The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems: motivations, challenges, and applications

Abstract In response to growing demand for ecosystem-level risk assessment in biodiversity conservation, and rapid proliferation of locally tailored protocols, the IUCN recently endorsed new Red List criteria as a global standard for ecosystem risk assessment. Four qualities were sought in the design of the IUCN criteria: generality; precision; realism; and simplicity. Drawing from extensive global consultation, we explore trade-offs among these qualities when dealing with key challenges, including ecosystem classification, measuring ecosystem dynamics, degradation and collapse, and setting decision thresholds to delimit ordinal categories of threat. Experience from countries with national lists of threatened ecosystems demonstrates well-balanced trade-offs in current and potential applications of Red Lists of Ecosystems in legislation, policy, environmental management and education. The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems should be judged by whether it achieves conservation ends and improves natural resource management, whether its limitations are outweighed by its benefits, and whether it performs better than alternative methods. Future development of the Red List of Ecosystems will benefit from the history of the Red List of Threatened Species which was trialed and adjusted iteratively over 50 years from rudimentary beginnings. We anticipate the Red List of Ecosystems will promote policy focus on conservation outcomes in situ across whole landscapes and seascapes

Shipboard Crisis Management: A Case Study.

The loss of the "Green Lily" in 1997 is used as a case study to highlight the characteristics of escalating crises. As in similar safety critical industries, these situations are unpredictable events that may require co-ordinated but flexible and creative responses from individuals and teams working in stressful conditions. Fundamental skill requirements for crisis management are situational awareness and decision making. This paper reviews the naturalistic decision making (NDM) model for insights into the nature of these skills and considers the optimal training regimes to cultivate them. The paper concludes with a review of the issues regarding the assessment of crisis management skills and current research into the determination of behavioural markers for measuring competence

What are the true clusters?

Constructivist philosophy and Hasok Chang's active scientific realism are used to argue that the idea of "truth" in cluster analysis depends on the context and the clustering aims. Different characteristics of clusterings are required in different situations. Researchers should be explicit about on what requirements and what idea of "true clusters" their research is based, because clustering becomes scientific not through uniqueness but through transparent and open communication. The idea of "natural kinds" is a human construct, but it highlights the human experience that the reality outside the observer's control seems to make certain distinctions between categories inevitable. Various desirable characteristics of clusterings and various approaches to define a context-dependent truth are listed, and I discuss what impact these ideas can have on the comparison of clustering methods, and the choice of a clustering methods and related decisions in practice

What Can Artificial Intelligence Do for Scientific Realism?

The paper proposes a synthesis between human scientists and artificial representation learning models as a way of augmenting epistemic warrants of realist theories against various anti-realist attempts. Towards this end, the paper fleshes out unconceived alternatives not as a critique of scientific realism but rather a reinforcement, as it rejects the retrospective interpretations of scientific progress, which brought about the problem of alternatives in the first place. By utilising adversarial machine learning, the synthesis explores possibility spaces of available evidence for unconceived alternatives providing modal knowledge of what is possible therein. As a result, the epistemic warrant of synthesised realist theories should emerge bolstered as the underdetermination by available evidence gets reduced. While shifting the realist commitment away from theoretical artefacts towards modalities of the possibility spaces, the synthesis comes out as a kind of perspectival modelling

Civil Procedure as a Critical Discussion

This Article develops a model for analyzing legal dispute resolution systems as systems for argumentation. Our model meshes two theories of argument conceived centuries apart: contemporary argumentation theory and classical stasis theory. In this Article, we apply the model to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure as a proof of concept. Specifically, the model analyzes how the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure function as a staged argumentative critical discussion designed to permit judge and jury to rationally resolve litigants’ differences in a reasonable manner. At a high level, this critical discussion has three phases: a confrontation, an (extended) opening, and a concluding phase. Those phases are the umbrella under which discrete argumentation phases occur at points we call stases. Whenever litigants seek a ruling or judgment, they reach a stasis—a stopping or standing point for arguing procedural points of disagreement. During these stases, the parties make arguments that fall into predictable “commonplace” argument types. Taken together, these stock argument types form a taxonomy of arguments for all civil cases. Our claim that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure function as a system for argumentation is novel, as is our claim that civil cases breed a taxonomy of argument types. These claims also mark the beginning of a broader project. Starting here with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, we embark on a journey that we expect to follow for several years (and which we hope other scholars will join), exploring our model’s application across dispute resolution systems and using it to make normative claims about those systems. From a birds-eye view, this Article also represents a short modern trek in a much longer journey begun by advocates in city states in and near Greece nearly 2500 years ago

Models for an Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries

This document is one outcome from a workshop held in Gizo in October 2010 attended by 82 representatives from government, NGO's private sector, and communities. The target audience for the document is primarily organizations planning to work with coastal communities of Solomon Islands to implement Community-Based Resource Management (CBRM). It is however also envisaged that the document will serve as a reference for communities to better understand what to expect from their partners and also for donors, to be informed about agreed approaches amongst Solomon Islands stakeholders. This document does not attempt to summarize all the outcomes of the workshop; rather it focuses on the Solomon Islands Coral Triangle Initiative (CTI) National Plan of Action (NPoA): Theme 1: Support and implementation of CBRM and specifically, the scaling up of CBRM in Solomon Islands. Most of the principles given in this document are derived from experiences in coastal communities and ecosystems as, until relatively recently, these have received most attention in Solomon Islands resource management. It is recognized however that the majority of these principles will be applicable to both coastal and terrestrial initiatives. This document synthesizes information provided by stakeholders at the October 2010 workshop and covers some basic principles of engagement and implementation that have been learned over more than twenty years of activities by the stakeholder partners in Solomon Islands. The document updates and expands on a summary of guiding principles for CBRM which was originally prepared by the Solomon Islands Locally Managed Marine Area Network (SILMMA) in 2007

A Puzzle About Economic Explanation: Examining the Cournot and Bertrand Models of Duopoly Competition

Economists use various models to explain why it is that firms are capable of pricing above marginal cost. In this paper, we will examine two of them: the Cournot and Bertrand duopoly models. Economists generally accept both models as good explanations of the phenomenon, but the two models contradict each other in various important ways. The puzzle is that two inconsistent explanations are both regarded as good explanations for the same phenomenon. This becomes especially worrisome when the two models are offering divergent policy recommendations. This report presents that puzzle by laying out how the two models contradict each other in a myriad of ways and then offers five possible solutions to that puzzle from various economists, philosophers of science, and philosophers of economics

Why did Greece block the Euro-Atlantic integration of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia?: an analysis of Greek foreign policy behaviour shifts

This essay analyses shifts in Greek foreign policy behaviour with regard to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia from the early 1990s to the late 2000s, with a particular emphasis on the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit. In this paper, I attempt to provide an understanding of foreign policy decisions that examines the interplay of all the international, domestic and individual levels of analysis. Two parallel analyses take place: first, a historical analysis, showing how international threats/opportunities and domestic variables shape the strategic adjustments of the Greek Foreign Policy Executives (FPE); secondly, an intuitive analysis of the rationale behind the ‘Greek blocking’ based on the role of ‘permeable’ perceptions of Greeks on security, (negotiating) power and national interest