Ecosystem Service
Benefits people derive from ecosystem. Ecosystem services are typically grouped in four broad categories: provisioning, such as the production of food and water; regulating, such as the control of climate and disease; supporting, such as nutrient cycles and crop pollination; and cultural, such as spiritual and recreational benefits. (Source: Wikipedia)
Elastic (goods and services)
Elastic goods and services generally have plenty of substitutes. Inelastic goods have fewer substitutes and price change doesn't affect quantity demanded as much. Some inelastic goods include gas, electricity, water, drinks, clothing, tobacco, food, and oil.
Food Insecurity
The state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. During the first decade of this century, more than 800 million people live every day with hunger or food insecurity as their constant companion (see also National Academy of Science definitions).
Greenhouse Gas Effect
Heat trapping effect of greenhouse gases in the troposphere (lowest portion of the earth's atmosphere)
Life Cycle Assessment
LCA addresses the environmental aspects and potential environmental impacts (e.g. use of resources and the environmental consequences of releases) throughout a product's life cycle from raw material acquisition through production, use, end-of-life treatment, recycling and final disposal (i.e. cradle-to-grave). There are four phases in an LCA study: a) the goal and scope definition phase, b) the inventory analysis phase, c) the impact assessment phase, and d) the interpretation phase (ISO 2006).
Payment for Environmental Services (PES)
Payments to farmers or landowners who have agreed to take certain actions to manage their land or watersheds to provide an ecological service. As the payments provide incentives to land owners and managers, PES is a market-based mechanism, similar to subsidies and taxes, to encourage the conservation of natural resources.
Sustainable Intensification
Narrowly defined, SI refers to increase food production from existing farmland in ways that place far less pressure on the environment and that do not undermine our capacity to continue producing food in the future. However, Garnett et al. (2013) added the following four premises underlying SI: (a) The need to increase production; (b) Increase production must be met through higher yields because increasing the area of land in agriculture carries major environmental costs; (c) Food security requires as much attention to increasing environmental sustainability as to raising productivity; and (d) SI denotes a goal but does not specify a priori how it should be attained or which agricultural techniques to deploy.
Unit of Mass in Metric System
1,000,000,000,000,000
1x1015
petagram (Pg)
quadrillion
1,000,000,000,000
(Million Metric Tons or Megatonnes) 1x1012
teragram (Tg)
trillion
1,000,000,000
(Thousand Metric Tons) 1x109
gigagram (Gg)
billion
1,000,000
(Metric Ton) 1x106
megagram (Mg)
million
1,000
1x103
kilogram (Kg)
thousand
100
1x102
hectogram (Hg)
hundred
10
1x101
decagram (Dg)
ten
1
gram
0.1 10-1
decigram (dg)
tenth
0.01 10-2
centigram (cg)
hundredth
0.001 10-3
milligram (mg)
thousandth
0.000,001 10-6
microgram (ยตg)
millionth
0.000,000,001 10-9
nanogram (ng)
billionth
0.000,000,000,001 10-12
picogram (pg)
trillionth
0.000,000,000,000,001 10-15
femtogram (fp)
quadrillionth