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This paper gives an overview of the development of Fair Trade in six European countries: Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. After the description of the food retail industry and its market structures in these countries, the main European Fair Trade organizations are analyzed regarding their role within the Fair Trade system. The following part deals with the development of Fair Trade sales in general and with respect to the products coffee, tea, bananas, fruit juice and sugar. An overview of the main activities of national Fair Trade organizations, e.g. public relation activities, completes the analysis. This study shows the enormous upswing of Fair Trade during the last decade and the reasons for this development. Nevertheless, it comes to the conclusion that Fair Trade is still far away from being an essential part of the food retail industry in Europe.
Recent findings in South Africa have once again underlined the fact that the oldest people in the world obviously came from Africa. Thus, historically, this continent has a very special significance. However, its history in more recent times, especially from the mid-19th century onwards, was strongly influenced by colonisation by European states. Many deep wounds from that time still have an impact on society as a whole today. However, the continent is currently also confronted with a greater number of challenges of a different nature.
On the one hand, Africa is trying to strengthen internal cohesion by means of a number of regional organisations and the African Union as a globally active institution; on the other hand, the continent has been marked by political and military conflicts between neighbouring states over the past decades until the recent present. In addition, there are regular internal social upheavals in individual countries due to violent or manipulated political change.
Yet the continent could well be on a good development path, since it has a large number of important raw materials - also in comparison to other continents. However, the individual African states - and especially their citizens - often do not benefit from this to an adequate extent. This results in a social imbalance in large parts of the continent (data collection until the end of June 2023), which leads to considerable internal tensions. To make matters worse, Africa is the continent most affected by climate change.
A closer look at the partly very different economic, political and social situations of the large continent leads to an overall predominantly critical assessment of Africa's further development, which is explained in more detail in the final chapter with regard to the foreseeable consequences for the continent.
Although climate-induced liquidity risks can cause significant disruptions and instabilities in the financial sector, they are frequently overlooked in current debates and policy discussions. This paper proposes a macro-financial agent-based integrated assessment model to investigate the transmission channels of climate risks to financial instability and study the emergence of liquidity crises through interbank market dynamics. Our simulations show that the financial system could experience serious funding and market liquidity shortages due to climate-induced liquidity crises. Our investigation contributes to our understanding of the impact - and possible solutions - to climate-induced liquidity crises, besides the issue of asset stranding related to transition risks usually considered in the existing studies.
Quantum mechanical theories are used to search and optimized the conformations of proposed small molecule candidates for treatment of SARS-CoV-2. These candidate compounds are taken from what is reported in the news and in other pre-peer-reviewed literature (e.g. ChemRxiv, bioRxiv). The goal herein is to provided predicted structures and relative conformational stabilities for selected drug and ligand candidates, in the hopes that other research groups can make use of them for developing a treatment.
In the research project "MetPVNet", both, the forecast-based operation management in distribution grids and as well as the forecasts of the feed-in of PV-power from decentralized plants could be improved on the basis of satellite data and numerical weather forecasts. Based on a detailed network analyses for a real medium-voltage grid area, it was shown that both – the integration of forecast data based on satellite and weather data and the improvement of subsequent day forecasts based on numerical weather models – have a significant added value for forecast-based congestion management or redispatch and reactive power management in the distribution grid. Furthermore, forecast improvements for the forecast model of the German Weather Service were achieved by assimilating visible satellite imagery, and cloud and radiation products from satellites were improved, thus improving the database for short-term forecasting as well as for assimilation. In addition, several methods have been developed that will enable forecast improvement in the future, especially for weather situations with high cloud induced variability and high forecast errors. This article summarizes the most important project results.