Global climate change and increasing urbanization worldwide intensify the need for a better understanding of human heat stress dynamics in urban systems. During heat waves, which are expected to increase in number and intensity, the development of urban cool islands could be a lifesaver for many elderly and vulnerable people. The use of remote sensing data offers the unique possibility to study...

One commonly observed issue in the vast majority of Asian cities is economic growth that pushes land prices up, especially in urban and inner-city areas. Consequently, lowand middle-income households are priced out of land markets. As affordable housing in Asia is a serious and considerable challenge, governments have implemented housing programmes, policies and institutional arrangements to pr...

BACKGROUND A major global challenge is to provide agricultural production systems that are able to sustain growing demands for food, feed, fibre and renewable raw materials without exacerbating climate change. Detailed and reliable data on the CO(2) balance of different agricultural management activities and inputs as a basis to quantify carbon footprints of agriculture are still lacking. This ...

Payment for ecosystem services programs are being implemented in a wide variety of settings, but whether and in what contexts such programs present ‘win–win’ scenarios that simultaneously improve human wellbeing and achieve conservation goals remains poorly understood. Based on semi-structured interviews with early program participants enrolling either collectivelyor individually-held land, we ...

The cost of this wall of codes is clear for managers: They must fill out endless forms—repeatedly explaining their safety procedures, overtime rules, and so forth. In addition, they must host endless visits from compliance auditors. Less obviously, the wall of codes is costly for consumers and other stakeholders who care about the social performance of businesses. Not only must they pay the (pa...

Agricultural land has a strategic function as the primary food provider for the people of Indonesia. Various methods of agricultural production estimation, particularly food crops, provide different information. It can be a source of error in decision making. Satellite data, provides information periodically, wide coverage area, can be used as a source of information on the condition of agricul...

extremes and produced a story which is vivid, factual and Convincing. The theme?that of the cause and course of alcoholism ln a personality of refinement?is handled with insight and knowledge, sympathy and toleration, and built up without either sentimentality or sensationalism. Events move quickly but carry conviction, the style is impersonal and the descriptions succinct. To sticklers, the us...

The Passage mechanism introduced in this paper provides an easy and intuitive way to transport various types of digital objects by using also normal physical objects without any special identification tags. The current implementation of the Passage mechanism utilizes electronic scales and contact-free identification devices and thus allows for identification of arbitrary physical objects as wel...