Master's Thesis
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- Fakultät 12 / Institut für Technologie und Ressourcenmanagement in den Tropen und Subtropen (10)
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- Fakultät 02 / Cologne Institute of Conservation Sciences (1)
- Fakultät 04 / Institut für Versicherungswesen (1)
Durch das permanente Wachstum der Weltbevölkerung wird der Bedarf von Textilien stetig steigen. Die Produktvielfalt sowie der Konsum der Textilien werden immer größer. Die aktuellen Recyclingtechniken ermöglichen es nicht, den Rohstoffkreislauf für Textilien zu schließen. Dies liegt auch darin begründet, dass derzeit große Mengen der Textilien aus Mischgeweben zwischen Baumwolle und PET bestehen. Die Trennung dieser Komponenten ist jedoch eine Grundvoraussetzung für die Entwicklung eines geschlossenen Rohstoffkreislaufs und stellt gleichzeitig eine große Herausforderung für das Recycling dar. Durch chemische Recyclingverfahren können die Rohstoffe getrennt, aufbereitet und in die Textilproduktion zurückgeführt werden. In dieser Arbeit wird aufgezeigt, wie ein chemischer Recyclingprozess, der einen geschlossenen Rohstoffkreislauf erlaubt, technisch realisiert werden kann. Der Prozess erzeugt eine PET-Fraktion und eine Celluloselösung, die in weiteren Verarbeitungsschritten zu einer Regeneratfaser versponnen wird. In dieser frühen Projektphase werden in dieser Arbeit ebenfalls die Investitionsausgaben und die Herstellungskosten für das Verfahren abgeschätzt.
Die vorliegende Masterarbeit behandelt die Bewertung der eingegangenen Unternehmensrisiken im Rahmen der Lebensversicherung und die hiervon abgeleiteten Auswirkungen zur Unternehmenssteuerung.
Dabei wird einerseits die Angemessenheit der sog. „Standardformel“ nach Solvency II überprüft, die in den europäischen Mitgliedsstaaten einen weitestgehend einheitlichen Ansatz bei der Bewertung der Risiken von Versicherungsunternehmen verwendet. Andererseits werden unter ökonomischen Überlegungen versicherungsmathematische Methoden vorgestellt, wie ein Lebensversicherer seine Risiken unternehmensindividueller ermitteln und damit seinen tatsächlichen Risikokapitalbedarf bestimmen kann.
Zur Quantifizierung der Ergebnisse werden die Berechnungsvorgaben der Standardformel für ausgewählte Risikomodule nachgebildet und mit den in dieser Arbeit vorgestellten unternehmensindividuellen Berechnungen verglichen und analysiert. Es zeigt sich, dass trotz der Komplexität des Solvency II-Modells eine noch differenziertere Herangehensweise notwendig ist, damit ein einzelnes Unternehmen seine Risiken adäquat und möglichst individuell bestimmen kann. Zur Gewährleistung einer nicht bestandsgefährdenden Unternehmensfortführung müssen die Versicherungsunternehmen bei Betrachtung ihrer Risiken mithilfe des EU-weiten Aufsichtssystems Solvency II in der Lage sein, die korrekten Rückschlüsse zur Unternehmenssteuerung zu ziehen. Die in dieser Arbeit vorgestellten versicherungsmathematischen Ansätze können dabei den Prozess zur unternehmenseigenen Risiko- und Solvabilitätsbeurteilung (ORSA) unterstützen.
The climate is changing and this increases the risk of climate threats, which is affecting the most vulnerable populations, mainly peasant farmers. In order to minimize impacts on these populations, interest has been aroused to develop strategies that increase their resilience to climate-related risks. This issue has been little addressed in Ecuador, despite the increased frequency and intensity of climate-related risks, which are directly affecting agroecosystems and farmers' livelihoods. This research addresses the resilience of farmers to climate risks in the canton of Pedro Carbo, an area located on the Ecuadorian coast of Guayas Province characterized by a high rate of poverty and dedicated mainly to agriculture.
The overall objective of this research was to carry out an analysis of the resilience of small farmers to climate risks, as well as to recommend adaptation/transformation strategies to increase their resilience to climate. For this, farmers' perceptions were considered, as well as the opinion of experts on the subject. Multiple methods were applied such as: literature review, map generation, household surveys, participatory workshops with farmers and interviews with experts. In addition, a multidimensional matrix was developed to analyze quantitative and qualitative data through indicators that measure resilience in the study area. The main findings in this research reflect that farmers have very low resilience due to their socioeconomic characteristics, agricultural practices, lack of infrastructure and technologies, weak community organizations, limited access to credit and insurance, as well as lack of capacity building and technical assistance. Finally, recommendations for strategies to support planning and decision-making were developed.
Keywords: climate-related risks, peasant family farming, resilience, resilience assessment, climate resilience, farmers perceptions, Pedro Carbo
While global food production greatly exceeds dietary energy demand, undernutrition remains, and diets largely fail to ensure the health of the population. Agricultural biodiversity is crucial for the world’s food security, but genetic diversity has been degraded. In Mexico, the dietary transition towards processed foods has contributed to malnutrition and a rise of diet-related chronic diseases. Mexico’s indigenous people are conserving and creating valuable plant genetic resources in their swidden milpas and traditional agroforestry systems but remain the country’s most vulnerable population group. The Teenek (or Huastec), an indigenous group that habitat the Huasteca Potosina, a region in north-eastern Mexico cultivate a high diversity of edible plants in their home gardens (solar), milpas, and agroforestry systems (te’lom, or finca). However, migration has been leading to the abandonment of traditional farming in the region.
The objective of this study was to analyse if the managed agricultural biodiversity of the different traditional land use systems contributes to the food security of the farming households in the community of Jol Mom. Food availability and access were investigated. In total, 40 households were surveyed. Dietary patterns were identified through principal component analysis. Informal interviews, semi-structured interviews and participant observation allowed to account for the people’s own perceptions and provided additional insights. Findings showed that traditional Teenek farming systems are the source of a variety of nutritious foods and resulted to be the most important provider of fruits and vegetables. The average production diversity was 34 out of 56 crops, farmers cultivating more than one or two farming systems showed an increase of four and 11 produced species respectively. Production diversity was strongly correlated with food variety in a household’s diet, with an increment of one per 0.85 produced crop. Two main diverging dietary patterns were revealed, a westernized diet relying largely on purchased foods, to which the younger generation was more inclined, and a traditional diet characterized by a high consumption of cultivated products, mostly observed in the older households.
In conclusion, farming households in Jol Mom profit from the agricultural diversity of their production systems, either through the consumption of nutritious foods or by the sale of agricultural products. However, a tendency towards nutrient-poor diets was observed. Increasing agricultural diversity and consumption of locally produced foods might help to fight this trend but would require a valorisation of traditional foods and an appreciation of the contribution of indigenous people’s traditional agriculture to food security.
In dieser Arbeit wird die Frage nach der Zusammensetzung einer aus konservatorischer Sicht unbedenklichen Stempelfarbe untersucht. Es konnten vier Kategorien von Stempelfarben ermittelt werden: die leinölhaltigen, die mineralölhaltigen, die glykol-/glycerolhaltigen und die harzhaltigen. Neun Stempelfarben aus diesen vier Kategorien wurden in einer umfangreichen Testreihe auf ihre Licht- und Klimabeständigkeit, ihre Löse- und Bleichmittelfestigkeit, ihre Wischfestigkeit und ihr Durchschlagvermögen überprüft. Drei rein pigmenthaltige Stempelfarben haben diese Tests bestanden. Von diesen hatte nur die leinölhaltige Stempelfarbe eine gute Dokumentenechtheit. Zudem werden im letzten Kapitel Möglichkeiten zur Entfernung von Stempelfarben auf Papier vorgestellt.
Soils are complex, evolving systems that simultaneously shape and are shaped by numerous biotic and abiotic factors in a vast web of interactions that creates the conditions for the propagation of life and the maintenance of human societies. Yet, land use and land use change (LULUC) and anthropogenic climate change (CC) are forcing substantial and rapid alterations into soil’s properties and processes, thus affecting the functions and services derived from it. The resulting land degradation (LD) is now spread, according to recent estimates, over nearly 30 % of the world’s total land, mostly on the population dense and impoverished tropics, a zone predicted to withstand the worst impacts of CC. The Atlantic Forest in Brazil is a particularly vulnerable environment, and the unusual drought of 2014-2017 that hit its Southeastern region is likely the harbinger of a progressively drier future.
The way the prelude of what might be an increasingly frequent hazard affected farmers’ livelihoods and natural resources, and the manner in which they reacted to those impacts can thus reveal points of strength and fragility that could be respectively harnessed or addressed to develop a more sustainable agriculture and climate resilience. This master thesis focused on characterizing those impacts and reactions on distinct dairy production systems in two municipalities in Northwestern Rio de Janeiro: Santo Antônio de Pádua and Cambuci. Through interviews and in loci observations, the researcher collected data concerning environmental services (erosion prevention, soil cover and water provision), production variables (inputs and outputs), socio-economic information, farm system management and farmers’ future perspectives. The results show that dairy production systems in the region are heterogeneous and, although they may share common characteristics, drought outcomes were closely tied to the specificities of each farm. Ultimately, outcomes originated from differences in water supply, water demand, and feed availability, their subsequent change by the drought and farmers’ reaction to those changes at each property.
As the number and intensity of environmental challenges increase, more faiths have initiated religiously motivated change within their communities or have been involved in cooperation projects with NGOs or GOs dedicated to conservation. Even though a lot of quantitative research had been done on the correlation of religiosity and concern for the environment, no scientific study dealt about the argumentation lines that drive or discourage believers to get involved in environmental conversation. As a basis for the research the Theory of Planned Behavior of Ajzen was modified into a model. By the means of Semi-Standardized Interview guidelines 15 members and leaders of different church communities in Amman were interrogated to retrieve meaning of and cause-effect-chains between the different components of the model. Their answers were coded and analyzed with cross tables to identify interconnections and their tendencies.
The results show that interviewees’ religious convictions about God and the world were the strongest influencer, whereas the community and leaders rarely gave a reason for people to adapt water saving measures. External factors such as governmental, societal, political or economic mostly discouraged people to adapt environmentfriendly behaviors. Approaches by the GIZ have already started catering to those challenges and potentials, however the range of impact did not reach until most of the interviewees.
The post-conflict setting in Colombia resulted after the signing of the peace agreement between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the national Government at the end of 2016, faces two main problems. On one hand, the environmental degradation and the pressure over the ecosystems now exposed to the economic and socio-demographic dynamics of the country; and on the other hand, the increase of violence in rural areas characterized by the abundance of natural resources. These two problems can be linked through the complex dynamics of natural resources appropriation. Among the natural resources affecting the course of the post-conflict in Colombia, gold appears as one of the most relevant sources of violence and environmental degradation. This condition makes it crucial to understand the complex local dynamics of mining regions in order to propose alternatives for consolidating a sustaining peace. The armed groups, the state, the private companies, and traditional gold mining communities are all stakeholders involved in gold mining and the conflicts around this activity. Nevertheless, communities have been denied as a formal actor.
This work aims to give voice to those communities, understanding them as a key actor for peacebuilding. This research seeks to understand the relationship between gold mining and the social-armed conflict in Colombia, to identify which are the drivers for the increasing of this activity during the post-conflict, as well as which strategies developed by traditional gold mining communities can contribute to peacebuilding. Thus, an integrative analytical framework is developed. This theoretical framework integrates 1) environmental peacebuilding to evaluate the possibilities of natural resources to becoming tools for cooperation, and 2) political ecology to clarify, from a multi-scalar approach, the socio-political context in which the conflict takes place. Hence, from a qualitative approach that involves several ethnographic methods is found that artisanal-ancestral miners and traditional miners organized to remain in their territories in a context of dispossession, have developed socio-ecological systems and natural resources management strategies relevant to implement initiatives of environmental peacebuilding that can be sustained over time and aimed to overcome the structural causes of violence and environmental degradation.
Bei Low-Code Entwicklungsplattformen handelt es sich um Lösungen zur Entwicklung und Bereitstellung von Software mit geringerem Anteil von Quelltext als in der Anwendungsentwicklung sonst erforderlich. Die Forschungsarbeit prüft, ob Low-Code Entwicklungsplattformen dazu geeignet sind, moderne webbasierte Geschäftsanwendungen umzusetzen. Dabei zeigt die Arbeit auf, wie Programmierparadigmen, Methoden der modellgetriebenen Softwareentwicklung (MDSD) und des Rappid Application Developments (RAD) als Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Lösungen zur Anwendungsentwicklung durch Anbieter kombiniert werden. Aktuell offerierte Lösungen werden in einem Marktüberblick hinsichtlich ihrer Funktionalität und Anwendungszielgruppe eingeordnet.
Zur Klärung der Forschungsfrage werden gängige Anforderungen an eine Geschäftsanwendung gesammelt und deren Implementierung durch die prototypische Realisierung eines Anwendungsfalls mit der Low-Code Entwicklungsplattform Oracle Application Express (APEX) validiert. Auf dieser Basis zeigt die Arbeit den tatsächlich erforderlichen Quelltextanteil auf. Dabei werden jedoch auch funktionelle Einschränkungen sowie möglicheorganisatorische Risiken, z.B. durch Vendor Lock-In Effekte, dargestellt.
Aufgrund ihrer aktuellen Bedeutung im Zusammenhang des Internet of Things werden in der vorliegenden Arbeit Time Series Databases und Event Stores miteinander vergli-chen. Ziel ist, die Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede der beiden Arten von Datenbank Management Systemen herauszustellen.
Der erste, theoretische Teil des Vergleichs erfolgt anhand der funktionalen Kriterien Speichersystem, Performance und Funktionen sowie der nicht-funktionalen Kriterien Usability und Support. Im zweiten Teil des Vergleichs wird anhand eines konkreten An-wendungsfalls untersucht, ob sich Time Series Databases und Event Stores gleicher-maßen für die Speicherung und in einem zweiten Schritt für die Abfrage von Zeitreihen-daten eignen.
Zumal der theoretische Vergleich Unterschiede zwischen einzelnen Time Series Data-bases und Event Stores in Bezug auf die betrachteten Kriterien erkennen lässt, wird für den praktischen Vergleich unter Berücksichtigung der im konkreten Anwendungsfall gegebenen Anforderungen nur die am besten geeignetste Time Series Database (In-fluxDB) und der am besten geeignetste Event Store (Event Store) ausgewählt. Der prak-tische Vergleich zeigt, dass die Zeitreihendaten im konkreten Anwendungsfall zwar in beiden Arten von Datenbank Management Systemen gespeichert werden können, die Nutzung der auf Zeitreihendaten spezialisierten Time Series Database InfluxDB jedoch offensichtliche Vorteile gegenüber dem Event Store aufweist.