Enhancing integrated coastal management decision making in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa through knowledge transfer and information sharing.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal. Pietermaritzburg.Coastal environments are complex systems being sought-after for a myriad of environmental, socioeconomic and cultural activities, supporting an estimated 44% of the world’s population. The demand for coastal space and resources has created extreme pressure in coastal areas, leading to reduced coastal functionality and amplified risk of natural hazards. These stresses and changes require proactive management, in particular through policies and legislation that ensure protection and longterm sustainability, thus the emergence of Integrated Coastal Management (ICM) as a ‘holistic’ approach. South Africa, being a country of high marine and coastal biodiversity, recognised the need for better coastal management in the 1970s; however, it was only in 2009 that an Integrated Coastal Management Act (ICM Act) was promulgated. The Act attempts to tackle the interlinked problems of coastal development and conservation; however to date implementation has been frustratingly slow, with capacity constraints and knowledge gaps being the primary limitations. If ICM is to be effective, coastal managers require a broad range of scientific and social information, modelled data and environmental indicators, meaning that the scope and complexity of coastal management is strongly dependent upon capacity. However, in South Africa, these functions do not rest with such experts, but are assigned to various government departments at the local municipality level. Thus ICM initiatives, that integrate natural and social sciences and empower managers with best available knowledge, are required. This research focused on the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) Province, one of four coastal provinces in South Africa grappling with ICM implementation. Consequently, the KZN provincial government committed financial resources to improving knowledge transfer, information sharing and capacity building. KZN-specific barriers to ICM implementation were identified through a series of interviews and surveys, from which requirements for an information support tool were determined. The tool, devised from a coastal management perspective, enables continued knowledge acquisition and retention, thereby acting as an ‘institutional knowledge bank’. Development followed a participatory approach that ensured the needs of target users were met, however while such tools can improve understanding and lead to improved decision-making, their effectiveness depends on continued use by managers. Additionally, this research shows the value-add of such a tool in conjunction with traditional capacity building sessions and how these complementary approaches assisted ICM implementation. Lessons learned from KZN can be up-scaled to inform Government on the value of the information support tool by incorporating national data and information sharing for ICM capacity building

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Sustainable Irrigation in Agriculture: An Analysis of Global Research

Irrigated agriculture plays a fundamental role as a supplier of food and raw materials. However, it is also the world’s largest water user. In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of studies analyzing agricultural irrigation from the perspective of sustainability with a focus on its environmental, economic, and social impacts. This study seeks to analyze the dynamics of global research in sustainable irrigation in agriculture between 1999 and 2018, including the main agents promoting it and the topics that have received the most attention. To do this, a review and a bibliometric analysis were carried out on a sample of 713 articles. The results show that sustainability is a line of study that is becoming increasingly more prominent within research in irrigation. The study also reveals the existence of substantial differences and preferred topics in the research undertaken by different countries. The priority issues addressed in the research were climatic change, environmental impact, and natural resources conservation; unconventional water resources; irrigation technology and innovation; and water use efficiency. Finally, the findings indicate a series of areas related to sustainable irrigation in agriculture in which research should be promoted

The science of clinical practice: disease diagnosis or patient prognosis? Evidence about "what is likely to happen" should shape clinical practice.

BACKGROUND: Diagnosis is the traditional basis for decision-making in clinical practice. Evidence is often lacking about future benefits and harms of these decisions for patients diagnosed with and without disease. We propose that a model of clinical practice focused on patient prognosis and predicting the likelihood of future outcomes may be more useful. DISCUSSION: Disease diagnosis can provide crucial information for clinical decisions that influence outcome in serious acute illness. However, the central role of diagnosis in clinical practice is challenged by evidence that it does not always benefit patients and that factors other than disease are important in determining patient outcome. The concept of disease as a dichotomous 'yes' or 'no' is challenged by the frequent use of diagnostic indicators with continuous distributions, such as blood sugar, which are better understood as contributing information about the probability of a patient's future outcome. Moreover, many illnesses, such as chronic fatigue, cannot usefully be labelled from a disease-diagnosis perspective. In such cases, a prognostic model provides an alternative framework for clinical practice that extends beyond disease and diagnosis and incorporates a wide range of information to predict future patient outcomes and to guide decisions to improve them. Such information embraces non-disease factors and genetic and other biomarkers which influence outcome. SUMMARY: Patient prognosis can provide the framework for modern clinical practice to integrate information from the expanding biological, social, and clinical database for more effective and efficient care

Managing Climatic Risks to Combat Land Degradation and Enhance Food security: Key Information Needs

This paper discusses the key information needs to reduce the negative impacts of weather variability and climate change on land degradation and food security, and identifies the opportunities and barriers between the information and services needed. It suggests that vulnerability assessments based on a livelihood concept that includes climate information and key socio-economic variables can overcome the narrow focus of common one-dimensional vulnerability studies. Both current and future climatic risks can be managed better if there is appropriate policy and institutional support together with technological interventions to address the complexities of multiple risks that agriculture has to face. This would require effective partnerships among agencies dealing with meteorological and hydrological services, agricultural research, land degradation and food security issues. In addition a state-of-the-art infrastructure to measure, record, store and disseminate data on weather variables, and access to weather and seasonal climate forecasts at desired spatial and temporal scales would be needed

Citizen Science 2.0 : Data Management Principles to Harness the Power of the Crowd

Citizen science refers to voluntary participation by the general public in scientific endeavors. Although citizen science has a long tradition, the rise of online communities and user-generated web content has the potential to greatly expand its scope and contributions. Citizens spread across a large area will collect more information than an individual researcher can. Because citizen scientists tend to make observations about areas they know well, data are likely to be very detailed. Although the potential for engaging citizen scientists is extensive, there are challenges as well. In this paper we consider one such challenge – creating an environment in which non-experts in a scientific domain can provide appropriate and accurate data regarding their observations. We describe the problem in the context of a research project that includes the development of a website to collect citizen-generated data on the distribution of plants and animals in a geographic region. We propose an approach that can improve the quantity and quality of data collected in such projects by organizing data using instance-based data structures. Potential implications of this approach are discussed and plans for future research to validate the design are described

Designing behaviourally informed policies for land stewardship: A new paradigm

This paper argues the case for a new approach to the stewardship of land resources that uses behavioural science theory to support the design and application of policies that facilitate changes in behaviour by those who develop policy and the farmers who implement it. Current approaches have: focused on legally-based expert system; and have been devised by national and international bureaucracies with little or no knowledge of how land owners and managers are motivated, and how they think, behave and operate as stewards of their natural resources. A review of current approaches from the social scientific literature is provided, with a particular focus on principles from social psychology. This is followed by an examination of how these principles can be applied to influence behaviour related to land restoration and soil conservation. Examples of the problems with traditional approaches and the evolution of new approaches with full engagement of farmers as the delivery agents are provided from within the European Union, Iceland and Scotland. In the light of these examples and emerging thinking in other parts of the world, the paper sets out the basis for a new approach based on behavioural science theory and application, reinforcing the arguments already made in the literature for a social license for farming