Feasibility study on manganese nodules recovery in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone

The sea occupies three quarters of the area on the earth and provides various kinds of resources to mankind in the form of minerals, food, medicines and even energy. “Seabed exploitation” specifically deals with recovery of the resources that are found on the seabed, in the form of solids, liquids and gasses (methane hydrates, oil and natural gas). The resources are abundant; nevertheless the recovery process from the seabed, poses various challenges to mankind. This study starts with a review on three types of resources: polymetallic manganese nodules, polymetallic manganese crusts and massive sulphides deposits. Each of them are rich in minerals, such as manganese, cobalt, nickel, copper and some rare earth elements. They are found at many locations in the deep seas and are potentially a big source of minerals. No commercial seabed mining activity has been accomplished to date due to the great complexities in recovery. This book describes the various challenges associated with a potential underwater mineral recovery operation, reviews and analyses the existing recovery techniques, and provides an innovative engineering system. It further identifies the associated risks and a suitable business model.Chapter 1 presents a brief background about the past and present industrial trends of seabed mining. A description of the sea, seabed and the three types of seabed mineral resources are also included. A section on motivations for deep sea mining follows which also compares the latter with terrestrial mining.Chapter 2 deals with the decision making process, including a market analysis, for selecting manganese nodules as the resource of interest. This is followed by a case study specific to the location of interest: West COMRA in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Specific site location is determined in order to estimate commercial risk, environmental impact assessment and logistic challenge.Chapter 3 lists the existing techniques for nodule recovery operation. The study identifies the main components of a nodules recovery system, and organizes them into: collector, propulsion and vertical transport systems.Chapter 4 discusses various challenges posed by manganese nodules recovery, in terms of the engineering and environment. The geo-political and legal-social issues have also been considered. This chapter plays an important role in defining the proposed engineering system, as addressing the identified challenges will better shape the proposed solution.Chapter 5 proposes an engineering system, by considering the key components in greater details. An innovative component, the black box is introduced, which is intended to be an environmentally-friendly solution for manganese nodules recovery. Other auxiliary components, such as the mother ship and metallurgical processing, are briefly included. A brief power supply analysis is also provided.Chapter 6 assesses the associated risks, which are divided into sections namely commercial viability, logistic challenges, environmental impact assessment and safety assessment. The feasibility of the proposed solution is also dealt with.Chapter 7 provides a business model for the proposed engineering system. Potential customers are identified, value proposition is determined, costumer relation is also suggested. Public awareness is then discussed and finally a SWOT analysis is presented. This business model serves as an important bridge to reach both industry and research institutes.Finally, Chapter 8 provides some conclusions and recommendation for future work

Measuring Impact: The Art, Science and Mystery of Nonprofit News

This report seeks to answer the two-pronged question, "What is 'impact,' and how can it be measured consistently across nonprofit newsrooms?" A review of recent, relevant literature and our informal conversations with experts in the field reveal growing ambitions toward the goal of developing a common framework for assessing journalism's impact, yet few definitive conclusions about how exactly to reach that framework. This is especially the case when journalism's "impact" is defined by its ultimate social outcomes -- not merely the familiar metrics of audience reach and website traffic. As with all journalism, the frame defines the story, and audience is all-important. Defining "impact" as a social outcome proves a complicated proposition that generally evolves according to the constituency attempting to define it. Because various stakeholders have their own reasons for wanting to measure the impact of news, understanding those interests is an essential step in crafting measurement tools and interpreting the metrics they produce. Limitations of impact assessment arise from several sources: the assumptions invariably made about the product and its outcome; the divergent and overlapping categories into which nonprofit journalism falls in the digital age; and the intractable problem of attempting to quantify "quality." These formidable challenges, though, don't seem to deter people from posing and attempting to find answers to the impact question. Various models for assessing impact are continually being tinkered with, and lessons from similar efforts in other fields offer useful insight for this journalistic endeavor. And past research has pointed to specific needs and suggestions for ways to advance the effort. From all of this collective wisdom, several principles emerge as the cornerstones upon which to build a common framework for impact assessment

Coherent Price Systems and Uncertainty-Neutral Valuation

We consider fundamental questions of arbitrage pricing arising when the uncertainty model is given by a set of possible mutually singular probability measures. With a single probability model, essential equivalence between the absence of arbitrage and the existence of an equivalent martingale measure is a folk theorem, see Harrison and Kreps (1979). We establish a microeconomic foundation of sublinear price systems and present an extension result. In this context we introduce a prior dependent notion of marketed spaces and viable price systems. We associate this extension with a canonically altered concept of equivalent symmetric martingale measure sets, in a dynamic trading framework under absence of prior depending arbitrage. We prove the existence of such sets when volatility uncertainty is modeled by a stochastic differential equation, driven by Peng's G-Brownian motions

Call for a corporate social conscience index

This repository item contains a single issue of Issues in Brief, a series of policy briefs that began publishing in 2008 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a widely used term to describe how large companies adopt practices and policies that curb the potential negative impacts their operations can have on the surrounding environment and the community in which they are based. But companies’ claims of CSR behavior can be difficult to verify. This brief calls for the development of a “Corporate Social Conscience Index” as a mechanism for exerting some degree of transparency and accountability for CSR programs of large multinational companies. The author argues that by developing an index that provides insights to corporations’ excessive, unproductive spending as well as their activities related to environmental sustainability, job creation, and supply chain transparency, consumers along with policy makers, employees and researchers would be able determine whether a corporation is truly practicing corporate social responsibility and pressure more corporations to adopt meaningful CSR programs

Reconstructing Climate Policy: Beyond Kyoto

In their comprehensive analysis of the Kyoto Protocol and climate policy, Richard B. Stewart and Jonathan B. Wiener examine the current impasse in climate policy and the potential steps nations can take to reduce greenhouse gases. They summarize the current state of information regarding the extent of global warming that would be caused by increasing uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions. They explain why participation by all major greenhouse gas-emitting countries is essential to curb future greenhouse gas emissions and also note the significant obstacles to obtaining such participation. Stewart and Wiener argue it is in the national interest of the United States to participate in such a regime, provided that it is well designed. They discuss the elements of sound climate regulatory design, including maximum use of economic incentives, the comprehensive approach, and other flexibility mechanisms; participation by all major emitting countries, including developing countries; regulatory targets based on longer-term emissions pathways set to maximize net social benefits; and effective arrangements to ensure compliance with regulatory obligations by nations and sources. After evaluating the successes and failures of the Kyoto Protocol in light of those elements, the authors propose a series of U.S. initiatives at the international and domestic levels, with the aim of engaging the United States and major developing country emitters such as China in the global greenhouse gas regulatory effort and correcting the remaining defects in the design of the Kyoto Protocol. Although several alternatives to the current Kyoto Protocol regime have been proposed, Stewart and Wiener argue that the best approach for surmounting the current global climate policy impasse is a new strategy that would lead, sooner or later, to simultaneous accession by the United States and China (and other major developing country emitters) to a modified and improved version of the Kyoto Protocol agreement

Market-based Approaches to Environmental Management: A Review of Lessons from Payment for Environmental Services in Asia

Market-based approaches to environmental management, such as payment for environmental services (PES), have attracted unprecedented attention during the past decade. PES policies, in particular, have emerged to realign private and social benefits such as internalizing ecological externalities and diversifying sources of conservation funding as well as making conservation an attractive land-use paradigm. In this paper, we review several case studies from Asia on payment for environmental services to understand how landowners decide to participate in PES schemes. The analysis demonstrates the significance of four major elements facilitating the adoption and implementation of PES schemes: property rights and tenure security, transaction costs, household and community characteristics, communications, and the availability of PES-related information. PES schemes should target win-win options through intervention in these areas, aimed at maintaining the provision of ecological services and improving the conditions for local inhabitants