This volume describes one of the most extensive grassland ecosystems and the efforts of Chinese scientists to understand it. Leading Chinese scientists attribute the decline in China's grasslands to overgrazing and excessive cultivation of marginal areas and discuss measures to limit the damage. The book gives its view on the Chinese approach to the study of grasslands and the relevance of this activity in China to global scientific concerns.
This book is a comprehensive volume that brings together vast knowledge about agricultural prairies in one place, providing concise information and providing concise descriptions of natural resources and their influence on crop productivity. It provides detailed descriptions about natural settings as well as lucid discussions on soil fertility and
Northeast Asia is a region with highly disparate levels of industrialization and political systems. It also contains some very troubling security flashpoints the Taiwan Strait, the Korean Peninsula, and the East China Sea. China s rapacious quest for energy and rapid industrial expansion have led to intense international competition with Japan and the United States and internal instability as well. North Korea poses two distinct environmental security threats: famine refugees and the regime s use of nuclear blackmail for subsidized energy. Yet there is very little regional cooperation, despite the need to manage disputes over energy, natural resources, and pervasive pollution. The Environmental Dimension of Asian Security examines these issues through a regional environmental security complex that explores the potential for greater intersubjective understandings of regional environmental and natural resource problems and greater institutional collaboration and management."
Nearly two-thirds of the world's population live in Asia, and many countries in that region are currently undergoing very rapid industrial, agricultural and economic development. The Framework Convention on Climate Change constrains developed countries with regard to their future emissions of greenhouse gases, but recognizes the special needs of developing countries. There is growing appreciation of the ways in which developing countries in the Asian region both contribute to global changes (by altering biogeochemical pathways and cycles) and are themselves affected by those changes. This volume uses the intellectual efforts and findings of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) community to provide the first integrated analysis of the interactions between global change and Asian change, giving particular attention to China's role. The book will be of interest to readers in a wide range of academic disciplines (natural sciences and socio-economic) and for those involved in national and international policy development relevant to global change.
This is an ethnographic study of a community of Mongolian herders who have been undergoing dramatic environmental and social transformations since 1980. It provides a rare window of observation into a fascinating and important, though remote and relatively understudied, region of modern China, and documents some of the unintended harmful consequences of decollectivization and economic development. Initially, the book presents a case study of land degradation and shows how competing social and cultural forces at the local, national, and international level actively shape that process. More broadly, it focuses on local experiences of modernization and the ways that marginalized people creatively appropriate alien technologies to serve their own ethnic identity and cultural renewal. The book aims to deepen our understanding of environmental change as a social process by exploring significant tensions between such symbolic dichotomies as Chinese/Mongol, farmer/herder, private/collective, development/conservation, Western/Asian, and scientific/indigenous. It argues that the reconstruction of local landscape cannot be separated from the social context of economic insecurity and political fear, nor from the cultural context of group identity and environmental symbolism. Ideologically informed perceptions of the land prove to be highly relevant in both shaping and contesting international development agendas, national grassland policies, and the daily practices of local production. In presenting the full range of material and symbolic stakes now in play on the Chinese grasslands, the book demonstrates that human-land interactions involve social dimensions on a global scale of widely underestimated complexity. Throughout, the author draws from his extensive fieldwork to enrich his study with poignant (and sometimes humorous) anecdotes and biographical sketches.
In both India and China, economic reforms have generated challenges for local institutions. This book studies the political experiences in India and China from an interdisciplinary perspective. It examines the process of democratisation, highlighting the demands for participation and the power structures interjecting them.
This book provides a comprehensive overview of grassland ecosystems based on publications by Chinese scholars. It offers an up-to-date review of the recent advances in grassland research in China, discusses the climatic and physical conditions governing the grasslands, describes their types and distribution, and introduces a new classification scheme for grassland ecosystems. Further, it details the plant, animal, and microbial compositions of each grassland ecosystem type, examining the above and below ground relationships between phytomass, vegetation succession, and past/current management practices with a particular focus on the steppes in China. It also includes references that are only available in the Chinese language. This scientifically rigorous book offers insights into knowledge gaps for the scientific community and identifies pressing issues facing practitioners of grassland ecology and management. It can be used as a textbook for undergraduate and graduate students in ecology, environmental science, natural resource management, agriculture, and other relevant fields, and is also a valuable reference resource for researchers studying drylands in China or around the globe.
Faced with unprecedented socioeconomic changes, China has increasingly embraced collaborative governance (CG), the sharing of power and discretion between and within public, private, and nonprofit sectors for public purposes. This book analyzes new areas of CG development such as environmental protection, disaster response, and infrastructure.
