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Turkey is a laggard in terms of the achievement of its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and one of the primary issues it faces is environmental deterioration. Therefore, a policy-level reorientation may be needed to address this relevant issue. From this standpoint, this research assesses the impact of renewable energy (RE) use and financial development on the emissions of CO2 as well as the role of urbanization and agriculture, utilizing a dataset stretching between 1985 and 2019. By applying the innovative quantile-on-quantile regression (QQR) and non-parametric Granger causality in quantiles techniques, the study assesses the ways in which the quantiles of the independent variables affect the quantiles of CO2 emissions. The outcomes from the QQR show that in all quantiles, financial development, economic growth, urbanization, and agriculture impact CO2 emissions positively, while in the middle quantiles, the influence of renewable energy use on CO2 is negative. Furthermore, the outcomes from the non-parametric Granger causality test disclosed that in mean and variance, all the variables could predict CO2 emissions at different quantiles. A complete SDG-oriented policy framework has been proposed based on the research’s findings so that Turkey may move toward reaching its SDG 13 and SDG 7 targets.

After many years of decline, hunger in Africa is growing again. This represents a global societal issue that all disciplines concerned with data analysis are facing. The rapid and accurate identification of food insecurity situations is a complex challenge. Although a number of food security alert and monitoring systems exist in food insecure countries, the data and methodologies they are based on do not allow for comprehending food security in all its complexity. In this study, we focus on two key food security indicators: the food consumption score (FCS) and the household dietary diversity score (HDDS). Based on the observation that producing such indicators is expensive in terms of time and resources, we propose the FSPHD (Food Security Prediction based on Heterogeneous Data) framework, based on state-of-the-art machine and deep learning models, to enable the estimation of FCS and HDDS starting from publicly available heterogeneous data. We take into account the indicators estimated using data from the Permanent Agricultural Survey conducted by the Burkina Faso government from 2009 to 2018 as reference data. We produce our estimations starting from heterogeneous data that include rasters (e.g., population density, land use, soil quality), GPS points (hospitals, schools, violent events), line vectors (waterways), quantitative variables (maize prices, World Bank variables, meteorological data) and time series (Smoothed Brightness Temperature - SMT, rainfall estimates, maize prices). The experimental results show a promising performance of our framework, which outperforms competing methods, thus paving the way for the development of advanced food security prediction systems based on state-of-the-art data science technologies. International audience

Abstract The recent proliferation of mobile phones in rural Africa has also led to increased interest in mobile financial services (MFS), such as mobile money and mobile banking. Such services are often portrayed as promising tools to improve agricultural finance, especially among smallholders who are typically underserved by traditional banks. However, empirical evidence on the actual use of MFS for agricultural activities is thin. Here, we use nationally representative data from Kenya to analyze the use of mobile payments, mobile savings, and mobile credit among the farming population. We find that more than 80% of farmers use mobile money, but only 15% use this innovation for agriculture-related payments. Mobile loans for agricultural investments are used by less than 1% of farmers. Usage rates are somewhat higher among farmers in modern supply chains, even though for them traditional banking services are often also accessible and still much more important. Overall, the use of MFS for agriculture is lower than commonly assumed, indicating that these services do not yet have a transformative impact on smallholder farming. As Kenya is one of the leaders of the MFS boom in Africa, this general finding likely holds for other African countries as well.

Forests can make important contributions to the diet quality of forest proximate people for example through the direct provision of food. However, ongoing deforestation and forest degradation influence the availability of forest food – potentially decreasing the diet quality of people relying on forest food. Using a combination of food frequency questionnaires, wealth questionnaires, interviews, principal component analysis and land cover maps, this study examines the importance of forest food for diet quality in the two villages of Houay Tom and Maipaksang, Sangthong District, Laos (N = 49 households). We found that 71% of the respondents consumed forest food in the past week – and that a decrease in the forest area appears to have affected local people's diet quality negatively. Overall, forest food contributed to the consumption of six different food groups, and food sourced from the forest resulted in the consumption of minimum one additional food group for 48% of the respondents. Specifically, we found a significant positive association between forest food consumption and the consumption of more meat, poultry, and fish. Also, our findings suggest that the forest was most important for people belonging to the bottom wealth group. That is, this group exhibited higher consumption frequencies of forest food and forest food contributed more to their mean dietary diversity score and total consumption frequency compared to the upper- and middle wealth groups. Finally, the diet quality of households in the bottom wealth group might be more negatively affected by deforestation because these households typically are less engaged in various income-generating activities. These results point to the need of integrating forests into food and nutrition security and agriculture development policies.

Background: The nexus of agri-food and sustainability in economic development has recently attracted the interest of policymakers, as global challenges like climate change and food security are revisited and reassessed. The critical role of food production in economic development has been emphasized through targeted agricultural quality policies. Many developed countries worldwide, including EU member states, have introduced food quality policies that could support sustainability.Scope and approach: This paper combines knowledge obtained by several groups in a broad EU study and the reflections on policy-related results by EU-stakeholders, streamlined by a Delphi analysis.Current work presents research-based policy recommendations and statements on various quality schemes, introductory inferred from expert opinions throughout Europe, gauged through a modified policy Delphi framework.Key findings and conclusions: A roadmap of policy and practical proposals have been identified for all key stakeholders involved in these initiatives, implying the need to reshape the supply chain dynamics to continuously improve producers, processors, retailers, and consumers within the EU and definitively worldwide. Furthermore, implementing a holistic approach considering environmental and socio-economic features can improve the effectiveness of EU food quality policies.

This paper set out to explore the precision agriculture (PA)-training needs of students studying in agricultural universities in the Euro-Mediterranean region (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain). SPARKLE is a Knowledge Alliance Project, funded by the European Union (EU), and one of its main goals is to narrow the innovation divide between entrepreneurship and the effective application of sustainable PA. During the project, the research conducted in all countries in the Euro-Mediterranean region revealed differences in the PA-training needs of university students. Additionally, this paper set out to explore the socioeconomic characteristics of students that affect their interest and knowledge towards PA. Finally, this paper aimed to understand the scope, present status and strategies for improving PA training in agricultural universities in the Euro-Mediterranean region. The following descriptive statistics and two multivariate analysis techniques were used: Two-Step Cluster Analysis (TSCA) and Categorical Regression (CATREG). Results support the notion that the lack of “PA knowledge/interest” adds to the technological gap amongst university students, slow adoption of PA and lower levels of overall rural economic development. These findings will be used as the fundamental cognition for the development of a joint action plan and several other national plans in the selected regions. The authors would like to acknowledge the cooperation of the partners of “SPARKLE—Sustainable Precision Agriculture: Research and Knowledge for Learning how to be an agri-Entrepreneur”, Project co-funded by the Erasmus + program of the European Union. Peer reviewed

Conditional incentives are a promising complementary approach to conserve tropical forests, for example, in multiple-use protected areas. In this paper we analyze the environmental impacts of Bolsa Floresta, a forest conservation program that combines direct conditional payments with livelihood-focused investments in 15 multiple-use reserves in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. We use grid-based data, nearest-neighbor matching, and panel data econometrics to compare three forest-related program outcomes – deforestation, degradation, and fires – of participating and non-participating reserve areas. Forest threats were low before and after treatment, because the program prioritized low-pressure sites. Thus, we find significant but small additional conservation effects from the implementation of the program. Notwithstanding, treatment effects are relatively larger in areas with higher deforestation pressure and higher potential agricultural income. Our findings add to the growing body of evidence showing that adverse spatial targeting of conservation incentives, i.e. disproportionally enrolling low–pressure sites, is a prime cause for the low additionality found in rigorous impact evaluations of many existing initiatives. http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100002347 Federal Ministry of Education and Research Bonn Office http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100007843 Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659 German Research Foundation

Abstract Over the past two decades, the private rental sector has grown significantly in Japan. Once an overlooked sector of the market, it has been seized by the financial industry to the point of becoming the second largest REIT residential market in the world. This paper explores the development of residential REITs in Japan, in a context of demographic decline and urban shrinkage. It highlights the strategies of major Japanese real estate groups to diversify their activities and strengthen their control over popular downtown Tokyo neighbourhoods, building on government initiatives to revitalize land markets and stabilize the banking system through real estate investment instruments. As the paper shows, the need to secure financial investors' expectations of attractive returns has led REIT asset managers to target the vast majority of their leasing activity to Japan’s young, “promising” corporate employees. By pointing to the mediation of large corporations in the landlord-tenant relationship, the paper brings these neglected actors into the framework of financialized rental housing, and puts the analysis into the broader context of employment.