The role of microfinance in household livelihood adaptation in the Satkhira District, Southwest Bangladesh

There is increasing interest in the potential of microfinance to foster climate change adaptation. However, existing literature over-relies upon theoretical arguments rather than empirical evidence, and until now the emphasis has been on potential positive linkages. We address these weaknesses by empirically examining the role of microfinance in adaptation, drawing from household-level quantitative and qualitative data gathered from Satkhira District, Southwest Bangladesh. We find evidence that microfinance facilitates coping by reducing sensitivity to environmental and climate hazards. Credit is especially important because its availability is uncorrelated with the occurrence of flooding, unlike many other traditional coping responses. We also find evidence that microfinance facilitates adaptation by helping households to overcome financial barriers of adopting adaptation options which reduce exposure or sensitivity. However, credit limits restrict its role to incremental adaptations, which may not meaningfully reduce vulnerability. Transformational adaptations require access to bank credit. Therefore the poorest cannot effectively adapt and are penalised financially by having to obtain loans to cope. We also find evidence that microfinance can lead to maladaptation when used in non-profit generating activities as income streams are not produced to help repay associated costs. Almost a fifth of all loans were obtained for repaying existing loans. Thus microfinance may undermine longer term adaptive capacity

Autonomous adaptation to riverine flooding in Satkhira District, Bangladesh: implications for adaptation planning

Systematic understanding of adaptation measures utilised by households in developing countries is needed to identify the constraints they face, and the external interventions or adaptation planning needed to overcome them. Understanding of autonomous household adaptation patterns remains underdeveloped. In particular little is known regarding whether households are implementing incremental or transformational adaptation measures as well as the implications of this for adaptation planning. We demonstrate the suitability of the risk hazard approach for understanding autonomous household adaptation patterns and discuss the implications for planned adaptation. To achieve this we use an in-depth village case study from an area of Bangladesh particularly vulnerable to climate change, using qualitative semi-structured household interviews as primary material. We find that the risk hazard approach is ideal for exploring autonomous adaptations because of its capacity for understanding how households respond to livelihood risk, and what resources are required for it to be most effective. However, the risk hazard approach overlooks equity and fairness considerations need to be integrated due to the insufficient emphasis on these concerns

Finite-time quantum-to-classical transition for a Schroedinger-cat state

The transition from quantum to classical, in the case of a quantum harmonic oscillator, is typically identified with the transition from a quantum superposition of macroscopically distinguishable states, such as the Schr\"odinger cat state, into the corresponding statistical mixture. This transition is commonly characterized by the asymptotic loss of the interference term in the Wigner representation of the cat state. In this paper we show that the quantum to classical transition has different dynamical features depending on the measure for nonclassicality used. Measures based on an operatorial definition have well defined physical meaning and allow a deeper understanding of the quantum to classical transition. Our analysis shows that, for most nonclassicality measures, the Schr\"odinger cat dies after a finite time. Moreover, our results challenge the prevailing idea that more macroscopic states are more susceptible to decoherence in the sense that the transition from quantum to classical occurs faster. Since nonclassicality is prerequisite for entanglement generation our results also bridge the gap between decoherence, which appears to be only asymptotic, and entanglement, which may show a sudden death. In fact, whereas the loss of coherences still remains asymptotic, we have shown that the transition from quantum to classical can indeed occur at a finite time.Comment: 9+epsilon pages, 4 figures, published version. Originally submitted as "Sudden death of the Schroedinger cat", a bit too cool for APS policy :-

Can REDD+ reconcile local priorities and needs with global mitigation benefits? lessons from Angai Forest, Tanzania

The scope of the reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) mechanism has broadened REDD+ to accommodate different country interests such as natural forests, protected areas, as well as forests under community-based management. In Tanzania the REDD+ mechanism is still under development and pilot projects are at an early stage. In this paper, we seek to understand how local priorities and needs could be met in REDD+ implementation and how these expectations match with global mitigation benefits. We examine the local priorities and needs in the use of land and forest resources in the Angai Villages Land Forest Reserve (AVLFR) in the Liwale District of Lindi Region in Tanzania. Primary data was collected in two villages, Mihumo and Lilombe, using semistructured key informant interviews and participatory rural appraisal methods. In addition, the key informant interviews were conducted with other village, district, and national level actors, as well as international donors. Findings show that in the two communities REDD+ is seen as something new and is generating new expectations among communities. However, the Angai villagers highlight three key priorities that have yet to be integrated into the design of REDD+: water scarcity, rural development, and food security. At the local level improved forest governance and sustainable management of forest resources have been identified as one way to achieve livelihood diversification. Although the national goals of REDD+ include poverty reduction, these goals are not necessarily conducive to the goals of these communities. There exist both structural and cultural limits to the ability of the Angai villages to implement these goals and to improve forestry governance. Given the vulnerability to current and future climate variability and change it will be important to consider how the AVLFR will be managed and for whose benefit

The systemic and governmental agendas in presidential attention to climate change in Mexico, 1994-2018

Ambitious climate action requires sustained long-term attention from political leaders. To understand how climate change entered the political agenda in a developing country, we examine from an agenda-setting perspective the attention paid by Mexican presidents to this issue from 1994 to 2018. We perform a longitudinal analysis of 968 documents referring to climate change published by four presidencies to describe changes in attention levels over time and to determine how changes in international agreements and public policies (i.e. systemic agenda) and National Development Plans (NDPs)(i.e. governmental agenda) influence them. Our results indicate international agreements and national legislation establish a baseline for inclusion of climate change into governmental actions. Agenda changes driven by international agreements result in reactive changes in attention, while ambitious approaches are aligned with proactive NDPs. Our results also indicate public awareness and electoral periods can open windows of opportunity for reframing agendas and promoting ambitious climate action

Can national policy blockages accelerate the development of polycentric governance? Evidence from climate change policy in the United Kingdom

Many factors can conspire to limit the scope for policy development at the national level. In this paper, we consider whether blockages in national policy processes − resulting for example from austerity or small state political philosophies − might be overcome by the development of more polycentric governance arrangements. Drawing on evidence from three stakeholder workshops and fifteen interviews, we address this question by exploring the United Kingdom’s recent retrenchment in the area of climate change policy, and the ways in which its policy community have responded. We identify two broad strategies based on polycentric principles: ‘working with gatekeepers’ to unlock political capital and ‘collaborate to innovate’ to develop policy outputs. We then empirically examine the advantages that these actions bring, analysing coordination across overlapping sites of authority, such as those associated with international regimes, devolved administrations and civic and private initiatives that operate in conjunction with, and sometimes independently of, the state. Despite constraining political and economic factors, which are by no means unique to the UK, we find that a polycentric climate policy network can create opportunities for overcoming central government blockages. However, we also argue that the ambiguous role of the state in empowering but also in constraining such a network will determine whether a polycentric approach to climate policy and governance is genuinely additional and innovative, or whether it is merely a temporary ‘sticking plaster’ for the retreat of the state and policy retrenchment during austere times

Environment-dependent dissipation in quantum Brownian motion

The dissipative dynamics of a quantum Brownian particle is studied for different types of environment. We derive analytic results for the time evolution of the mean energy of the system for Ohmic, sub-Ohmic and super-Ohmic environments, without performing the Markovian approximation. Our results allow to establish a direct link between the form of the environmental spectrum and the thermalization dynamics. This in turn leads to a natural explanation of the microscopic physical processes ruling the system time evolution both in the short-time non-Markovian region and in the long-time Markovian one. Our comparative study of thermalization for different environments sheds light on the physical contexts in which non-Markovian dissipation effects are dominant.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, v2: added new references and paragraph

Community action on natural flood management and the governance of a catchment-based approach in the UK

There is increasing interest in natural flood management (NFM) and the delivery of public environmental goods. Yet the implementation of NFM can be ad-hoc and is regionally diverse. Communities often play a role in NFM and thus we assess NFM governance in the UK and communities' position within it. We develop a theoretical framework using the concepts of public goods, social capital, collective action and polycentrism and use it to examine the governance of the design and implementation of NFM in Pickering and Calderdale in Yorkshire, to contribute to a debate on how NFM should be managed, by whom, and under what governance arrangements. Drawing on stakeholder interviews, we find that the participation of community flood groups (CFGs) in NFM improved community access to strategic conversations on flood risk management (FRM). In turn CFGs raised the public profile of NFM, enabled the deployment of NFM measures, and helped to generate the evidence base on them. We conclude that there is a need for a polycentric community and catchment-based approach to better coordinate NFM governance across and between scales, to support community access and contribution to flood risk strategy, and to foster sustainable flood risk management

Organizational use of ecosystem service approaches: A critique from a systems theory perspective

Although corporate sustainability theory is well established, there is limited research on the use and understanding of the ecosystem service (ES) approaches based on an advanced conceptualization of the environment in organizational practice. This article analyzes the use of ES approaches in organizations using a system theory lens, conducting empirical research on the contribution of ES approaches to corporate environmental management. Drawing from 30 semistructured interviews with ES practitioners from private, policy, and third sector organizations, we find that ES approaches provide practitioners with an advanced understanding of the environment as a system, the interconnections between the organization and the environment, and a better awareness of temporal and physical attributes of the environment. Overemphasis on ecological systems, limited acknowledgment of the nesting of the social system within the ecological system, and limited detailed practitioner knowledge are barriers for advancing the use of the ES approaches in corporate sustainability practice

Genetic and functional implications of an exonic TRIM55 variant in heart failure

Background: To tackle the missing heritability of sporadic heart failure, we screened for novel heart failure associated genetic variants in the Finnish population and functionally characterized a novel variant in vitro and in vivo. Methods and results: Heart failure-associated variants were screened in genotyping array data of the FINRISK study, consisting of 994 cases and 20,118 controls. Based on logistic regression analysis, a potentially damaging variant in TRIM55 (rs138811034), encoding an E140K variant, was selected for validations. In HL-1 cardiomyocytes, we used CRISPR/Cas9 technology to introduce the variant in the endogenous locus, and additionally TRIM55 wildtype or E140K was overexpressed from plasmid. Functional responses were profiled using whole-genome RNA sequencing, RT-PCR and Western analyses, cell viability and cell cycle assays and cell surface area measurements. In zebrafish embryos, cardiac contractility was measured using videomicroscopy after CRISPR-mediated knockout of trim55a or plasmid overexpression of TRIM55 WT or E140K. Genes related to muscle contraction and cardiac stress were highly regulated in Trim55 E140K/- cardiomyocytes. When compared to the WT/WT cells, the variant cells demonstrated reduced viability, significant hypertrophic response to isoproterenol, p21 protein overexpression and impaired cell cycle progression. In zebrafish embryos, the deletion of trim55a or overexpression of TRIM55 E140K reduced cardiac contractility as compared to embryos with wild type genotype or overexpression of WT TRIM55, respectively. Conclusions: A previously uncharacterized TRIM55 E140K variant demonstrated a number of functional implications for cardiomyocyte functions in vitro and in vivo. These findings suggest a novel role for TRIM55 polymorphism in predisposing to heart failure.Peer reviewe