Managing the Risk of Stranded Assets in Agriculture and Forestry

To date, much of the research into stranded assets – broadly defined as assets incurring significant unanticipated or premature write-downs or devaluations – has focused on the fossil fuel sector. However, not least in the context of the 2015 Paris Agreement, and with growing understanding that climate change may become a major factor in the creation of stranded assets, it has become clear that it is not just the energy sector that will be affected. Assets in agriculture and forestry may also be at risk of stranding, because of physical impacts such as drought and desertification as well as through regulatory and technological change.The risk of stranding is particularly high in production regions where natural forests are being cleared for agricultural use. Other regions at high risk are those where climate change is predicted to have impacts that will severely disrupt production cycles or shift production patterns. In addition, strong low-carbon development plans can affect the regulatory frameworks that govern the agriculture and forestry sectors, bringing further risks of stranding.Stranding risks have a potential impact on the various actors positioned along the supply chain for agriculture and forest commodities. They include the land- or rights-owners, the owners of infrastructure related to the transport and processing of commodities, consumer companies and investors.The faster the pace of decarbonization, or the more pronounced the impacts of climate change, the greater the chance of asset stranding and the higher the likelihood of economic, social and political impacts. The prospect of asset stranding could be sufficient to cause potentially affected groups to impede efforts towards low-carbon development, but this possibility has not been sufficiently accounted for in the national low-carbon development plans of either developed or developing economies. As a result, there is a potential risk to the implementation of such plans.This paper includes case studies of stranding risk in Brazil, Malaysia and Liberia. In these countries, there are potentially significant risks of stranding, both from regulation and climate change impacts. However, there has been very little consideration of these risks by policymakers, and there are significant information gaps.Further research is necessary in the following areas: analysing the outlook for biofuels to assess the risk of stranding and the possible impacts of new technology; assessing the physical impacts of extreme weather events on investments, taking into account the role of the insurance industry and price fluctuations; and determining whether growing consumer preferences for 'sustainable' products contribute to the risk of stranding in agriculture and forestry.Such research could be used to initiate discussions within producer countries about the risk of stranded assets given their national strategies and policies, and in light of the available evidence of the physical impacts of climate change, in order to identify the options for both mitigating and managing that risk

Capital stranding cascades: The impact of decarbonisation on productive asset utilisation

This article develops a novel methodological framework to investigate the exposure of eco- nomic systems to the risk of physical capital stranding. Combining Input-Output (IO) and network theory, we define measures to identify both the sectors likely to trigger relevant capital stranding cascades and those most exposed to capital stranding risk. We show how, in a sample of ten European countries, mining is among the sectors with the highest external asset strand- ing multipliers. The sectors most affected by capital stranding triggered by decarbonisation include electricity and gas; coke and refined petroleum products; basic metals; and transporta- tion. From these sectors, stranding would frequently cascade down to chemicals; metal products; motor vehicles water and waste services; wholesale and retail trade; and public administration. Finally, we provide an estimate for the lower-bound amount of assets at risk of transition-related stranding, which is in the range of 0.6-8.2% of the overall productive capital stock for our sample of countries, mainly concentrated in the electricity and gas sector, manufacturing, and mining. These results confirm the systemic relevance of transition-related risks on European societies.Series: Ecological Economic Paper

On the development of relativization in the English language

The discussion is about relative clauses in Old English and the transition to the Middle English period. More specifically, it deals with the phenomenon of preposition stranding in one type of relative clauses but not in the two other types. An explanation is provided within the framework of generative grammar.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Auxiliary-Stranding Relative Clauses

A little discussed feature of English are non-restrictive relative clauses in which the antecedent is normally not an NP and the gap follows an auxiliary, as in Kim will sing, which Lee won?t. These relative clauses resemble clauses with auxiliary complement ellipsis or fronting. There are a variety of analyses that might be proposed, but there are reasons for thinking that the best analysis is one where which is a nominal filler associated with a gap which is generally non-nominal: a filler-gap mismatch analysis in other words

Evidence from Strandings for Geomagnetic Sensitivity in Cetaceans

We tested the hypothesis that cetaceans use weak anomalies in the geomagnetic field as cues for orientation, navigation and/or piloting. Using the positions of 212 stranding events of live animals in the Smith sonian compilation which fall within the boundaries of the USGS East-Coast Aeromagnetic Survey, we found that there are highly significant tendencies for cetaceans to beach themselves near coastal locations with local magnetic minima. Monte-Carlo simulations confirm the significance of these effects. These results suggest that cetaceans have a magnetic sensory systemcomparable to that in other migratory and homing animals, and predict that the magnetic topography and in particular the marine magnetic lineations may play an important role in guiding long-distance migration. The ‘map’ sense of migratoryanimals may therefore be largely based on a simple strategy of following paths of local magnetic minima and avoiding magnetic gradients

Establishing death in stranded Odontocetes (toothed whales) using other mammals : a pilot study : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Zoology at Massey University

The aim of this study was to investigate and evaluate a new method for determining death in stranded odontocetes (toothed whales). The new method was using the pulsations seen in the retinal blood vessels in the place of the heart rate. The retinal blood vessels can visualized, using an ophthalmoscope, in the fundus of the eye. Initially the procedure was to be testing using animals at a mass stranding, but there were no suitable strandings that took place during the time of the study. Therefore other mammal species were used to test the procedure. These mammals were cattle, sheep, and dogs, with additional observational testing carried out on seals, sea lions and dolphins. The mammals were chosen because of their availability and supply. The results showed that there was a strong relationship between the heart rate and the pulsations measured in the retinal blood vessels. This was expected as the cardiovascular system is connected and pulsations of blood vessels must have originated from the heart. The results using dogs, also indicated that there is a relationship between the cessation of the pulsations in the retinal blood vessels and the cessation of the heart beat. Dogs were used as a benchmark by which all other mammals could be compared. Therefore this study indicates that it is possible to identify the cessation of the heart using the cessation of the pulsations in the retinal blood vessels

Rescue, rehabilitation, and release of marine mammals: An analysis of current views and practices.

Stranded marine mammals have long attracted public attention. Those that wash up dead are, for all their value to science, seldom seen by the public as more than curiosities. Animals that are sick, injured, orphaned or abandoned ignite a different response. Generally, public sentiment supports any effort to rescue, treat and return them to sea. Institutions displaying marine mammals showed an early interest in live-stranded animals as a source of specimens -- in 1948, Marine Studios in St. Augustine, Florida, rescued a young short-finned pilot whale (Globicephala macrorhynchus), the first ever in captivity (Kritzler 1952). Eventually, the public as well as government agencies looked to these institutions for their recognized expertise in marine mammal care and medicine. More recently, facilities have been established for the sole purpose of rehabilitating marine mammals and preparing them for return to the wild. Four such institutions are the Marine Mammal Center (Sausalito, CA), the Research Institute for Nature Management (Pieterburen, The Netherlands), the RSPCA, Norfolk Wildlife Hospital (Norfolk, United Kingdom) and the Institute for Wildlife Biology of Christian-Albrects University (Kiel, Germany).(PDF contains 68 pages.

Modelling optical fibre cable

Optical fibre cables are made by placing optical fibres inside a loose tube packed with a water based gel, and then winding these loose tubes on to a central strength member in helically wound sections of alternating twist separated by reversing sections. The length of the loose tubes and their position on the strength member was modelled along with an analysis of where the optical fibres lie in the loose tubes

Are white-beaked dolphins Lagenorhynchus albirostris food specialst? Their diet in the southern North Sea

The white-beaked dolphin Lagenorhynchus albirostris is the most numerous cetacean after the harbour porpoise Phocoena phocoena in the North Sea, including Dutch coastal waters. In this study, the diet of 45 white-beaked dolphins stranded on the Dutch coast between 1968 and 2005 was determined by analysis of stomach contents. Although 25 fish species were identified, the diet was dominated by Gadidae (98.0% by weight, 40.0% in numbers), found in all stomachs. All other prey species combined contributed little to the diet by weight (2.0%W). The two most important prey species were whiting Merlangius merlangus (91.1% frequency of occurrence (FO), 30.5%N, 37.6%W) and cod Gadus morhua (73.3%FO, 7.4%N, 55.9%W). In numbers, gobies were most common (54.6%N), but contributed little to the diet by weight (0.6%W). Three stomachs contained different prey compared to the others: one animal had taken 2250 gobies, accounting for 96.4% of all gobies found; one animal had fed on 29 small sepiolids; and one animal had solely taken haddock Melanogrammus aeglefinus. Squid and haddock were not found in any other stomach. The overall diet showed a lasting predominance of whiting and cod, without clear changes over time (35 years) or differences between sexes or size-classes of dolphins. This study adds to earlier published and unpublished data for Dutch coastal waters and agrees well with studies of white-beaked dolphins from other parts of the species’ range, in the North Sea and in Canadian waters, with Gadidae dominating the diet on both sides of the Atlantic