‘Mind the Gap’: Reconnecting Local Actions and Multi-Level Policies to Bridge the Governance Gap. An Example of Soil Erosion Action from East Africa

Achieving change to address soil erosion has been a global yet elusive goal for decades. Efforts to implement effective solutions have often fallen short due to a lack of sustained, context-appropriate and multi-disciplinary engagement with the problem. Issues include prevalence of short-term funding for ‘quick-fix’ solutions; a lack of nuanced understandings of institutional, socio-economic or cultural drivers of erosion problems; little community engagement in design and testing solutions; and, critically, a lack of traction in integrating locally designed solutions into policy and institutional processes. This paper focusses on the latter issue of local action for policy integration, drawing on experiences from a Tanzanian context to highlight the practical and institutional disjuncts that exist; and the governance challenges that can hamper efforts to address and build resilience to soil erosion. By understanding context-specific governance processes, and joining them with realistic, locally designed actions, positive change has occurred, strengthening local-regional resilience to complex and seemingly intractable soil erosion challenges.

The Landslides Developed with the Evolution of the River Terraces in the Loess Plateau, China

Landslide investigation in the center part of loess plateau reflects that most of large-scale old and ancient landslides lie on river terraces at different heights, but the small ones usually occur along the sides of V-shaped loess valleys, which implies that there is an inherent connection between the landslides and the erosion action. Since river terraces were formed by intermittent uplift of the crust, which controls the features of river erosion and the thickness of loess on the terraces. The analysis of typical loess landslides in this region shows that during relative static period, lateral erosion was dominated, so river valley was widened, which induced some large-scale landslides because the toe of slope was strongly eroded. While during the uplift period, vertical erosion was dominated, and the loess began to deposit on the terraces above water level, with the downcutting of the river, a narrow V-shaped valley formed, and then small loess landsides occurred on both sides of the rivers. Therefore, intermittent crustal uplifts not only led to the formation of multi-degree of terraces, but also induce alternative occurrence of large-scale and small loess landslides.

Conservation of crop germplasm: an overview of the FAO/IBPGR regional programme for South West Asia

SynopsisThe International Board for Plant Genetic Resources (IBPGR) has paid particular emphasis to SW Asia in its endeavour to collect, conserve and promote utilisation of the world's plant germplasm. This is in view of the region's rich genetic diversity in many crop plants and their weedy/wild relatives, coupled with its alarming rate of genetic erosion. Action during the past decade has focused on collecting mainly cereal and grain legume crops and their closest wild relatives within the framework of a regional programme encompassing six countries. Gene banks were also set up in these member countries to handle a full range of operations including seed storage, characterisation/preliminary evaluation and documentation. In future, emphasis will be placed on ecogeographical surveys prior to mounting collecting missions and on more characterisation/preliminary evaluation work.