The OECD is a unique forum where the governments of 30 democracies work together to address the economic, social and environmental challenges of globalisation. The OECD is also at the forefront of efforts to understand and to help governments respond to new developments and concerns, such as corporate governance, the information economy and the challenges of an ageing population. The Organisati...

In light of concerns over climate change and the need for national inventories for greenhouse gas reporting, there has been a recent increase in interest in the ‘carbon foot printing’ of products. A number of LCA-based carbon reporting tools have been developed in both the agricultural and renewable energy sectors, both of which follow calculation methodologies to account for GHG emissions from...

Global warming is attributed to increasing greenhouse gas emissions and mounting concentrations of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere. Since the middle of the 19th century, increasing worldwide anthropogenic activity is said to have given rise to a steady increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is corroborated by direct measurement of CO2 concentrations at Mauna Loa Lab...

The production of mineral nitrogen represents a large fossil energy input in Swedish agriculture. However, mineral nitrogen can be produced in the Haber-Bosch synthesis, with input from renewable energy. This could lower the dependency on fossil energy and the emissions of greenhouse gases in agricultural production. The aim of this study was to investigate the land use, energy use and greenhou...

Emissions trading systems as a means of air pollution control have been developed in recent years to address some important limitations of traditional command and control environmental regulation. Trading systems address many of the inefficiencies of command systems and may promote cost-effectiveness by introducing flexibility and providing incentives for sources with lower control costs to und...

We develop individual-based Monte Carlo methods to explore how climate change can alter insect voltinism under varying greenhouse gas emissions scenarios by using input distributions of diapause termination or spring emergence, development rate, and diapause initiation, linked to daily temperature and photoperiod. We show concurrence of these projections with a field dataset, and then explore ...

COVER ARTICLE John Rogers et al Compact monocrystalline silicon solar modules with high voltage outputs and mechanically flexible designs REVIEW David King et al Biofuels and synthetic fuels in the US and China: A review of Well-to-Wheel energy use and greenhouse gas emissions with the impact of land-use change

The Review takes as its starting point, on the balance of probabilities and not as a matter of belief, the majority opinion of the Australian and international scientific communities that human activities resulted in substantial global warming from the mid 20th century, and that continued growth in greenhouse gas concentrations caused by human-induced emissions would generate high risks of dang...

Potential interactions between food production and climate mitigation are explored for two situations in sub-Saharan Africa, where deforestation and land degradation overlap with hunger and poverty. Three agriculture intensification scenarios for supplying nitrogen to increase crop production (mineral fertilizer, herbaceous legume cover crops--green manures--and agroforestry--legume improved tr...