We offer a nationwide analysis of the initial years of Costa Rica’s PSA program, which pioneered environmental-services payments and inspired similar initiatives. Our estimates of this program’s impact on deforestation, between 1997 and 2000, range from zero to one-fifth of 1% per year (i.e., deforestation is avoided on, at most, 2 out of every 1,000 enrolled hectares). The main explanation for...

The first is the burning of large tracts of forests in Indonesia (in Sumatra and Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo). Estimates of the total area of forest damaged by the fires vary from the official figure of 750,000 hectares to the figure of 1.7 million hectares made by the Indonesian environmental group WALHI.1 The forest fires, which have been going on for months, have created an eno...

Unbalanced distribution of population in a country like Iran as well as accelerating urbanization and environmental degradation, both arising from incorrect location of industrial areas, are two problems that require appropriate industrial development policies to get resolved. Considering the expansion of industrial areas along with their role in contamination of the environment, it is necessar...

PURPOSE To determine the microperimetric retinal sensitivity in areas with nascent geographic atrophy (nGA) compared with other pathological features in eyes with intermediate AMD. METHODS Participants with bilateral intermediate AMD underwent microperimetry examinations and high-resolution spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) scans in a prospective study. Twenty-two particip...

A recently completed research program (TREES) employing the global imaging capabilities of Earth-observing satellites provides updated information on the status of the world's humid tropical forest cover. Between 1990 and 1997, 5.8 +/- 1.4 million hectares of humid tropical forest were lost each year, with a further 2.3 +/- 0.7 million hectares of forest visibly degraded. These figures indicate...

Safflower [Carthamus tinctorius (L.)] is a multipurpose oilseed crop grown mainly for getting high quality edible oil rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids. India is the largest producer of safflower in the world with 402,000 hectares area under it, producing about 206,000 tons of safflower seed annually [1]. But its use in India is limited mainly to oil extraction from seed and leftover cake as ...