Household Consumption

The environmental assessment of the processing and consumption of mussels of the species Mytilus galloprovincialis was carried out for both fresh and canned mussels. For this purpose, the application of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) was considered. Inventories for ...

During the past decades, human water use has more than doubled, yet available freshwater resources are finite. As a result, water scarcity has been prevalent in various regions of the world. Here, we present the first global assessment of past development of water stress considering not only climate variability but also growing water demand, desalinated water use and non-renewable groundwater abstraction over the period 1960-2001 at a spatial resolution of 0.5 • . Agricultural water demand is estimated based on past extents of irrigated areas and livestock densities. We approximate past economic development based on GDP, energy and household consumption and electricity production, which are subsequently used together with population numbers to estimate industrial and domestic water demand. Climate variability is expressed by simulated blue water availability defined by freshwater in rivers, lakes, wetlands and reservoirs by means of the global hydrological model PCR-GLOBWB. We thus define blue water stress by comparing blue water availability with corresponding net total blue water demand by means of the commonly used, Water Scarcity Index. The results show a drastic increase in the global population living under water-stressed conditions (i.e. moderate to high water stress) due to growing water demand, primarily for irrigation, which has more than doubled from 1708/818 to 3708/1832 km 3 yr −1 (gross/net) over the period 1960-2000. We estimate that 800 million people or 27 % of the global population were living under water-stressed conditions for 1960. This number is eventually increased to 2.6 billion or 43 % for 2000. Our results indicate that increased water demand is a decisive factor for heightened water stress in various regions such as India and North China, enhancing the intensity of water stress up to 200 %, while climate variability is often a main determinant of extreme events. However, Correspondence to: Y. Wada (y.wada@uu.nl) our results also suggest that in several emerging and developing economies (e.g. India, Turkey, Romania and Cuba) some of past extreme events were anthropogenically driven due to increased water demand rather than being climate-induced.

Miombo woodlands cover vast areas of southern Africa. Of comparatively little interest for export-oriented commercial logging, they are part of a complex system of rural land use that integrates woodland management with crops and livestock. There is also evidence that woodland resources are extensively used for household consumption, greatly reducing the risk of households falling deeper into poverty as a result of environmental or economic stress. New opportunities for improving the management of miombo woodlands, with poverty mitigation in mind, suggest four policy options. First, communities are becoming more active in managing local natural resources, a result of decentralization and land reforms, which suggests that there may be good scope for strengthening related policy and legal frameworks and the measures to implement them. Second, new and integrated conservation-development approaches are emerging, which suggests possible scope for providing payments for environmental services to increase the value of managed woodlands. Third, markets throughout the region are developing and expanding, which suggests great scope for enhancing forest-based markets by removing restrictive legislation and by supporting local producers and forest enterprises. Fourth, all these opportunities suggest that public forest institutions can be revitalized by strengthening their service delivery orientations, with poverty mitigation as a main objective.

A new theoretical framework has recently emerged for analyzing the behavior of house-holds with two spouses. This approach, known as the collective model, assumes that each spouse has individual preferences and that households' outcomes are Pareto ...

This paper studies the relationship between consumption and wealth based on the concept of cointegration. The analysis focuses on French data over the 1987 - 2006 period. This relationship is expressed in two ways: in terms of Marginal Propensity to Consume out of wealth (MPC) and in terms of Elasticity of consumption to wealth. Three concepts of consumption are investigated: