Forecasting bathing water quality in the UK: a critical review

Climate change is altering rainfall patterns resulting in increasing variability and intensity of rainfall events worldwide. Increases to short duration, intense rainfall (i.e., convective rainfall), will lead to increases in sewage overflow and run-off from agricultural land. Such events generate spikes in micro-organisms from faeces and manure, especially Escherichia coli and intestinal enterococci, that temporarily end up in bathing waters posing serious health risks to bathers. Forecasting of bathing water quality associated with convective rainfall presents a distinctive forecasting challenge due to high uncertainties associated with predicting the timing, location, and impact of such events. In this article we review examples of bathing water quality forecasting practices, with a focus on the UK where convective rainfall in the summer bathing water season is a particular concern, and question whether the current approach is robust in a changing climate. We discuss potential upgrades in bathing water forecasting and identify the main challenges that must be addressed before an improved framework for bathing water forecasting can be achieved. Although developments in meteorological and hydrological short range forecasting capabilities are promising, convective rainfall forecasting has significant predictability limits. We suggest taking full advantage of short-range forecasts to provide sub-daily bathing water forecasts, focusing on targeted bathing water monitoring regimes to improve model accuracy with the ultimate goal of providing improved information and guidance for beach users

The efficacy of acceptance and commitment therapy on self-stigma reduction among people with mental illness: a quasi-experimental design

Self-stigma is prevalent and has adverse impact on people with mental illness, including negative effects on self-esteem, help-seeking, quality of life, and personal recovery. This study investigated the efficacy of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) in reducing the self-stigma of people with mental illness in a 5-week group intervention. Thirty-six individuals with mental illness were recruited and completed the ACT intervention. The participants from the intervention group were matched by propensity scores on preintervention outcome variables with another 36 individuals with mental illness from the control group. Levels of self-stigma, believability of stigmatizing thoughts, psychological flexibility, and mindfulness were assessed before the intervention, immediately after the intervention, and 1 month after the intervention. Significant interaction effects were found in psychological flexibility and mindfulness, but not self-stigma and believability of stigmatizing thoughts. For the intervention group, time effects were found in self-stigma, believability of stigmatizing thoughts, psychological flexibility, and mindfulness at post- and follow-up assessments. These findings suggested that ACT is potentially effective in improving psychological flexibility and mindfulness. Mediation analyses suggested that psychological flexibility and mindfulness did not mediate changes in self-stigma or the believability of stigmatizing thoughts. Randomized controlled trials are necessary to further determine its effect on self-stigma and self-stigmatizing thought processes

Assessing the impacts of EU agricultural policies on the sustainability of the livestock sector: a review of the recent literature

How do agricultural policies in the EU need to change to increase the sustainability of livestock production, and what measures could encourage sustainable practices whilst minimising trade-offs? Addressing such questions is crucial to ensure progress towards proclaimed targets whilst moving production levels to planetary boundaries. However, a lack of available evidence on the impacts of recent policies hinders developments in this direction. In this review, we address this knowledge gap, by collating and evaluating recent policy analyses, using three complementary frameworks. The review highlights that recent policy reforms, and especially those of the Common Agricultural Policy, have had a large impact on the sustainability of the livestock sector by contributing to intensification and simplification. This has often resulted in negative impacts (e.g. on greenhouse gas emissions and animal welfare) and while financial support has enabled production, it can also lead to a culture of dependency that limits innovation. At the same time, a lack of regulation and concrete targets, and low levels of stakeholder engagement in policy design have led to delays in the delivery of sustainability objectives. Future policies could take on-board more innovative thinking that addresses the interrelatedness of society, animals, and the environment, to deliver effective targets and support

Reading time and the time of reading

This thesis questions how time is defined in an interdisciplinary range of texts, from children’s literature to literary theory, philosophy, postcolonial theory, cognitive psychology and physics in order to think through a series of problems and issues with what time is claimed to be; specifically, time’s connection with children and childhood. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s (1992) arguments from ‘Counterfeit Money’, in Given Time, I read how time is defined according to different perspectives: time in such thinking is therefore always something other than time, including, crucially, being also always claimed necessarily in retrospect. I work with Jacqueline Rose’s (1984) related arguments from The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, concerning claims to know the child always from another perspective, including the child’s relations to time. I also draw on critical psychologist Erica Burman’s Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (1994), and philosopher Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1962), as these different texts enable me to read the differences in ideas of time while also reading the repetition of differences in retrospect. The implications of such arguments are worked through in relation to texts by the children’s literature theorist Maria Tatar (1999) and historian Ernst Bloch (1999) on myth and folktale; developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1969), physicist Carlo Rovelli (2015; 2018), literary critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar on author Virginia Woolf (2004), author Jhumpa Lahiri (2004), post-colonial theorist Pheng Cheah (2016) and educator Geoffrey Williams (1999). These ideas are analysed in order to think through what is at stake in the claims made about time and the ostensible educational intentions or purpose of children’s literature to which these notions lead. This means that this thesis is not concerned with the achievement of mastery or knowledge and is formulated as a reading in perspective

A framework for physically consistent storylines of UK future mean sea level rise

We present a framework for developing storylines of UK sea level rise to aid risk communication and coastal adaptation planning. Our approach builds on the UK national climate projections (UKCP18) and maintains the same physically consistent methods that preserve component correlations and traceability between global mean sea level (GMSL) and local relative sea level (RSL). Five example storylines are presented that represent singular trajectories of future sea level rise drawn from the underlying large Monte Carlo simulations. The first three storylines span the total range of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) likely range GMSL projections across the SSP1-2.6 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios. The final two storylines are based upon recent high-end storylines of GMSL presented in AR6 and the recent literature. Our results suggest that even the most optimistic sea level rise outcomes for the UK will require adaptation of up to 1 m of sea level rise for large sections of coastline by 2300. For the storyline most consistent with current international greenhouse gas emissions pledges and a moderate sea level rise response, UK capital cities will experience between about 1 and 2 m of sea level rise by 2300, with continued rise beyond 2300. The storyline based on the upper end of the AR6 likely range sea level projections yields much larger values for UK capital cities that range between about 3 and 4 m at 2300. The two high-end scenarios, which are based on a recent study that showed accelerated sea level rise associated with ice sheet instability feedbacks, lead to sea level rise for UK capital cities at 2300 that range between about 8 m and 17 m. These magnitudes of rise would pose enormous challenges for UK coastal communities and are likely to be beyond the limits of adaptation at some locations

Improving traceability to achieve sustainable development and commercial scaling-up of fisheries resources in Tanzania

This study identifies barriers to and drivers of sustainable development and commercial scaling-up of Tanzania’s fisheries resources by exploring a market-based approach to improving traceability in fisheries to overcome these barriers. Data collection from Tanzanian and European stakeholders used Grounded Theory (GT) analytical framework. Lack of trust, credibility, and inadequacies in public governance were barriers that created opportunities for local and foreign rogue actors to unsustainably overexploit Tanzanian fisheries resources. A Basic Social Process (BSP) called Fishmining, which captured these barriers, was derived using the GT methodology. Literature on resolving these barriers suggested that market-based mechanisms would potentially increase transparency and traceability to improve accountability for sustainability in fisheries. A Blockchain technology-based traceability solution was thus devised, based on successful case studies in other developing countries, for testing in the Tanzanian context. A large-scale survey tested Tanzania’s marine and freshwater fishers’ willingness to accept/adopt this solution. An extension of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) conceptual framework explained the drivers of willingness to accept/adopt this solution, modelled using Partial Least Squares–Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). The solution’s proposed monthly price of US$100.00 attracted fishers’ potential uptake rates of over 80%. Overall, the PLS-SEM model explained 38.5% of variations in the fishers’ Behavioural Intention to accept/adopt the solution, with more explanatory power in marine (43.6%) than freshwater (38.8%). Four drivers influenced positively and directly the fishers’ intention: Complementary Technology, Effort Expectancy, Performance Expectancy, and Price Value. Also found were moderating and mediating effects that invariably revealed the drivers’ influence on fishers’ intention. Therefore, attaining sustainable development and commercial scaling-up of the fisheries resources requires increased uptake of this solution whose features of transparency and traceability enhance accountability through identification and mitigation of stakeholder trust issues and governance problems along the fisheries supply and value chains

Adhesive and healable supramolecular comb-polymers

A series of supramolecular comb polymers (SCPs) with adhesive and healable characteristics have been generated through the copolymerisation of methacrylate monomers featuring aromatic amide functionalities with lauryl methacrylate. By varying the amide functionality and loading of the supramolecular monomers, the properties of the resulting SCPs can be tailored, ultimately providing stable films at room temperature. As the loading of the amide-bearing monomer was increased, the phase separation between the hard and soft domains was enhanced, promoting larger hard-domain aggregation, as observed via atomic force microscopy (AFM). The mechanical properties of the SCPs correlated to the loading of the amide-bearing monomers, by increasing the mol% incorporation the resulting SCPs transition from possessing high strain to high ultimate tensile strength (UTS) and Young’s modulus (YM). Over several re-adhesion cycles, the SCPs were shown to retain their shear strength when thermally adhered to both glass and aluminium substrates. Additionally, the SCPs exhibited healable properties at elevated temperatures (> 45 °C) allowing for the recovery of mechanical properties post-damage

The significance of the melt-pond scheme in a CMIP6 global climate model

The impact of melt ponds on sea-ice albedo has been observed and documented. In general circulation models, ponds are now accounted for through indirect diagnostic treatments (‘implicit’ schemes), or prognostic melt-pond parametrisations (‘explicit’ schemes). However, there has been a lack of studies showing the impacts of these schemes on simulated Arctic climate. We focus here on rectifying this using the general circulation model HadGEM3, one of the few models with a detailed explicit pond-scheme. We identify the impact of melt ponds on the sea ice and climate, and associated ice-ocean-atmosphere interactions. We run a set of constant forcing simulations for three different periods and show, for the first time, using mechanistically different pond-schemes can lead to very significantly different sea-ice and climate states. Under near-future conditions, an implicit scheme never yields an ice-free summer Arctic, whilst an explicit scheme yields an ice-free Arctic 35% of years and raises autumn Arctic air temperatures by 5 to 8 °C. We find that impacts on climate and sea ice depend on the ice state: under near-future and Last Interglacial conditions, the thin sea ice is very sensitive to pond formation and parametrisation, whilst during the Pre-Industrial, the thicker sea ice is less sensitive to the pond-scheme choice. Both of these two commonly-used parametrisations of sea-ice albedo yield similar results under pre-industrial conditions, but in warmer climates, lead to very different Arctic sea ice and ocean and atmospheric temperatures. Thus changes to physical parametrisations in the sea-ice model can have large impacts on simulated sea ice, ocean and atmosphere