Global water: issues and insights

This book brings together some of the world’s leading water researchers with an especially written collection of chapters on: water economics; transboundary water; water and development; water and energy; and water concepts. Introduction Freshwater governance holds a prominent position in the global policy agenda. Burgeoning water demand due to population growth and rising incomes is combining with supply-side pressures, such as environmental pollution and climate change, to create acute conditions of global water scarcity. This is a major concern because water is a primary input for agriculture, manufacturing, environmental health, human health, energy production and just about every economic sector and ecosystem. In addition to its importance, the management of freshwater resources is a complex, multidisciplinary topic. Encompassing a range of fields in the physical and social sciences, the task of sustainably meeting human and environmental water needs requires a depth and breadth of understanding unparalleled by most other policy problems. Our objective in this volume is to provide knowledge and insights into major issues and concepts related to freshwater governance. The book is divided into five themed parts: Economics, Transboundary governance, Development, Energy and Water Concepts. A part addresses each theme and opens with an introduction that provides an overview of key topics. For example, the introduction to the economics section presents two main foci: measuring the value of water and managing trade-offs between different water uses. The thematic case studies discuss issues such as water pricing in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, finance of water supply and irrigation infrastructure and improving agricultural production with enhanced water management. The aim of the volume is to accessibly communicate academic research from the many fields of freshwater governance. Too often, academic research is paywalled and/or written in a style that caters to colleagues in the same field, rather than a broader audience from other disciplines, the policy-making community and the general public. This open-access book presents the research of a range of global experts on freshwater governance in brief, insightful chapters that do not presume a high level of pre-existing knowledge of their respective subjects. This format is intended to present knowledge on the key problems of and solutions to global freshwater challenges. The final part presents research from several United Nations Educational, Social, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) supported water research Chairs and Centres. Support and coordination of the insititutions highlighted in this part of the book is provided by UNESCO. One water research Chair is The Australian National University – UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Governance, which was established in April 2010 and works with partners in southern Africa, UNESCO, the Global Water Partnership and other organisations to: (1) increase the skills, capacity, networks and potential of leaders and prospective water managers and policy-makers; (2) sustain and strengthen institutional capacity (especially in southern Africa) by providing a platform for collaboration and institutional development; and, (3) develop innovative research, tools, case-studies, and insights on water economics, water governance and equity. Established by the ANU–UNESCO Chair, the Global Water Forum (GWF) seeks to disseminate knowledge regarding freshwater governance and build the capacity of students, policy-makers and the general public to respond to local and global water issues. The GWF publishes accessible, subscription-free articles highlighing the latest research and practice concerning freshwater governance. A broad range of water-related topics are discussed in a non-technical manner, including water security, development, agriculture, energy and environment. In addition to publishing articles, reports and books, the GWF is engaged in a range of activities, such as the annual Emerging Scholars Award and hosting a portal to educational resources on freshwater. We hope that you enjoy reading this book and, more importantly, gain an improved understanding of the complex freshwater-governance challenges facing us all on a global scale and at a local level

Potential mass surveillance and privacy violations in proximity-based social applications

Proximity-based social applications let users interact with people that are currently close to them, by revealing some information about their preferences and whereabouts. This information is acquired through passive geo-localisation and used to build a sense of serendipitous discovery of people, places and interests. Unfortunately, while this class of applications opens different interactions possibilities for people in urban settings, obtaining access to certain identity information could lead a possible privacy attacker to identify and follow a user in their movements in a specific period of time. The same information shared through the platform could also help an attacker to link the victim's online profiles to physical identities. We analyse a set of popular dating application that shares users relative distances within a certain radius and show how, by using the information shared on these platforms, it is possible to formalise a multilateration attack, able to identify the user actual position. The same attack can also be used to follow a user in all their movements within a certain period of time, therefore identifying their habits and Points of Interest across the city. Furthermore we introduce a social attack which uses common Facebook likes to profile a person and finally identify their real identity

Interbasin Water Transfers and Water Scarcity in a Changing World: A Solution or a Pipedream?

The world is increasingly forced to face the challenge of how to ensure access to adequate water resources for expanding populations and economies, whilst maintaining healthy freshwater ecosystems and the vital services they provide. Now the growing impacts of climate change are exacerbating the problem of water scarcity in key regions of the world. One popular way for governments to distribute water more evenly across the landscape is to transfer it from areas with perceived surpluses, to those with shortages.While there is a long history of water transfers from ancient times, as many societies reach the limits of locally renewable water supplies increasingly large quantities of water are being moved over long distances, from one river basin to another. Since the beginning of dam building that marked the last half of the 1900s more that 364 large-scale interbasin water transfer schemes (IBTs) have been established that transfer around 400 km³ of water per year (Shiklomanov 1999). IBTs are now widely touted as the quick fix solution to meeting escalating water demands. One estimate suggests that the total number of largescale water transfer schemes may rise to between 760 and 1 240 by 2020 to transfer up to 800 km³ of water per year (Shiklomanov 1999).The wide range of IBT projects in place, or proposed, has provoked the preparation of this review, including seven case studies from around the globe. It builds on previous assessments and examines the costs and benefits of large scale IBTs. This report assesses related, emerging issues in sustaining water resources and ecosystems, namely the virtual water trade, expanding use of desalination, and climate change adaptation. It is based on WWF's 2007 publication "Pipedreams? Interbasin water transfers and water shortages".The report concludes that while IBTs can potentially solve water supply issues in regions of water shortage - they come with significant costs. Large scale IBTs are typically very high cost, and thus economically risky, and they usually also come with significant social and environmental costs; usually for both the river basin providing and the river basin receiving the water

On the anonymity risk of time-varying user profiles.

Websites and applications use personalisation services to profile their users, collect their patterns and activities and eventually use this data to provide tailored suggestions. User preferences and social interactions are therefore aggregated and analysed. Every time a user publishes a new post or creates a link with another entity, either another user, or some online resource, new information is added to the user profile. Exposing private data does not only reveal information about single users’ preferences, increasing their privacy risk, but can expose more about their network that single actors intended. This mechanism is self-evident in social networks where users receive suggestions based on their friends’ activities. We propose an information-theoretic approach to measure the differential update of the anonymity risk of time-varying user profiles. This expresses how privacy is affected when new content is posted and how much third-party services get to know about the users when a new activity is shared. We use actual Facebook data to show how our model can be applied to a real-world scenario.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Growing green?: co-creating an evidence-based model of SME engagement

Topic: This paper reports on our experiences in running a pilot ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) project that addresses the issue of ‘sustainable growth’ by engaging SME owners and managers in facilitated workshop discussions on this important, yet highly contested topic. If the UK and other countries are to meet their carbon reduction obligations, it is clear that SMEs will need to make significant, and in some cases radical changes, not only in terms of their day-to-day operational practices but also in their longer-term trajectories. However, policymakers face substantial obstacles in communicating with this audience, including: the scale and diversity of the SME population, competing priorities, competitive pressures and resource constraints. This project combines published research on SMEs, their growth processes and environmental behaviours, with specialist expertise in SME engagement and climate change communication. Aim: The multi-partner collaboration is designed to co-create new knowledge on environmentally sustainable growth in SMEs. Its primary aim is to help SMEs and intermediaries gain a better understanding of sustainable growth and its implications for their businesses. The team designed and trialled an innovative approach engagement, based on facilitated workshop discussions, creating an initial evidence base that will be coupled with a set of practical recommendations. The project builds on the academic and external partners’ complementary research insights into SMEs, organisational growth, climate change communication, energy use and associated policy-making. By incorporating the expertise of the practical insights of practitioners and intermediary organisations, the project seeks to initiate a vigorous knowledge exchange about the conceptualisation and practical application of sustainable growth. Methodology: Prior to engaging with SMEs, the team conducted a review of the literature on sustainable growth, which informed the engagement phase of the project. We also conducted a small survey of SME owners and managers and engaged in an informal consultation with stakeholders that informed the design and contents of the pilot workshops. Two half-day workshops were organised with SME owner and manager participants, facilitated by the communications specialists, Climate Outreach, and drawing on previous engagement projects with hard to reach groups. The workshops provided a forum for participants to engage in grounded, ‘peer to peer’ discussion about sustainable growth, expressed in their own terms and drawing on their own values and narratives. Audio recording of the workshops provided the basis for a thematic analysis, which has been combined with the other sources to construct this working paper. Contribution: The project is generating new insights into SME perspectives on sustainable growth that are grounded in relevant theory and evidence, coupled with practical tools that will be of value to practitioners and policymakers. The project team has also developed audio-visual resources, which will be used to raise awareness and help to provide the foundations for future engagement activity. The aim of the next phase of the project is to further refine this approach to engagement in the form of a more fully developed ‘toolkit’ and associated resources

Energy-Efficient Management of Data Center Resources for Cloud Computing: A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Open Challenges

Cloud computing is offering utility-oriented IT services to users worldwide. Based on a pay-as-you-go model, it enables hosting of pervasive applications from consumer, scientific, and business domains. However, data centers hosting Cloud applications consume huge amounts of energy, contributing to high operational costs and carbon footprints to the environment. Therefore, we need Green Cloud computing solutions that can not only save energy for the environment but also reduce operational costs. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements for energy-efficient management of Cloud computing environments. We focus on the development of dynamic resource provisioning and allocation algorithms that consider the synergy between various data center infrastructures (i.e., the hardware, power units, cooling and software), and holistically work to boost data center energy efficiency and performance. In particular, this paper proposes (a) architectural principles for energy-efficient management of Clouds; (b) energy-efficient resource allocation policies and scheduling algorithms considering quality-of-service expectations, and devices power usage characteristics; and (c) a novel software technology for energy-efficient management of Clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures,Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA 2010), Las Vegas, USA, July 12-15, 201