VEIL Ballarat centre structural plan

This report looks at the future devlopment in Ballerat, Victoria. New forms of urban planning, housing and also transport and use of natural resouces are some of the major topics covered.  (1) BALLARAT - THE LOCALLY PRODUCTIVE CITY Goal: All precincts in Ballarat (exemplified by the CBA) aim to maximise production of environmentally and socially critical resources.Target: To be a net exporter in as many of the following areas as possible: Renewable energy - diverse systems - wind, solar, geothermal, biomass Water - rainwater, grey water, recycled Food production - close to points of consumption Community services Knowledge - research, innovation, education and skills. E.g: climate adaptation solutions; low-carbon solutions; sustainable agriculture (food and bio-mass) Green businesses, green services, eco-innovation (agricultural best practice and re-mining) "green zone" (2) BALLARAT - THE LOW CONSUMPTION CITYGoal: Living and Working Better - Consuming LessTarget: To develop the highest quality of living and working conditions with the lowest per-capita consumption and production of waste, in as many of the following areas as possible: Greenhouse gas (e.g. target: reductions of greater than 60%) Electricity use (e.g through retrofitting - 40% reduction) Water: (e.g. target 80 litres/person/day of reticulated potable water) Transport /mobility (e.g. target greater than 30% shift from car to walking & cycling; 25% reduction in car trip distances; 40% increase in public transport use) Waste reduction (e.g, in all sectors,40%) (3) BALLARAT - THE REGENERATIVE CITYGoal: Avoiding cascading breakdown effects, enabling quick bounceback from challenges - creating a social and physical fabric that is diverse, decentralised and locally inter-connected, so that any shocks (environmental or economic) will be limited in the spread of their effects.Target: To approach all planning and design decisions with the intent of increasing the diversity of communities, production systems (as in 1, above) and public facilities, particularly in relation to: access to energy, water, food, transport, the provision of work and residential facilities life in extreme weather conditions community engagement (4) BALLARAT - THE INVENTIVE CITYGoal: To achieve all of above through the development of innovative new solutions and approaches, building on the strong history of inventiveness and creativity in Ballarat (in agriculture and mining in particular).Target: Ballarat to be known nationally and internationally as supporting a culture of creative risk-taking, experimentation, and innovation in relation to climate resilience and sustainable solutions

The Social and Political Dimensions of the Ebola Response: Global Inequality, Climate Change, and Infectious Disease

The 2014 Ebola crisis has highlighted public-health vulnerabilities in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea – countries ravaged by extreme poverty, deforestation and mining-related disruption of livelihoods and ecosystems, and bloody civil wars in the cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Ebola’s emergence and impact are grounded in the legacy of colonialism and its creation of enduring inequalities within African nations and globally, via neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. Recent experiences with new and emerging diseases such as SARS and various strains of HN influenzas have demonstrated the effectiveness of a coordinated local and global public health and education-oriented response to contain epidemics. To what extent is international assistance to fight Ebola strengthening local public health and medical capacity in a sustainable way, so that other emerging disease threats, which are accelerating with climate change, may be met successfully? This chapter considers the wide-ranging socio-political, medical, legal and environmental factors that have contributed to the rapid spread of Ebola, with particular emphasis on the politics of the global and public health response and the role of gender, social inequality, colonialism and racism as they relate to the mobilization and establishment of the public health infrastructure required to combat Ebola and other emerging diseases in times of climate change

The Resilience of Mining Communities in Obuasi, as Anglogold Ashanti Shifts Position

A Flurry or an avalanche of publications examining the effects of mining on host communities have painted a rather incomplete picture of  the abilities of these communities to cope with  economic and population induced shocks and its ramifications  not to mention their capacity to  withstand the aftermath of the  exhaustion of all economically valuable resources. In this paper, therefore, the concept on resource-community reliance is investigated. Obuasi the host community of the oldest mining site in Ghana is the case study. The study conducted a broad meta-analysis of all the types of capitals available in Obuasi that are essential to achieving resilience at the community level.  The findings revealed Obuasi’s ability to cope with the on-going stress and recover thereof appears daunting as the resources capable of placing the community in a better condition are not locally owned. Additionally, institutional inefficiencies and convergent thinking have exacerbated the problem. The paper recommends among other things the need for AGA to depart from the current handout dependent nature of its corporate social responsibility to one that promotes wealth creation. Obuasi Municipal Assembly on the other hand would have to be innovative and re-direct its energies towards preparing the Municipality to take advantage of the huge physical capital currently at its disposal. Keywords: Obuasi, resilience, mining communities, development

Enabling Social Applications via Decentralized Social Data Management

An unprecedented information wealth produced by online social networks, further augmented by location/collocation data, is currently fragmented across different proprietary services. Combined, it can accurately represent the social world and enable novel socially-aware applications. We present Prometheus, a socially-aware peer-to-peer service that collects social information from multiple sources into a multigraph managed in a decentralized fashion on user-contributed nodes, and exposes it through an interface implementing non-trivial social inferences while complying with user-defined access policies. Simulations and experiments on PlanetLab with emulated application workloads show the system exhibits good end-to-end response time, low communication overhead and resilience to malicious attacks.Comment: 27 pages, single ACM column, 9 figures, accepted in Special Issue of Foundations of Social Computing, ACM Transactions on Internet Technolog

China’s Global Monopoly on Rare-Earth Elements

This article delivers a novel economic analysis of US dependence on China for rare-earth elements and sheds light on how Western nations may exploit the limitations of limit pricing to break China’s global monopoly in rare-earth element production and refinement. This analytical framework, supported by a comprehensive literature review, the application of microeconomic and industrial organization concepts, and two case-study scenarios, provides several policy recommendations to address the most important foreign policy challenge the United States has faced since the end of the Cold War