De-Europeanising or disengaging? EU environmental policy and Brexit

The European Union (EU) has had a profound effect upon its members’ environmental policy. Even in the United Kingdom (UK), the EU’s most recalcitrant member state (historically labeled the ‘Dirty man of Europe’), environmental policy has been Europeanised. As the UK moves to the EU’s exit door it is timely to assess the utility of Europeanisation for understanding policy dynamics in the UK. Drawing upon interviews and extensive engagement with stakeholders, this article analyses the potential impact of Brexit upon environmental policy and politics. The analytical toolkit offered by de-Europeanisation is developed to identify the factors that drive and inhibit de-Europeanisation processes, thereby providing insights that may be applicable in other settings. Disengagement and policy stagnation are presented as more likely environmental outcomes of Brexit, with capacity emerging as a central explanatory variable

Madagascar's fire regimes challenge global assumptions about landscape degradation

Narratives of landscape degradation are often linked to unsustainable fire use by local communities. Madagascar is a case in point: the island is considered globally exceptional, with its remarkable endemic biodiversity viewed as threatened by unsustainable anthropogenic fire. Yet, fire regimes on Madagascar have not been empirically characterised or globally contextualised. Here, we contribute a comparative approach to determining relationships between regional fire regimes and global patterns and trends, applied to Madagascar using MODIS remote sensing data (2003–2019). Rather than a global exception, we show that Madagascar's fire regimes are similar to 88% of tropical burned area with shared climate and vegetation characteristics, and can be considered a microcosm of most tropical fire regimes. From 2003–2019, landscape-scale fire declined across tropical grassy biomes (17%–44% excluding Madagascar), and on Madagascar at a relatively fast rate (36%–46%). Thus, high tree loss anomalies on the island (1.25–4.77× the tropical average) were not explained by any general expansion of landscape-scale fire in grassy biomes. Rather, tree loss anomalies centred in forests, and could not be explained by landscape-scale fire escaping from savannas into forests. Unexpectedly, the highest tree loss anomalies on Madagascar (4.77×) occurred in environments without landscape-scale fire, where the role of small-scale fires (<21 h [0.21 km2]) is unknown. While landscape-scale fire declined across tropical grassy biomes, trends in tropical forests reflected important differences among regions, indicating a need to better understand regional variation in the anthropogenic drivers of forest loss and fire risk. Our new understanding of Madagascar's fire regimes offers two lessons with global implications: first, landscape-scale fire is declining across tropical grassy biomes and does not explain high tree loss anomalies on Madagascar. Second, landscape-scale fire is not uniformly associated with tropical forest loss, indicating a need for socio-ecological context in framing new narratives of fire and ecosystem degradation

Устройство для перемещения датчиков в магнитном поле малогабаритного бетатрона

Рассматривается возможность увеличения точности измерений характеристик магнитного поля посредством более точной установки датчиков в исследуемой точке

GeantV: Results from the prototype of concurrent vector particle transport simulation in HEP

Full detector simulation was among the largest CPU consumer in all CERN experiment software stacks for the first two runs of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In the early 2010's, the projections were that simulation demands would scale linearly with luminosity increase, compensated only partially by an increase of computing resources. The extension of fast simulation approaches to more use cases, covering a larger fraction of the simulation budget, is only part of the solution due to intrinsic precision limitations. The remainder corresponds to speeding-up the simulation software by several factors, which is out of reach using simple optimizations on the current code base. In this context, the GeantV R&D project was launched, aiming to redesign the legacy particle transport codes in order to make them benefit from fine-grained parallelism features such as vectorization, but also from increased code and data locality. This paper presents extensively the results and achievements of this R&D, as well as the conclusions and lessons learnt from the beta prototype.Comment: 34 pages, 26 figures, 24 table

An integrated view on monitoring and compensation for dynamic optical networks: from management to physical layer

A vertical perspective, ranging from management and routing to physical layer options, concerning dynamic network monitoring and compensation of impairments (M&C), is given. Feasibility, reliability, and performance improvements on reconfigurable transparent networks are expected to arise from the consolidated assessment of network management and control specifications, as a more accurate evaluation of available M&C techniques. In the network layer, physical parameters aware algorithms are foreseen to pursue reliable network performance. In the physical layer, some new M&C methods were developed and rating of the state-of-the-art reported in literature is given. Optical monitoring implementation and viability is discussed.Publicad

Wales: challenges and opportunities for post-Brexit environmental governance

Brexit represents a major change to environmental governance in Wales and the United Kingdom (UK), raising both opportunities and challenges. Welsh stakeholders are worried that English interests will predominate in the design of environmental governance after Brexit and are also concerned about the prospect of greater instability and weaker environmental protections. Crucially, the key planks of the UK government’s ‘Green Brexit’ strategy—the 25 Year Environment Plan (25 YEP) and Defra’s environmental governance and principles consultation—do not cover governance in the devolved nations. This gap in coverage raises the prospect of policy divergence and inconsistent implementation and enforcement across the UK. Most importantly, there is a strong fear in Wales that Welsh environmental policy ambition will be thwarted by Brexit and deregulatory pressure emanating from England

Scotland: challenges and opportunities for post-Brexit environmental governance

Brexit represents a major change to environmental governance in Scotland and the United Kingdom (UK), raising both opportunities and challenges. It has prompted a constitutional dispute between the Scottish and UK governments, which may jeopardise future environmental governance. The current constitutional impasse has created even more uncertainty, making Brexit preparations highly challenging for government and civil society actors. Scottish stakeholders are worried that English interests will predominate in the design of environmental governance after Brexit and are also concerned about the prospect of greater instability and weaker environmental protections. Crucially, the key planks of the UK government’s ‘Green Brexit’ strategy—the 25 Year Environment Plan and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra) environmental governance and principles consultation—do not cover governance in the devolved nations. This gap in coverage raises the prospect of policy divergence and inconsistent implementation and enforcement across the UK. Most importantly, there is a strong fear in Scotland that Scottish environmental policy ambition will be thwarted by Brexit and deregulatory pressure from England

Environmental policy in a devolved United Kingdom: challenges and opportunities after Brexit

The European Union (EU) has had a profound effect on UK environmental policy and governance. The EU provides treaty-based principles to underpin and inform new policy development and a well-developed system of monitoring and enforcement to ensure it is implemented. The EU’s system of environmental governance provides a set of structures that establishes minimum common standards across the UK. These structures have allowed the devolved nations to develop their own policies, some with a higher level of ambition than the UK’s. EU membership, therefore, provides a common framework that enables both transboundary cooperation and local policy innovation. Brexit consequently represents a major change to environmental governance in the United Kingdom (UK), raising significant opportunities and challenges. Environmental policy in the UK is devolved, but UK devolution is asymmetrical: England has no formal representation or parliament. For environmental policy this means that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) often acts on behalf of England. This model of devolution raises concerns amongst stakeholders in the devolved nations that Defra approaches policy with an English mind-set, which suggests that English interests will dominate after Brexit. There are also concerns that Brexit will lead to greater instability and weaken environmental protections. In addition, Brexit has prompted a constitutional dispute between the Scottish and UK governments, which may jeopardise future environmental governance. These tensions have created uncertainty, making Brexit preparations highly challenging for both government and civil society actors. Crucially, the key planks of the UK government’s ‘Green Brexit’ strategy— the 25 Year Environment Plan (25 YEP) and Defra’s consultation on environmental governance and principles—do not cover governance in the devolved nations. This gap in coverage raises the prospect of policy divergence and inconsistent implementation and enforcement across the UK. More importantly, there is a strong fear in Scotland and Wales that their environmental policy ambitions could be thwarted by Brexit and deregulatory pressures emanating from England. Meanwhile Northern Ireland, which has a history of weak environmental governance and sits alongside the politically sensitive border with Ireland, has no government and therefore no voice in the Brexit negotiations. As a result, it is poorly represented in the discussions over the future shape of UK-wide environmental policy and governance

Northern Ireland: challenges and opportunities for post-Brexit environmental governance

Brexit represents a major change to environmental governance in Northern Ireland and the UK. Yet it is occurring at a time when Northern Ireland has no government, curtailing its ability to engage in both local and UK-wide preparations. Northern Irish stakeholders are worried that tensions between England and Scotland are dominating Brexit preparations, hampering discussions of UK-wide cooperation, as well as of the specific needs of Northern Ireland. They are concerned pre-existing environmental governance issues in the region (such as the lack of an independent environmental agency or the prevalence of cross-border environmental crime) will remain unaddressed, and that current North/South cooperation on environmental issues will be negatively impacted by the Brexit deal. Crucially, the key planks of the UK government’s ‘Green Brexit’ strategy (such as the commitments laid out in the 25 Year Environment Plan and the Environmental Principles and Governance consultation) do not cover the devolved nations. This raises the prospect of further policy divergence and inconsistent implementation and enforcement across the UK, and for Northern Ireland’s environment to continue deteriorating

Wales: challenges and opportunities for post-Brexit environmental governance

Brexit represents a major change to environmental governance in Wales and the United Kingdom (UK), raising both opportunities and challenges. Welsh stakeholders are worried that English interests will predominate in the design of environmental governance after Brexit and are also concerned about the prospect of greater instability and weaker environmental protections. Crucially, the key planks of the UK government’s ‘Green Brexit’ strategy—the 25 Year Environment Plan (25 YEP) and Defra’s environmental governance and principles consultation—do not cover governance in the devolved nations. This gap in coverage raises the prospect of policy divergence and inconsistent implementation and enforcement across the UK. Most importantly, there is a strong fear in Wales that Welsh environmental policy ambition will be thwarted by Brexit and deregulatory pressure emanating from England