Climate change is affecting every aspect of human activities, especially the agriculture. In China, extreme drought events caused by climate change have posed a great threat to food safety. In this work we aimed to study the drought risk of maize in the farming–pastoral ecotone in Northern China based on physical vulnerability assessment. The physical vulnerability curve was constructed from th...

The WHO's well known definition of health stressed the indivisibility of human well-being, physical and otherwise, by stating that health is "not merely the absence of disease or infirmity". The spiritual dimension of health is well covered in the medical literature. Different locations on Earth are associated with different interrelated profiles: physical, biological, environmental, socio-econ...

The Pastoral Properties Futures Simulator (PPFS) is a dynamic systems model, developed within a participatory action research partnership with the pastoral industry of Australia’s Northern Territory. The model was purpose-built to support the industry’s strategic planning capacity in the face of environmental, market and institutional uncertainty. The mediated modelling process sought to maximi...

In Australia, desertification tends to be associated with land degradation in the rangelands. It results from unsustainable land use and the impact of European settlement, rather than changing climate. Desertification can, however, be exacerbated or triggered by climate variability. Some of the degradation occurred in the early stages of pastoral development but the problem has continued. The e...

As people living in remote areas rely on SPS systems for their electricity and water needs, they hold a practical and non-idealistic perspective towards using renewable energy technologies. This research explores pastoral owner-operators’ personal experience and opinion of stand-alone power supply (SPS) systems over 30 years in remote pastoral regions Western Australia (WA). This research was u...

Michel Foucault's work traces shifting techniques in the governance of humans, from the production of 'docile bodies' subjected to the knowledge formations of the human sciences (disciplinary power), to the facilitation of self-governing agents directed towards specified forms of self-knowledge by quasi-therapeutic authorities (pastoral power). While mindful of the important differences between...