This study aimed to assess the merit and suitability of individual functional units (FU) in expressing greenhouse gas emissions intensity in different dairy production systems. An FU provides a clearly defined and measurable reference to which input and output data are normalised. This enables the results from life-cycle assessment (LCA) of different systems to be treated as functionally equiva...

Despite the apparent abundance of land, agricultural land with a dependable growing period represents a fraction of the total land area in Ethiopia. Moreover, land degradation is extensive and severe, particularly in the highlands above 1500 meters above sea level, which account for about 40 percent of the total land area but home for 90 percent of the total population and 70 percent of livesto...

Contemporary urban areas are complex economic and transportation systems having a structured land use pattern. The utility value of land use is a measurement unit of the value of a specific land use zone in relation to the whole economic system. It is the effective economic output value of land use and it is defined according to concepts of accessibility level, economic level and spatial intera...

Land-use regimes vary throughout the world. Within the forest land-use regime there are several broad management strategies. Diverse views are prevalent about the superiority of one forest management strategy over the others, especially in relation to net benefits. These debates about net benefit cannot be solved from the current body of literature as they are mostly concluded by summing market...

This study proposes the use of marginal abatement cost curves to calculate environmental damages of agricultural systems in China's Loess Plateau. Total system costs and revenues, management characteristics and pollution attributes are imputed into a directional output distance function, which is then used to determine shadow prices and abatement cost curves for soil and nitrogen loss. Marginal...

while conventional data envelopment analysis models set targets separately for each decision making unit, centralized recourse allocation model is presented where there is a centralized decision maker that supervises all the operating units. optimizing of total input consumption and total output production is the main aim of this model. in this paper, firstly the centralized output production m...

Recent land reforms in China have sought to address fundamental problems with the Household Production Responsibility System such as land fragmentation. Primarily the reforms have targeted land productivity and grain output. However, the reforms have had a much broader effect on rural development as they have allowed a degree of household specialisation in non-grain activities both on and off t...

Inorganic C reactions are among the most important chemical reactions that occur in irrigated soils and may contribute to the total amount of C sequestered in those soils. Because CO2 can escape from soils to the atmosphere or return to precipitate carbonate minerals, soils are open systems with regard to inorganic C. We measured inorganic and organic C stored in southern Idaho soils having lon...

Imagine a world where the demand for food and other agricultural products is constant or increases regularly as populations and incomes grow. Land can only be used for agriculture or forest. Then the only ways to keep more land in forest are to increase agricultural yields, reduce population growth or depress incomes. The amount of land devoted to agriculture equals the total demand for agricul...

This study computes the eco-efficiency of High Yielding Variety (HYV) rice production by including an on-farm environmental damage index (OFEDI) as an undesirable output using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and then identifies its determinants by applying an interval regression procedure on a sample of 317 farmers from north-western Bangladesh. Results reveal that the mean level of the OFEDI-a...