Fire and rescue service reconfiguration: a case study in Nottinghamshire

The Fire Cover Review in Nottinghamshire arises out of the Integrated Risk Management Planning process introduced in the UK by the Fire and Rescue 2004 Act,. It is intended to provide the evidence and analysis for the reconfiguration of services and the future deployment of resources in in the short, medium and long terms. Any future reconfigurations of services must be based on contemporary and comprehensive risk assessments of the areas affected.(ODPM 2004). The need to undertake the review pre-dated the current financial crises, the general election and the need for significant reductions in public expenditure in the UK, although these circumstances made the review more challenging and politically sensitive. This paper evaluates the practical implementation of the Integrated Risk Management Planning process and the Fire Cover Review in Nottinghamshire to identify good practice and to generate recommendations for improving the process and its implementation

Climate change and disaster impact reduction

Based on papers presented at the 'UK - South Asia Young Scientists and Practitioners Seminar on Climate Change and Disaster Impact Reduction' held at Kathmandu, Nepal on 5-6 June, 2008

Architecture of Environmental Risk Modelling: for a faster and more robust response to natural disasters

Demands on the disaster response capacity of the European Union are likely to increase, as the impacts of disasters continue to grow both in size and frequency. This has resulted in intensive research on issues concerning spatially-explicit information and modelling and their multiple sources of uncertainty. Geospatial support is one of the forms of assistance frequently required by emergency response centres along with hazard forecast and event management assessment. Robust modelling of natural hazards requires dynamic simulations under an array of multiple inputs from different sources. Uncertainty is associated with meteorological forecast and calibration of the model parameters. Software uncertainty also derives from the data transformation models (D-TM) needed for predicting hazard behaviour and its consequences. On the other hand, social contributions have recently been recognized as valuable in raw-data collection and mapping efforts traditionally dominated by professional organizations. Here an architecture overview is proposed for adaptive and robust modelling of natural hazards, following the Semantic Array Programming paradigm to also include the distributed array of social contributors called Citizen Sensor in a semantically-enhanced strategy for D-TM modelling. The modelling architecture proposes a multicriteria approach for assessing the array of potential impacts with qualitative rapid assessment methods based on a Partial Open Loop Feedback Control (POLFC) schema and complementing more traditional and accurate a-posteriori assessment. We discuss the computational aspect of environmental risk modelling using array-based parallel paradigms on High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms, in order for the implications of urgency to be introduced into the systems (Urgent-HPC).Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, 1 text box, presented at the 3rd Conference of Computational Interdisciplinary Sciences (CCIS 2014), Asuncion, Paragua

Adapting to climate change : Assessing the vulnerability of ecosystem services in Europe in the context of rural development

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version. The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-013-9507-6.Over the past decade, efforts to move towards a low carbon economy have been increasingly coupled with the acknowledgement that we also need to develop climate resilient economies, capable of adapting and responding to changes in climate. To shift society in these directions we need to quantify impacts in relation to these objectives and develop cost-effective interventions. Techniques for quantifying greenhouse gas emissions are relatively well established and enable identification of hotspots where there is emissions reduction potential. However, there are no established techniques to assess and quantify adaptation vulnerability issues and identify hotspots for intervention. This paper presents work undertaken at a European level with the objective of identifying potential hotspots where ecosystem services may be vulnerable to climate change and thus where intervention may be required under the European Rural Development Programme. A pragmatic and relatively simple approach is presented, based on data that is readily available across Europe. The vulnerability assessments cover: Water (quality: dilution and filtration, regulation: flooding and provision); soils (erosion and organic matter); and biodiversity (forest fires, migration and pollination). The framework and assessments presented are considered fit for purpose (at a basic level) and they are potentially valuable tools for targeting limited resources to achieve desirable outcomes. They also contribute towards providing a better understanding of the climate change challenges we face and support the formulation of solutions to optimally address those challenges. There is scope to further improvement and a number of options are discussed and explored within this paperPeer reviewe