Using Eco-schemes in the new CAP: a guide for managing authorities

This guide has been developed primarily for policy makers and Member State officials involved in the national and regional programming processes of the CAP Strategic Plans (CSPs). This process might involve different administrative levels (national, regional, local), different political fields (agriculture, environmental, food and health ministries), different public bodies (paying agencies, environmental agencies, rural development offices) depending on the administrative setting of each MS. In addition, the guide provides support to other stakeholders and practitioners from the public and private sectors and civil society (including agricultural, environmental, food, health and consumer NGOs), with a direct or indirect involvement in the programming and evaluation process of the CSPs. Since these new plans will have a strong impact on MS environments, agricultural sectors, rural areas, etc., the engagement of all stakeholders will be an important asset for supporting an effective implementation of the CSP objectives. There are many others with potential interests in the contents of this guide. EU citizens have demonstrated their increasing interest in the contents of the CAP objectives and policy framework, as demonstrated both by civil society initiatives and consumption decisions. The contents of this guide may therefore also be of interest to other societal actors with interests in agricultural and environmental policies, such as researchers, journalists, trade unions, and civil society organizations. However, the guide is intentionally more focused on the technical needs of those involved in CSP development and implementation

Parallel Sort-Based Matching for Data Distribution Management on Shared-Memory Multiprocessors

In this paper we consider the problem of identifying intersections between two sets of d-dimensional axis-parallel rectangles. This is a common problem that arises in many agent-based simulation studies, and is of central importance in the context of High Level Architecture (HLA), where it is at the core of the Data Distribution Management (DDM) service. Several realizations of the DDM service have been proposed; however, many of them are either inefficient or inherently sequential. These are serious limitations since multicore processors are now ubiquitous, and DDM algorithms -- being CPU-intensive -- could benefit from additional computing power. We propose a parallel version of the Sort-Based Matching algorithm for shared-memory multiprocessors. Sort-Based Matching is one of the most efficient serial algorithms for the DDM problem, but is quite difficult to parallelize due to data dependencies. We describe the algorithm and compute its asymptotic running time; we complete the analysis by assessing its performance and scalability through extensive experiments on two commodity multicore systems based on a dual socket Intel Xeon processor, and a single socket Intel Core i7 processor.Comment: Proceedings of the 21-th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT 2017). Best Paper Award @DS-RT 201

Task-based adaptive multiresolution for time-space multi-scale reaction-diffusion systems on multi-core architectures

A new solver featuring time-space adaptation and error control has been recently introduced to tackle the numerical solution of stiff reaction-diffusion systems. Based on operator splitting, finite volume adaptive multiresolution and high order time integrators with specific stability properties for each operator, this strategy yields high computational efficiency for large multidimensional computations on standard architectures such as powerful workstations. However, the data structure of the original implementation, based on trees of pointers, provides limited opportunities for efficiency enhancements, while posing serious challenges in terms of parallel programming and load balancing. The present contribution proposes a new implementation of the whole set of numerical methods including Radau5 and ROCK4, relying on a fully different data structure together with the use of a specific library, TBB, for shared-memory, task-based parallelism with work-stealing. The performance of our implementation is assessed in a series of test-cases of increasing difficulty in two and three dimensions on multi-core and many-core architectures, demonstrating high scalability

Biodiversity 2020: climate change evaluation report

In 2011, the government published Biodiversity 2020: A strategy for England’s wildlife and ecosystem services [1]. This strategy for England builds on the 2011 Natural Environment White Paper - NEWP [2] and provides a comprehensive picture of how we are implementing our international and EU commitments. It sets out the strategic direction for biodiversity policy between 2011-2020 on land (including rivers and lakes) and at sea, and forms part of the UK’s commitments under the ‘the Aichi targets’ agreed in 2010 under the United Nations Convention of Biological Diversity’s Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 [3]. Defra is committed to evaluating the Biodiversity 2020 strategy and has a public commitment to assess climate change adaptation measures. This document sets out the information on assessing how action under Biodiversity 2020 has helped our wildlife and ecosystems to adapt to climate change. Biodiversity 2020 aims to halt the loss of biodiversity and restore functioning ecosystems for wildlife and for people. The outcomes and actions in Biodiversity 2020, although wider in scope, aimed to increase resilience of our wildlife and ecosystems in the face of a changing climate. In order to inform the assessment, we have defined which of the measurable outputs under Biodiversity 2020 contribute to resilience. Biodiversity 2020 included plans to develop and publish a dedicated set of indicators to assess progress towards the delivery of the strategy. The latest list (at the time of writing), published in 2017, contains 24 biodiversity indicators [4] that would help inform progress towards achieving specific outcomes, they are also highly relevant to the outputs (detailed below) that form the basis for this evaluation. The Adaptation Sub-Committee’s 2017 UK Climate Change Risk Assessment Evidence Report [5] sets out the priority climate change risks and opportunities for the UK. The ASC also produced a review of progress in the National Adaptation Programme - “Progress in preparing for climate change” [6], which highlights adaptation priorities and progress being made towards achieving them. The UK Government’s response to the ASC [7] review includes a set of recommendations, of which Recommendation 6 states that “Action should be taken to enhance the condition of priority habitats and the abundance and range of priority species”. The recommendation further iterated that “This action should maintain or extend the level of ambition that was included in Biodiversity 2020” and that “An evaluation should be undertaken of Biodiversity 2020 including the extent to which goals have been met and of the implications for resilience to climate change.” To this, end an evaluation process has been put in place to define: a. What worked and why? Which actions or activities have had the greatest benefit in terms of delivering the desired outcomes? And, conversely, what prevented progress? b. Where are the opportunities? What are the financial, political, scientific and social opportunities for furthering the desired outcomes in the future? These objectives underpin the evaluation process for actions to date, and will also inform future actions and the iteration of a new nature strategy for England

The quality of district plans and their implementation: Towards environmental quality

Since inception of the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA) the issue of sustainable management has dominated planning practice in New Zealand. Over the past decade, councils have wrestled with converting the concept of sustainable management into policy and practice. Implicit to the requirement that district councils develop plans for managing the environmental effects of the use and development of natural and physical resources is the assumption that good quality plans will result in improved environmental quality. The key question to be addressed in this paper is: Do good plans matter? Measuring the quality of plan implementation is a complex task, and little, if any, attempt has been made in councils to do it. The PUCM research is the first in New Zealand to attempt a quantitative analysis of the links between the quality of plans produced under the RMA and the quality of plan implementation. The purpose of this paper is to describe the methodology that we adopted for the research and to present some preliminary results from studying the implementation of plans through the resource consent process. Overall, we are trying to determine: how best to measure the quality of plan implementation and the effect that district plan quality has on implementation quality; and what factors influence the relationship between plan quality and implementation quality. This paper is structured into three main parts. The first is a description of the methodological approach taken to conduct the research. In the second part, the key preliminary results are presented. Finally the findings and the implications for achieving good environmental outcomes are discussed