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Voluntary land registries can affect land use by facilitating both the public's ability to monitor land use and farmers' access to credit. We estimate the impacts of participation in a land registry on the conversion of natural vegetation to agricultural land use by examining the impacts of the rural environmental registry (CAR) in Brazil, using a dynamic land use model. We show that although participation in the CAR does not significantly affect crop area, it does influence pasture expansion, with variation by farm size and environmental compliance level. Our results provide insights for agricultural land‐use policies by illuminating how the intended environmental objectives of land registry programs might be undermined by credit policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent large‐scale land transactions, often framed as 'land grabbing,' are historically unprecedented. Millions of hectares of land have changed hands for agriculture‐driven development over the past decade, and their implementation generates substantial risk of land degradation. This paper investigates land transaction patterns and evaluate their potential socio‐environmental impacts in Cambodia, Ethiopia, Liberia, and Peru. We undertake a novel spatially explicit approach to quantify land transactions and conduct scenario‐based analyses to explore their implementation consequences on people, land, and carbon emission. Our results demonstrate that existing global datasets on land transactions substantially underestimate their incidence but can either exaggerate or underreport transacted areas. Although confirming that land transactions are more likely to occur in sparsely populated, poorer, and more forested areas, our scenario‐based analyses reveal that if fully implemented for agricultural development, land transactions in the four countries will affect more than one million people, yield over 2 Gt of carbon emissions, and disrupt vast swathes of forests. Our findings refute the 'empty land' discourse in government policy and highlight the consequences of land degradation that can occur at an unexpected scale in the 'global land rush.' Future policymaking needs to anticipate the risk of land degradation in terms of deforestation and carbon emission while pursuing agriculture‐driven development through land transactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite recent breakthroughs in power conversion efficiencies (PCEs), which have resulted in PCEs exceeding 22%, perovskite solar cells (PSCs) still face serious drawbacks in terms of their printability, reliability, and stability. The most efficient PSC architecture, which is based on titanium dioxide as an electron transport layer, requires an extremely high-temperature sintering process (≈500 °C), reveals hysterical discrepancies in the device measurement, and suffers from performance degradation under light illumination. These drawbacks hamper the practical development of PSCs fabricated via a printing process on flexible plastic substrates. Herein, an innovative method to fabricate low-temperature-processed, hysteresis-free, and stable PSCs with a large area up to 1 cm2 is demonstrated using a versatile organic nanocomposite that combines an electron acceptor and a surface modifier. This nanocomposite forms an ideal, self-organized electron transport layer (ETL) via a spontaneous vertical phase separation, which leads to hysteresis-free, planar heterojunction PSCs with stabilized PCEs of over 18%. In addition, the organic nanocomposite concept is successfully applied to the printing process, resulting in a PCE of over 17% in PSCs with printed ETLs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of special types of transparent electrodes, known as 'ultrathin metal electrodes,' opens a new avenue for flexible and printable electronics based on their excellent optical transparency in the visible range while maintaining their intrinsic high electrical conductivity and mechanical flexibility. In this new electrode architecture, introducing metal nucleation inducers (MNIs) on flexible plastic substrates is a key concept to form high-quality ultrathin metal films (thickness ≈ 10 nm) with smooth and continuous morphology. Herein, this paper explores the role of 'polymeric' MNIs in fabricating ultrathin metal films by employing various polymers with different surface energies and functional groups. Moreover, a scalable approach is demonstrated using the ionic self-assembly on typical plastic substrates, yielding large-area electrodes (21 × 29.7 cm2) with high optical transmittance (>95%), low sheet resistance (<10 Ω sq−1), and extreme mechanical flexibility. The results demonstrate that this new class of flexible and transparent electrodes enables the fabrication of efficient polymer light-emitting diodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research evaluates the impacts on poverty rates of government funds for education, health and hospitals, and public welfare allocated to poverty reduction for counties with persistently high poverty in the Southern United States. Our analysis found that increases in education funding in a poverty hot-spot county reduce the poverty rates of that county and its neighbouring hot-spot counties. We also found that higher health and hospital funding in a hot-spot county is associated with higher poverty rates in neighbouring hot-spot counties and that public welfare funding is not effective in mitigating poverty either within or outside of poverty hot-spots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tailoring of the chromaticity of white organic light‐emitting diodes (WOLEDs) has presented a significant challenge in their application in smart lighting sources to improve the quality of life and human performance. Here, a new microcavity WOLED (M‐WOLED) structure to modulate the chromaticity of the emitted light is demonstrated by only adjusting the thickness of the white light‐emitting layer. By introducing a polymer‐metal hybrid electrode that functions both as a partially reflective mirror and a transparent electrode, a very simple microcavity architecture that does not require additional outer mirrors, such as distributed Bragg reflectors is developed. The resulting M‐WOLEDs exhibit reddish‐, greenish‐, and bluish‐white colors with different thicknesses of the single white light‐emitting layer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]