Incentives as effective as penalties for slowing Amazon deforestation

Research review shows incentives slow rain forest encroachment

2014-06-25

(Press-News.org) The rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has declined.

An international team of scientists, including one from Virginia Tech, reviewed published research about policy interventions and commodity market effects, and determined that positive incentives for farmers, counties, and states can do as much to preserve forests as public policies that call for penalties.

"The challenge now is to build upon this progress," the team reports in an article in the June 6 issue of Science. "Some immediate and simple positive incentives for responsible, low-deforestation farmers could be established without major new policies or markets for ecosystem services."

Suggestions include simplified regulatory requirements or discounts on environmental licensing procedures, better terms on pre-harvest packages from commodity suppliers, and lower interest rates or better terms on loans from banks for legally compliant landholders.

"Still, deforestation is only one of the threats to the Amazon region," said Leandro Castello, an assistant professor of fish and wildlife conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment at Virginia Tech, a co-author of the review article.

"There is an urgent need to shift the Amazon conservation paradigm to encompass the freshwater ecosystems, which are being rapidly degraded by deforestation and construction of hydroelectric dams," said Castello, who is first author on one of the articles reviewed. "We now know that freshwater ecosystems could be managed through policy and supply chains in a manner similar to that which is being done with deforestation."

Castello, whose specialty is Amazon fisheries, is leading a team from the Woods Hole Research Center and the University of California Santa Barbara, funded by NASA, assessing the impacts on wetlands and river ecosystems caused by extreme climatic events in collaboration with Brazilian scientists.

INFORMATION: Additional resources are available through the Virginia Tech News website.

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

New research shows freshers struggle to remember basic A-level concepts

2014-06-25

University freshers struggle to remember basic concepts from their A-level studies according to new research from the University of East Anglia. A new report published today shows that even grade-A students could only remember 40 per cent of their A-Level syllabus by the first week of term at university. Researchers tested nearly 600 students in their first week of term at five universities – three of which were in the prestigious Russell Group. It is hoped that the findings will assist the re-design of A-Levels to make them more relevant to higher education. The ...

Food ingredient fears

2014-06-25

Daily headlines on internet pages and blogs claim: "New ingredient X is harmful to your health." Such warnings can scare people into avoiding these ingredients without actually knowing the facts, leading some people to have food fears about ingredients such as sugar, fat, sodium, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), mono sodium glutamate (MSG), and others. While some of these food fears are merited, others can be misleading. A new Cornell University study published in Food Quality and Preference, investigated who might be most prone to food fears, why, and what can they do ...

Young researcher discovers source of disco clams' light show

2014-06-25

Four years after falling in love with the disco clam – a cute little mollusk known for its underwater light show – Lindsey Dougherty has discovered the secret of its mirrored lips. A dive instructor and University of California, Berkeley, graduate student, Dougherty first encountered the two-inch clam in 2010 while diving with her mother and sister in Wakatobi, Indonesia. She and her sister even did a bit of underwater disco dancing to the clam's flashing beat. "I've dived with humpback whales and great white sharks," said Dougherty, who first learned to dive at age ...

Hidden origins of pulmonary hypertension revealed by network modeling

2014-06-25

Boston, MA – In a groundbreaking study, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have identified a related family of molecules believed to be a major root cause of pulmonary hypertension, a deadly vascular disease with undefined origins. This is one of the first studies to leverage advanced computational network modeling to decipher the molecular secrets of this complex human disease. The study is published online June 24, 2014 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. Despite the rising number of people diagnosed with the disease worldwide, pulmonary hypertension ...

Meeting Aichi biodiversity targets for protected areas

2014-06-25

Habitat loss is a primary driver of biodiversity loss – so it isn't surprising that optimising the amount of protected land is high on policy-makers' priorities. However, according to research to be published in the Open Access journal PLOS Biology on June 24 by Oscar Venter and colleagues, many protected areas are established in locations of low economic value, failing to protect the imperilled biodiversity found on more valuable land. More of the earth's land surface is set to be protected in the next decade, but the trend of using poor quality land seems set to continue. ...

Engineered bacteria keep mice lean

2014-06-25

Obesity levels are rising throughout the world. As obesity rates increase, so do the incidences of diabetes, heart disease, and other serious health conditions. The bacteria within an individual's gut can influence their susceptibility to these disorders. Therefore, altering the microbe population in the gut could prevent or reverse disease. A June 24th study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation demonstrates that modified bacteria can prevent weight gain in mice. Sean Davies and colleagues at Vanderbilt University made bacteria that produce a compound called NAPE, ...

Estrogen receptor β limits breast cancer growth and indicates outcome

2014-06-25

Millions of women will develop breast cancer at some point in their lives. While many women will completely recover from this cancer, others will not respond to treatment, and predicting which women will not respond to treatment is currently difficult. Breast cancer cells divide rapidly, and treatments that can restrict their growth are of great interest. In a June 24th study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Rong Li and colleagues at the University of Texas determined that activation of the estrogen receptor β (ERβ) limits tumor cell growth. Cancer cells ...

Novel biomarker predicts febrile seizure-related epilepsy, UCI study finds

2014-06-25

Irvine, Calif. — A newly discovered biomarker – visible in brain scans for hours after febrile seizures – predicts which individuals will subsequently develop epilepsy, according to UC Irvine researchers. This diagnostic ability could lead to improved use of preventive therapies for the disorder. A team led by Dr. Tallie Z. Baram found that rats exhibiting this novel signal in magnetic resonance imaging scans of their brains manifested symptoms of epilepsy months after experiencing very long febrile seizures. Those that did not possess this biomarker remained free of ...

Team explains how mutated X-linked mental retardation protein impairs neuron function

2014-06-25

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – There are new clues about malfunctions in brain cells that contribute to intellectual disability and possibly other developmental brain disorders. Professor Linda Van Aelst of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has been scrutinizing how the normal version of a protein called OPHN1 helps enable excitatory nerve transmission in the brain, particularly at nerve-cell docking ports containing AMPA receptors (AMPARs). Her team's new work, published June 24 in the Journal of Neuroscience, provides new mechanistic insight into how OPHN1 defects can ...

Animal study unveils predictive marker for epilepsy development following febrile seizure

2014-06-25

Washington, DC — Within hours of a fever-induced seizure, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may be able to detect brain changes that occur in those most likely to develop epilepsy later in life, according to an animal study published in the June 25 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings may one day help improve methods to detect children at a heightened risk for developing epilepsy and guide efforts to prevent epilepsy development in those at greatest risk. Febrile seizures — convulsions brought on by fever — typically last only a few minutes and are relatively ...

Novel radiation therapy QA method: Monte Carlo simulation meets deep learning for fast, accurate epid transmission dose generation

A 100-fold leap into the unknown: a new search for muonium conversion into antimuonium

A new approach to chiral α-amino acid synthesis - photo-driven nitrogen heterocyclic carbene catalyzed highly enantioselective radical α-amino esterification

Physics-defying discovery sheds new light on how cells move

Institute for Data Science in Oncology announces new focus-area lead for advancing data science to reduce public cancer burden

Korea University College of Medicine successfully concludes the 2025 Lee Jong-Wook Fellowship on Infectious Disease Specialists Program

Girls are happiest at school – for good reasons

Researchers from the University of Maryland School of Medicine discover genetic ancestry is a critical component of assessing head and neck cancerous tumors

Can desert sand be used to build houses and roads?

[Press-News.org] Incentives as effective as penalties for slowing Amazon deforestation
Research review shows incentives slow rain forest encroachment

Incentives as effective as penalties for slowing Amazon deforestation

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: