This study aims to identify artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that are applied in climate-smart agricultural practices and address ethical concerns of deploying those technologies from legal perspectives. As climate-smart agricultural AI, the study considers those AI-based technologies that are used for precision agriculture, monitoring peat lands, deforestation tracking, and improved forest management. The study utilized a systematic literature review approach to identify and analyze AI technologies employed in climate-smart agriculture and associated ethical and legal concerns. The study findings indicate several (...) ethical concerns for deploying AI in climate-smart agricultural practices pertaining to data inaccuracy, other technical errors based on wrong recommendations or wrongful acts, data ownership and intellectual property issues, and economic issues resulting in digital division and privacy and security related issues. In this study, the ethical concerns were further examined based on criminal law, tort law, privacy and data protection law, and intellectual property law. In this regard, the study finds that the current tort law pattern is more suitable than the criminal law pattern to address some major ethical concerns, such as data inaccuracy and other technical errors based on wrong recommendations or wrongful acts. Finally, the study recommends that at the global level, all countries need to fill up the current gap of international law on climate-smart agriculture through agreeing on a standard set of legal provisions and enhancing collaboration in innovation and deployment of climate-smart agricultural AI. It further recommends that at the local level, countries need to adopt suitable regulations addressing multi-stakeholders’ interests associated with the deployment of climate-smart agricultural AIs. (shrink)

The ethical and legal challenges posed by assisted reproduction techniques are both profound and breathtaking, with most societies unable to fully comprehend one technique before another one, even more daring, emerges. The wrongful implantation of embryos in two women undergoing in vitro fertilisation treatments at two separate clinics in the UK seriously vitiates the traditional concept of who is a parent. In one case, a patient’s embryos were wrongly implanted into another woman seeking similar treatment, and in the second, a (...) woman’s eggs were fertilised using sperm from a man other than her husband.In the first mix-up, neither member of the recipient couple was the genetic parent of the child, while in the second case, the recipient mother was the genetic mother and her husband was not the genetic father. The mix-ups resulted in litigation to determine who the rightful parents were. First, I will show in this paper that, although the outcome of the application of English law in both cases was in agreement with the outcome prescribed by basic principles of Islamic law and bioethics, that agreement is based on different reasoning in the two traditions. Next, I will show that the profound ethical implications of reproductive technologies begs for a more pluralistic bioethical discourse than the one-dimensional analysis applied by secular Western societies that currently dominates the enquiry, particularly as most Western societies are more or less multicultural and multireligious. (shrink)

A sample of 871 currently married urban Bangladeshi women was used to assess the impact of mass media family planning programmes on current contraceptive use. The analyses suggested that radio had been playing a significant role in spreading family planning messages among eligible clients; 38% of women with access to a radio had heard of family planning messages while the figures for TV and newspaper were 18·5% and 8·5% respectively. Education, number of living children and current contraceptive use were important (...) predictors of exposure to any mass media family planning messages. There was a negative relationship between breast-feeding and the current use of contraception indicating a low need for contraception among women who were breast-feeding. (shrink)

The effects of environmental degradation and climate change are propelling a discourse shift towards regenerative agriculture, yet understanding motivations for implementing regenerative practices on private agricultural lands is still a challenge. We study that challenge within the realm of regenerative ranching, a subcategory of regenerative agriculture. By examining the frequency of values articulated by respondents, a valuation typology stemming from 24 semi-structured interviews with ranchers in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota is revealed. Instrumental valuations dominated in the studied region (...) in connection to regenerative ranching practices, although some respondents articulated relational and intrinsic valuations tied to their practices. While this study focuses on regenerative ranching, we posit that a better understanding of the interplay between diverse valuations as they relate to private land management practices is vital to promoting more resilient and thoughtful ecosystem governance. (shrink)