A State of the Art of Governance Literature on adaptation to climate change. Towards a research agenda

This report provides a state-of-the-art overview of governance literature on adaptation strategies. What has recent research taught us on adaptation from the perspective of governance and to what research agenda does this lead? This report is structured as followed. Firstly, it will be argued why adaptation is a matter of governance. Secondly, the research methods for the literature study will be outlined. Thirdly, the results of the literature study will portray the findings in terms of the themes and foci with, respectively, environmental studies, spatial planning and development studies, and public administration studies. Finally, a comparative analysis of these findings will lead to a research agenda for future research on governance of adaptatio

Managing coastal environments under climate change: pathways to adaptation

This paper deals with the question of how to manage vulnerable coastal systems so as to make them sustainable under present and future climates. This is interpreted in terms of the coastal functionality, mainly natural services and support for socio-economic activities. From here we discuss how to adapt for long term trends and for short terms episodic events using the DPSIR framework. The analysis is presented for coastal archetypes from Spain, Ireland and Romania, sweeping a range of meteo-oceanographic and socio-economic pressures, resulting in a wide range of fluxes among them those related to sediment. The analysis emphasizes the variables that provide a higher level of robustness. That means mean sea level for physical factors and population density for human factors. For each of the studied cases high and low sustainability practices, based on stakeholders preferences, are considered and discussed. This allows proposing alternatives and carrying out an integrated assessment in the last section of the paper. This assessment permits building a sequence of interventions called adaptation pathway that enhances the natural resilience of the studied coastal systems and therefore increases their sustainability under present and future conditions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Marine Managed Areas: What, Why, and Where

This paper, which focuses on ocean and coastal areas, explores the challenge of public participation by discussing the role of communities in IM. It draws on a decade of collaboration between academics and community partners to outline the community perspective on both the limiting factors and the opportunities, and a state-of-the-art survey of community involvement in IM, parti-cularly in the Canadian Maritimes. The paper highlights the importance of linking communities and governments, and the need to overcome the growing disconnect between the two. It also illustrates the varied experiences of local coastal communities with IM through three concrete examples. These practical examples lead to two specific out-puts: a set of fundamental IM values and attributes from a community perspective, and a four-step process for facilitating and enabling community-focused IM.The conclusion summarizes key outcomes in terms of inclusivity and active involvement of communities

The "Adaptive Management" of a New Nature along the Southern English Coastline

This article explores the tensions between different understandings about how best to manage a stretch of coastline that is threatened by a new piece of land that emerged out of the sea. It looks at the kinds of political worlds this environmental change has engendered and the dynamic shaping of people and places through such change. It argues that in managing the edges of the sea and land in this area, people also forge themselves as new kinds of subjects in a political landscape that is shifting and changing. Contrasting views about how best to manage these changes illuminate the politics of how best to adapt and manage different environments and the people who shape and are shaped by them

A Comprehensive Survey of Voice over IP Security Research

We present a comprehensive survey of Voice over IP security academic research, using a set of 245 publications forming a closed cross-citation set. We classify these papers according to an extended version of the VoIP Security Alliance (VoIPSA) Threat Taxonomy. Our goal is to provide a roadmap for researchers seeking to understand existing capabilities and to identify gaps in addressing the numerous threats and vulnerabilities present in VoIP systems. We discuss the implications of our findings with respect to vulnerabilities reported in a variety of VoIP products. We identify two specific problem areas (denial of service, and service abuse) as requiring significant more attention from the research community. We also find that the overwhelming majority of the surveyed work takes a black box view of VoIP systems that avoids examining their internal structure and implementation. Such an approach may miss the mark in terms of addressing the main sources of vulnerabilities, i.e., implementation bugs and misconfigurations. Finally, we argue for further work on understanding cross-protocol and cross-mechanism vulnerabilities (emergent properties), which are the byproduct of a highly complex system-of-systems and an indication of the issues in future large-scale systems

Oak Foundation Belize: Annual Summary Report 2012

In 2006 Oak Foundation developed a ten-year strategic plan that guides its grant-making in Belize and the wider Mesoamerica region. The purpose of this report is to provide a detailed description of regional grantmaking in 2012 and inform on the progress of active grants from previous years.The report is divided into four sections: 1) Introduction, 2) Mesoamerican Reef Eco-region Programme grants 2012; 3) active grants from previous years; and 4) a glossary of abbreviations.The Oak Belize Foundation is a part of a wider group of charitable and philanthropic organisations established in various countries worldwide. The resources of Oak Foundation originated from an interest in the Duty Free Shoppers business that Alan Parker helped to build. Since its establishment over a decade ago the Foundation has made over 2,700 grants to not-for-profit organisations across the globe.The office in Belize is not a grant-making organisation. Its staff provide technical support and expert advice that informs the grant-making of Oak Foundation in the Mesoamerican Reef region. Other philanthropic organisations which partner with Oak Foundation administer the grants described in this report. Oak Foundation's Mesoamerican Reef Eco-region Programme Goal is to develop an ecologically representative network of marine reserves that maintain the health of the barrier reef ecosystem and its wildlife, and that support the food security and sustainable economic development of local coastal communities

Outbound SPIT Filter with Optimal Performance Guarantees

This paper presents a formal framework for identifying and filtering SPIT calls (SPam in Internet Telephony) in an outbound scenario with provable optimal performance. In so doing, our work is largely different from related previous work: our goal is to rigorously formalize the problem in terms of mathematical decision theory, find the optimal solution to the problem, and derive concrete bounds for its expected loss (number of mistakes the SPIT filter will make in the worst case). This goal is achieved by considering an abstracted scenario amenable to theoretical analysis, namely SPIT detection in an outbound scenario with pure sources. Our methodology is to first define the cost of making an error (false positive and false negative), apply Wald’s sequential probability ratio test to the individual sources, and then determine analytically error probabilities such that the resulting expected loss is minimized. The benefits of our approach are: (1) the method is optimal (in a sense defined in the paper); (2) the method does not rely on manual tuning and tweaking of parameters but is completely self-contained and mathematically justified; (3) the method is computationally simple and scalable. These are desirable features that would make our method a component of choice in larger, autonomic frameworks