Global climate policy initiatives are now being proposed to compensate tropical forest nations for reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). These proposals have the potential to include developing countries more actively in international greenhouse gas mitigation and to address a substantial share of the world's emissions which come from tropical deforestation. For such a policy to be viable it must have a credible benchmark against which emissions reduction can be calculated. This benchmark, sometimes termed a baseline or reference emissions scenario, can be based directly on historical emissions or can use historical emissions as input for business as usual projections. Here, we review existing data and methods that could be used to measure historical deforestation and forest degradation reference scenarios including FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations) national statistics and various remote sensing sources. The freely available and corrected global Landsat imagery for 1990, 2000 and soon to come for 2005 may be the best primary data source for most developing countries with other coarser resolution high frequency or radar data as a valuable complement for addressing problems with cloud cover and for distinguishing larger scale degradation. While sampling of imagery has been effectively useful for pan-tropical and continental estimates of deforestation, wall-to-wall (or full coverage) allows more detailed assessments for measuring national-level reference emissions. It is possible to measure historical deforestation with sufficient certainty for determining reference emissions, but there must be continued calls at the international level for making high-resolution imagery available, and for financial and technical assistance to help countries determine credible reference scenarios. The data available for past years may not be sufficient for assessing all forms of forest degradation, but new data sources will have greater potential in 2007 and after. This paper focuses only on the methods for measuring changes in forest area, but this information must be coupled with estimates of change in forest carbon stocks in order to quantify emissions from deforestation and forest degradation

This is the story of a powerful historical pathway of structural transformation that is experienced by all successful developing countries; of highly important and diverse approaches to coping with the political pressures generated along that pathway; and of policy mechanisms available to keep the poor from falling off the pathway altogether.  This structural transformation involves four main features: a falling share of agriculture in economic output and employment, a rising share of urban economic activity in industry and modern services, migration of rural workers to urban settings, and a demographic transition in birth and death rates that always leads to a spurt in population growth before a new equilibrium is reached.

At one level, the story is easy to tell because the statistical picture presented, both graphically and econometrically, is, well, telling.  In their broad sweep and relevance, these are very robust results that have very deep historical roots.  Challenging them is like challenging the tides.

At another level, the complexity of national diversity asserts itself in very important ways.  This finding does not alter the pathways themselves, but rather their consequences for income distribution and the gap in labor productivity between urban and rural economies.  We learn a lot about the possibilities for narrowing this gap during the process of structural transformation by comparing the historical experience of rapidly growing Asia with the rest of the world.  Individual country experience is revealing as well.  The stress placed on this productivity gap, how it changes during the structural transformation, and potential policy interventions to narrow it, is the major contribution of this monograph.

Making sure the poor are connected to both the structural transformation and to the policy initiatives designed to ameliorate the distributional consequences of rapid transformation has turned out to be a major challenge for policy makers over the past half century.  There are successes and failures, and the historical record illuminates what works and what does not.  Trying to stop the structural transformation does not work, at least for the poor.  Investing in the capacity of the poor to cope with change and to participate in its benefits through better education and health does seem to work.  Such investments typically require significant public sector resources and policy support, and thus depend on political processes that are themselves conditioned by the pressures generated by the structural transformation.

This paper provides an original account of global land, water and nitrogen use in support of industrialized livestock production and trade, with emphasis on two of the fastest growing sectors, pork and poultry. Our analysis focuses on trade in feed and animal products, using a new model that calculates the amount of "virtual" nitrogen, water and land used in production but not embedded in the product. We show how key meat importing countries, such as Japan, benefit from "virtual" trade in land, water and nitrogen, and how key meat exporting countries, such as Brazil, provide these resources without accounting for their true environmental cost. Results show that Japan's pig and chicken meat imports embody the virtual equivalent of 50% of Japan's total arable land, and half of Japan's virtual nitrogen total is lost in the US. Trade links with China are responsible for 15% of the virtual nitrogen left behind in Brazil due to feed and meat exports, and 20% of Brazil's area is used to grow soybean exports. The complexity of trade in meat, feed, water and nitrogen, is illustrated by the dual roles of the US and the Netherlands as both importers and exporters of meat. Mitigating environmental damage from industrialized livestock production and trade depends on a combination of direct pricing strategies, regulatory approaches and use of best management practices. Our analysis indicates that increased water and nitrogen use efficiency and land conservation resulting from these measures could significantly reduce resource costs.

A concept note about setting up an international program for studying the effects of the emergence of biofuels on global poverty and food security. 

The recent global expansion of biofuels production is an intense topic of discussion in both the popular and academic press. Much of the debate surrounding biofuels has focused on narrow issues of energy efficiency and fossil fuel substitution, to the exclusion of broader questions concerning the effects of large-scale biofuels development on commodity markets, land use patterns, and the global poor. There is reason to think these effects will be very large. The majority of poor people living in chronic hunger are net consumers of staple food crops; poor households spend a large share of their budget on starchy staples; and as a result, price hikes for staple agricultural commodities have the largest impact on poor consumers. For example, the rapidly growing use of corn for ethanol in the U.S. has recently sent corn prices soaring, boosting farmer incomes domestically but causing riots in the streets of Mexico City over tortilla prices. Preliminary analysis suggests that such price movements, which directly threaten hundreds of millions of households around the world, could be more than a passing phenomenon. Rapid biofuels development is occurring throughout the developed and developing world, transforming commodity markets and increasingly linking food prices to a volatile energy sector. Yet there remains little understanding of how these changes will affect global poverty and food security, and an apprehension on the part of many governments as to whether and how to participate in the biofuels revolution.

We propose an international collaborative effort to:

• Understand and quantify the effects of expanding biofuels production on agricultural commodity markets, food security, and poverty;
• Develop training programs and policy tools to harness the benefits and mitigate the damages from such expansion on both local and global scales; and
• Build an international network of scholars and government officials devoted to studying and managing biofuels development and its social consequences