity that involves the sharing of food, spaces and stuff for the purpose of growing produce, eating and cooking, or redistributing surplus. Furthermore, food sharing encompasses not just organizational routines, but also social expectations, norms, symbolic values, and different ways of knowing and doing. This critical interpretive review collected and summarized peer reviewed research published between 2000 and 2023 to identify how the existing literature on urban food sharing attends to social norms across geographies. Our analysis uncovers ongoing tensions between competing normative demands—such as autonomy versus safety, efficiency versus conviviality, or charity versus solidarity—especially in non-familial, semi-public settings. Having identified gaps in the literature, we call for future research into food sharing to challenge normative blind spots by taking into account dynamics of care, the conflictual politics of food sharing initiatives, and changing social norms.
Chromium contamination in sugarcane soils is often combined with co-metals and salinity caused by tannery effluent, electroplating effluent, paper mill wastewater, vinasse fertigation and filter cake. Hence, single element toxicity assessment does not provide realistic assessment of its exposure. The present review summarizes research on chromium behaviour along the soil, root, stalk and cane juice in sugarcane. Cr mobility depends on soil pH and redox potential (Eh), while salinity adds an additional control through ionic strength and chloride complexation. Sequential extraction and speciation analysis prove that bioavailable fraction is more important for plant toxicity than total Cr concentration. Cr(VI) enters roots via sulphate and phosphate transporters via mimicking oxyanions and this mechanism differs from that of other metal ions that use ion channels, a route that salt-induced PHT1 expression could plausibly modulate, although this has not been tested in sugarcane. In proxy species, combined Cr and salinity exposure raises reactive oxygen species production and membrane damage beyond the level induced by either stress alone, whereas in sugarcane the downregulation of PEP carboxylase, pyruvate orthophosphate dikinase and photosystem proteins has so far been documented only under salinity applied by itself. Whether the two stresses interact on C4 carbon assimilation in cane remains untested. Root-to-stalk transfer of Cr is low at most sites examined, but not at all of them, and measurable Cr reaches cane juice at concentrations that have driven hazard quotients above unity in two of the four field studies assessed. Bagasse biochar, biochar with nZVI, halotolerant Cr-reducing microorganisms and water management based on redox reactions all reduce Cr bioavailability, but field experiments in cane are lacking. Factorial experiments investigating Cr behaviour depending on salinity gradient, juice level speciation and field trials in ratoons are required.
Edberto Moura Lima, Bano Mehdi-Schulz, José Miguel Reichert
The Atlantic Forest, one of the world's most threatened biodiversity hotspots, faces intense pressure from agricultural expansion and inadequate land governance. Understanding the spatial drivers and future trajectories of land-use and land cover (LULC) change is critical for safeguarding the ecosystem services and biodiversity that remnant natural areas provide. This study investigated the relative importance of multiple biophysical, socioeconomic, and demographic drivers of natural ecosystem loss in the Guaporé River Basin (GRB), a 246,300-ha subtropical Atlantic Forest agricultural watershed in southern Brazil. We combined a municipality-level temporal trend analysis to characterize historical LULC dynamics (1998–2019) with the Dinamica EGO cellular automata model, calibrated using Weight of Evidence (WoE), to simulate future landscapes under 2030 and 2050 scenarios. Our results reveal divergent ecological dynamics across the basin. The Northern region experienced extensive remnant vegetation loss (1.55% yr −1 conversion to altered ecosystems), driven by flat terrain and high agricultural productivity, while the Southern region showed partial natural regeneration (1.40% yr −1 transition from altered to regenerating vegetation), linked to steeper slopes and vegetation extraction practices. Despite apparent recovery, closer analysis reveals a regressive process of ecological simplification, in which remnant vegetation is progressively replaced by regenerating vegetation. Future projections suggest that, without strengthened enforcement of Brazil's Natural Vegetation Protection Law, the Northern basin will lose an additional 15,903 ha of remnant vegetation by 2050. These findings highlight critical spatial mismatches between legal protection frameworks and actual land-use pressures, with direct implications for conservation planning, watershed management, and biodiversity protection in the Atlantic Forest biome.
