This paper explores the phenomenon of food riots. It argues that the riots may have been triggered by spikes in food prices in 2007–8, but there were many other factors that underpinned them. Demonstrators challenged injustice, inequality and political repression. Food riots were part of an important groundswell of mobilization that brought together a wide range of political coalitions for change and the promotion of human dignity.
This paper deals with one basic problem that southern African countries will have to face in any transformation of their agriculture: if these societies are ‘labour reserves’ can they be easily transformed so as to eliminate labour migration. Zimbabwe seems to have an official policy of ending ‘divided families’ by pushing some into being unambiguously working class families with no land and others into a settled, non‐migratory peasantry. Thus former white‐owned land is only distributed to those without jobs. But this could be only a more radical variant of plans that were attempted in the 1950s to end migrant labour. Are today's plans for separating out worker‐peasants into separate classes any more realistic? Isn't there some danger of creating a landless, unemployed stratum in between, and of ignoring the needs of women heads of households? May it not be better to recognise that combining paid work and farming may have to continue for some time as Mozambique and Nicaragua seem to have done?
Investment in infrastructure is recognized as a key enabler of economic prosperity, but it is also important for addressing social and environmental challenges, including climate change mitigation and addressing fuel poverty. The UK Government Strategy Investing in Britain's Future argues that significant investment in "resilient, cost effective and sustainable energy supplies" is needed to meet these challenges. However, current methods of assessing the costs and benefits of infrastructure investment, and the subsequent design of business models needed to deliver this investment, often prioritise partial economic gains over social and environmental objectives. This paper extends the business model canvas approach to allow designing business models and evaluation methods that can incorporate social and environmental value streams and propositions as well as economic values in order to facilitate genuinely sustainable infrastructure investment. It demonstrates the usefulness of this extension through two case studies of the development of smart grids for electricity distribution and local heat delivery networks in the UK. Smart grids are essential for maintaining the security and reliability of electricity systems whilst incorporating increasing amounts of low carbon generation in distribution networks. District heat networks can facilitate the efficient supply of low carbon heat. However, both will require significant levels of investment, co-ordination between public, private and regulatory actors, and will deliver a range of economic, social and environmental costs and benefits to these actors. Drawing on empirical interviews with local actors involved in smart grid and heat network developments, and recent work on valuation and business model canvas analysis, the paper challenges the traditional view of a business model as only creating one form of value. Accounting for multiple types of value helps to identify business models that are more likely to achieve the environmental and social goals of infrastructure transformation and opens the door for new actors. Finally, the paper introduces an approach to complex systems modelling of infrastructure investment decisions to take into account the range of actors and the diversity of motivations of these actors.
Feed-in tariffs (FiTs) in the UK have been introduced to stimulate growth in small-scale renewables such as photovoltaics and micro-wind. They form one of the UK's key policies to decarbonise electricity by 2030. However, the evidence used to inform the policy was predominantly related to costs, capacity and deployment; not contribution to meeting decarbonisation targets. This paper employs an integrated hybrid lifecycle assessment method, which overcomes boundary limitations of traditional process-based assessments, to measure the full lifecycle emissions of solar PV and micro-wind technologies eligible under FiTs. Environmental assessments of policies often don't take account of the lifecycle emissions of technologies, therefore underestimating their emissions contribution and overestimating the success of policies towards decarbonisation targets.Considering the full lifecycle emissions, the paper assesses the effectiveness of FiTs for driving the UK's low carbon transition. The results demonstrate that, while there is still significant variation and uncertainty with such estimates, even with the most conservative figures, both the technologies can offer substantial emission savings compared to fossil fuel alternatives when installed in suitable locations. However, the renewable resource of installation sites is critical to the carbon intensity that the technologies can offer. Under a poor renewable resource their impacts can be as high as fossil fuels alternatives. As FiTs makes no distinction between installation sites this should form part of the assessment of funding. Finally, despite their potential for carbon reduction, with the full lifecycle of the considered technologies taken into account, a target of 50 gCO 2 e/kWh is not possible with the current technology generation efficiencies. The paper concludes that a complete re-assessment of the role of technologies in the decarbonisation of electricity is required to take into account the full lifecycle impacts to gain a more realistic picture of the mitigation potential.
Highlights We apply novel lifecycle analysis methodology to solar PV and micro-wind technologies We explore the implications of lifecycle emissions for meeting decarbonisation targets A 50 gCO 2 e/kWh target cannot be achieved for the case studies considered Availability of renewable resource is critical to the carbon intensity of electricity generation 2 The effectiveness of feed-in tariffs for driving decarbonisation in the UK is evaluated
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