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<p>This thesis investigates land reform coverage at the time of the land summit through quantitative and qualitative content analysis. Hard news reports, editorials and opinion pieces that appeared in the daily newspapers Beeld, Business day, Sowetan and Sunday newspapers Rapport and Sunday Times between July and September 2005 were analysed in terms of what they reported , issues that received little attention, portrayal of certain issues and sources used. The findings were used to make inference about the degree to which the newspapers in the study fulfill their societal roles.</p>

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The land (or ‘terrestrial’) biosphere strongly influences the exchange of carbon, energy and water between the land surface and the atmosphere. The size of the land carbon store and the magnitude of the interannual variability of the carbon exchange make models of the land surface a vital component in climate models. This thesis addresses two aspects of land surface modelling: soil respiration and phenology modelling, using different techniques with the goal of improving model representation of land-atmosphere interaction. The release of heat associated with soil respiration is neglected in the vast majority of large-scale models but may be critically important under certain circumstances. In this thesis, the effect of this heat release is considered in two ways. Firstly, a deliberately simple model for soil temperature and soil carbon, including biological heating, is constructed to investigate the effect of thermal energy generated by microbial respiration on soil temperature and soil carbon stocks, specifically in organic soils. Secondly, the mechanism for biological self-heating is implemented in the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES), in order to investigate the impacts of the extra feedback in a complex model. With the intention of improving estimates of the parameters governing modelled land surface processes, a data assimilation system based on the JULES land surface model is presented. The ADJULES data assimilation system uses information from the derivative of JULES (or adjoint) to search for a locally optimum parameter set by calibrating against observations. In this thesis, ADJULES is used with satellite-derived vegetation indices to improve the modelling of phenology in JULES.

The tension between conservation objectives and local people’s need for visible livelihoods is complex and often difficult to resolve.  In 2000, the Knuckles Conservation Area was established to include a protected area and a buffer zone to be used for management and restoration.  Prior to this decree, small tracts of land in the buffer zone were used for vegetable cultivation by villagers to supplement production from their titled agricultural plots.  An ethnographic approach was used in seven villages to explore how households have adapted their livelihoods in response to the change in land, and to examine the factors that may help understand the differences in the livelihood activities chosen.  The fundamental needs of the local people in their use of natural resources were not addressed when cultivation in the buffer zones was banned in 1990, creating shortfalls in production for some households, but stimulating others to diversify and invest in higher value crops in their own plots.  Physical, financial, human, and natural assets other than land were important to households as they responded to and coped with change.  Long-term livelihood strategies are dependent on more than just access to assets; the variability of farm and non-farm livelihood activities observed between households is explained by social and cultural factors.  Power relations within the community, personal characteristics of actors such as motivation and risk taking, and local laws and modes of governance all influence, to varying degrees and in complex and multiple ways, how households transform and utilise their assets.  The ability to transform assets is also dependent on the dynamics of the household: age and gender, status, social standing, and caste.  When conservation initiatives are implemented, programmes need to cater for variability among households in terms of their capacity to adapt to reductions in access to land, and in terms of their aspirations for diversifying their livelihood.

The fall out from the Quincentennial anniversary of the "discovery" of the Americas has yet to settle. One of the key issues still in need of address concerns the nature of the social and environmental change wrought by colonialism. Until recently, research in this field has been determined by a series of antiquated myths, largely creations of Eurocentric Renaissance and Romantic philosophies. This study aims to provide a more objective insight into the degree of regional Colonial impact by focusing on an archival reconstruction of post-Conquest social and environmental change in the highlands ofMichoacan, west central Mexico. Archival evidence suggests that the Spanish encountered an already degraded landscape in this region, reflective of several centuries of pre-Hispanic settlement and exploitation. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, little evidence emerges to suggest that there was an immediate and deleterious environmental impact following European contact, despite the introduction of livestock and plough technology to an area where they had hitherto been absent. Indeed, tangible evidence of ecological disturbance in the area does not emerge until the 18th century - a period recognised to have been one of population recovery and resource monopolisation. A detailed survey of litigation documents suggests that this period witnessed an acceleration in the number of indigenous claims for land reinstatement, concomitant with a marked increase in the number of references to infertile and degraded territory and apparent heightened concern over water sources. It is here argued that de-intensification of land use in the wake of indigenous depopulation and the imposition of conservative land use practices accounts for the negligible environmental impact in the early post-Conquest period. By the later 17th and 18th centuries, progressive climatic drying, population expansion, resource monopolisation and social inequality had combined to create a period of acute resource stress and landscape instability and consequent civil unrest. It was this untenable situation that was to play itself out in the Wars of Independence that characterised the first two decades of the 19th century.

This mini-dissertation is an investigation into wealth and poverty, land and class issues. These issues are very topical in the current South African political debate. The land issue, especially, is and will for the foreseeable future remain, a contentious issue especially on the African soil (cf. for instance the Zimbabwe situation, Khoi-San land claims). The question asked is, can the Bible make a valuable contribution to solving these problems? This study investigates whether Qoheleth can make a meaningful contribution to issues such as wealth and poverty, class and land. The book Qoheleth was chosen for its apparent “revolutionary” stance against traditional wisdom. In wisdom literature and tradition, the sages are known to situate themselves between the wealthy and the poor. Forming part of the protest phase of development of wisdom thought, it was necessary to evaluate Qoheleth to determine on whose side he is on, the haves or have-nots? Does he also protest against economic injustice? An ideological appreciation of Qoheleth was done to determine this. It was found that Qoheleth reinscribes the status quo of his time in terms of established hierarchies. He disappoints on the issue of the haves and the have-nots and does not provide a way out of social injustice. He certainly is not much of a voice for the have-nots. Qoheleth’s apparent “revolutionary” stance is rather an intellectual reaction against the doctrine of retribution, but not in a political or social sense. The Old Testament prophets might be far more useful in addressing current issues on social injustice. / Prof. H. Viviers

This study analyzes temporal trends and periodicity in seventy years of publicly available stream discharge and climate data for the Winooski River Basin of northern Vermont as well as lake level data for adjacent Lake Champlain. We also use random sampling and manual, point-based classification of recent and historical aerial imagery to quantify land use change over the past seventy years in the 2,704 km2 Winooski River Basin of northern Vermont. We find a general increase in annual precipitation, discharge, and mean lake level with time in the basin; discharge increases 18% over the period of record while precipitation increases by 14%. Over the last 70 years, mean annual temperature has increased at the Burlington Vermont station by 0.78 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit). Four sets of aerial photographs, taken at intervals of 12 to 29 years between 1937 and 2003 at thirty randomly selected sites, demonstrate that actively cleared land area has decreased by 14%, while forested land and impervious surfaces increased by 10% and 5%, respectively. Spectral analysis of precipitation, discharge and lake level data show a ~7.6 year periodicity, which is in phase with the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO); higher than average precipitation and discharge are most likely when the NAO is in a positive mode. The NAO relationship demonstrates that discharge is largely controlled by precipitation; anthropogenic changing climate and changing land use over the past 70 years appear to have subtly changed the seasonality of discharge and caused an increase in base flow.