Sustainable approaches for stormwater quality improvements with experimental geothermal paving systems

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.This research assesses the next generation of permeable pavement systems (PPS) incorporating ground source heat pumps (geothermal paving systems). Twelve experimental pilot-scaled pavement systems were assessed for its stormwater treatability in Edinburgh, UK. The relatively high variability of temperatures during the heating and cooling cycle of a ground source heat pump system embedded into the pavement structure did not allow the ecological risk of pathogenic microbial expansion and survival. Carbon dioxide monitoring indicated relatively high microbial activity on a geotextile layer and within the pavement structure. Anaerobic degradation processes were concentrated around the geotextile zone, where carbon dioxide concentrations reached up to 2000 ppm. The overall water treatment potential was high with up to 99% biochemical oxygen demand removal. The pervious pavement systems reduced the ecological risk of stormwater discharges and provided a low risk of pathogen growth

Techniques for Representation of Regional Clusters in Geographical In-formation Systems

This paper provides an overview of visualization techniques adapted for regional clusters presentation in Geographic Information Systems. Clusters are groups of companies and insti-tutions co-located in a specific geographic region and linked by interdependencies in providing a related group of products and services. The regional clusters can be visualized by projecting the data into two-dimensional space or using parallel coordinates. Cluster membership is usually represented by different colours or by dividing clusters into several panels of a grille display. Taking into consideration regional clusters requirements and the multilevel administrative division of the Romania’s territory, I used two cartograms: NUTS2- regions and NUTS3- counties, to illustrate the tools for regional clusters representation.Geographic Information Systems, Regional Clusters, Spatial Statistics, Geographic Data Visualisation

Community Self-Organisation from a Social-Ecological Perspective: ‘Burlang Yatra’ and Revival of Millets in Odisha (India)

In this paper, I focus on the revival of an Indigenous community seed festival known locally as Burlang Yatra (‘Indigenous Biodiversity Festival’) in the district of Kandhamal in Odisha (India). This annual event brings together millet farmers to share knowledge and practices, including exchange of Indigenous heirloom seeds. Such community seed festivals remain largely underappreciated (and underexplored). Investigating Burlang Yatra through a social-ecological lens allowed for a greater understanding of its capacity to build and strengthen relationships, adaptation, and responsibility, three key principles that together link the social and the ecological in a dynamic sense. These principles, driven by intergenerational participation and interaction as well as social learning, can be seen as fostering ‘social-ecological memory’ of millet-based biodiverse farming. The festival’s persistence and revival illustrate a form of grassroots self-organising that draws on values of an Indigenous knowledge system. Within a restorative context, it has the capacity to repair and restore cultural and ecological relationships that the community has with their own foods and practices. This paper offers a new understanding of community self-organising from a social-ecological perspective and particularly in a marginalised context as supporting the revitalisation of Indigenous food systems

CAST – City analysis simulation tool: an integrated model of land use, population, transport and economics

The paper reports on research into city modelling based on principles of Science of Complexity. It focuses on integration of major processes in cities, such as economics, land use, transport and population movement. This is achieved using an extended Cellular Automata model, which allows cells to form networks, and operate on individual financial budgets. There are 22 cell types with individual processes in them. The formation of networks is based on supply and demand mechanisms for products, skills, accommodation, and services. Demand for transport is obtained as an emergent property of the system resulting from the network connectivity and relevant economic mechanisms. Population movement is a consequence of mechanisms in the housing and skill markets. Income and expenditure of cells are self-regulated through market mechanisms and changing patterns of land use are a consequence of collective interaction of all mechanisms in the model, which are integrated through emergence

Spatial analysis and modelling of flood risk and climate adaptation capacity for assessing urban community and critical infrastructure interdependency

Flood hazards are the most common and destructive of all natural hazards in the world. A series of floods that hit the south east region of Queensland in Australia from December 2010 to January 2011 caused a massive devastation to the State, people, and its critical infrastructures. GIS-based risk mapping is considered a vital component in land use planning to reduce the adverse impacts of flooding. However, the integrated mapping of climate adaptation strategies, analysing interdependencies of critical infrastructures, and finding optimum decisions for natural disaster risk reduction in floodplain areas remain some of the challenging tasks. In this study, I examined the vulnerability of an urban community and its critical infrastructures to help alleviate these problem areas. The aim was to investigate the vulnerability and interdependency of urban community’s critical infrastructures using an integrated approach of flood risk and climate adaptation capacity assessments in conjunction with newly developed spatially-explicit analytical tools. As to the research area, I explored Brisbane City and identified the flood-affected critical infrastructures such as electricity, road and rail, sewerage, stormwater, water supply networks, and building properties. I developed a new spatially-explicit analytical approach to analyse the problem in four components: 1) transformation and standardisation of flood risk and climate adaptation capacity indicating variables using a) high resolution digital elevation modelling and urban morphological characterisation with 3D analysis, b) spatial analysis with fuzzy logic, c) geospatial autocorrelation, among others; 2) fuzzy gamma weighted overlay and topological cluster analyses using Bayesian joint conditional probability theory and self-organising neural network (SONN); 3) examination of critical infrastructure interdependency using utility network theory; and 4) analysis of optimum natural disaster risk reduction policies with Markov Decision Processes (MDP). The flood risk metrics and climate adaptation capacity metrics revealed a geographically inverse relationship (e.g. areas with very high flood risk index occupy a low climate adaptation capacity index). Interestingly, majority of the study area (93%) exhibited negative climate adaptation capacity metrics (-22.84 to < 0) which indicate that the resources (e.g. socio-economic) are not sufficient to increase the climate resiliency of the urban community and its critical infrastructures. I utilised these sets of information in the vulnerability assessment of critical infrastructures at single system level. The January 2011 flood instigated service disruptions on the following infrastructures: 1) electricity supplies along 627km (75%) and 212km (25%) transmission lines in two separate areas; 2) road and rail services along 170km (47%) and 2.5km (38%) networks, respectively; 3) potable water supply along 246km (56%) distribution lines; and 4) stormwater and sewerage services along 33km (91%) and 32km (78%) networks, respectively. From the critical infrastructure interdependency analysis, the failure of sewerage system due to the failure of electricity supply during the January 2011 flood exemplified the first order interdependency of critical infrastructures. The ripple effects of electricity failure down to road inaccessibility for emergency evacuation demonstrated the higher order interdependency. Moreover, an inverted pyramid structure demonstrated that the hierarchy of climate adaptation strategies of the infrastructures was graded from long-term measures (e.g. elimination) down to short-term measures (e.g. protection). The analysis with Markov Decision Processes (MDP) elucidated that the Australian Commonwealth government utilised the natural disaster risk reduction expenditure to focus on recovery while the State government focused on mitigation. There was a clear indication that the results of the MDP analysis for the State government established an agreement with the previous economic analysis (i.e. mitigation could reduce the cost of recovery by 50% by 2050 with benefit-cost ratio of 1.25). The newly developed spatially-explicit analytical technique, formulated in this thesis as the flood risk-adaptation capacity index-adaptation strategies (FRACIAS) linkage model, integrates the flood risk and climate adaptation capacity assessments for floodplain areas. Exacerbated by the absence of critical infrastructure interdependency assessment in various geographic analyses, this study enhanced the usual compartmentalised methods of assessing the flood risk and climate adaptation capacity of flood plain areas. Using the different drivers and factors that exposed an urban community and critical interdependent infrastructures to extreme climatic event, this work developed GIS-enabled systematic analysis which established the nexus between the descriptive and prescriptive modelling to climate risk assessment

The genetic code for cities – is it simpler than we thought?

September 200