Can green infrastructure development in cities be equitable? An eclectic review of Dundee City’s electric vehicles strategy.

Dundee City has been successful in installing green infrastructure for charging electric vehicles (EVs). This intervention apparently matches the sustainable development goals (SDGs) of affordable clean energy (7), sustainable cities and communities (11) and climate action (13). Local authorities can align interventions with SDGs according to needs. Thus, we undertake an eclectic examination of the elements of the plan against the city’s peculiar socio-economic environment, questioning whether the EV plan is equitable for the city’s residents. Equitability may be either the complementarity and benefits of the strategy from the obvious lenses of SDGs 7, 11 and 13 or the alignment or otherwise of the EV strategy with the other SDGs. We note that the EV strategy achieves some equitability but does not fully address all inequalities. Although this approach could be adopted by smaller, similar or bigger cities, we recommend that local priorities should be ranked to improve alignment with SDGs

Post-COVID-19 and African agenda for a green recovery: lessons from the European Union and the United States of America.

The concept of a ‘green new deal’ for Africa will provide a joined-up approach to managing the impact of extreme climatic events. In this regard, the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) green deal arrangements offer Africa lessons to consider in a green agenda. By recourse to green theory, which is a critique of existing power structures and nationalistic and political positions concerning climate change, we explore mechanisms for fostering collective action and collaboration through an African green deal. Building on the African Union’s existing agencies and arms, this chapter argues that an African Union Green Deal post–COVID-19 is crucial to achieving sustainable economic growth and development within the continent’s Agenda 2063. The African continent should take advantage of collaboration opportunities within the continent and the European Union, thereby strengthening its financing and governance structures

Aligning Local Interventions with the UN Sustainable Developments Goals (SDGs)

Dundee City has been successful in installing green infrastructure for charging electric vehicles (EVs). This intervention apparently matches the sustainable development goals (SDGs) of affordable clean energy (7), sustainable cities and communities (11) and climate action (13). Local authorities can align interventions with SDGs according to needs. Thus, we undertake an eclectic examination of the elements of the plan against the city’s peculiar socio-economic environment, questioning whether the EV plan is equitable for the city’s residents. Equitability may be either the complementarity and benefits of the strategy from the obvious lenses of SDGs 7, 11 and 13 or the alignment or otherwise of the EV strategy with the other SDGs. We note that the EV strategy achieves some equitability but does not fully address all inequalities. Although this approach could be adopted by smaller, similar or bigger cities, we recommend that local priorities should be ranked to improve alignment with SDGs

Solar Power for Resilient Healthcare Systems in Nigeria: Regulatory, Financial, and Organizational Options for Sustainable Business Models

This article investigates sustainable business models for the electrification of primary healthcare facilities (PHCs) through Renewable Energy (RE) in Nigeria. The PHCs using Luminous or lithium batteries require careful allocation of costs potentially among the government, financial institutions and donors. PHCs are unable to bear the operation and maintenance costs, as well as battery replacement in the long term. The university teaching hospitals and small and medium-sized businesses in the surrounding areas can be an option to keep the system working. The Nigerian Rural Electrification Agency (REA) is strategically positioned to coordinate initiatives in integrating the health and energy sectors

Solar Power for Resilient Healthcare Systems in Nigeria: Regulatory, Financial, and Organizational Options for Sustainable Business Models

This article investigates sustainable business models for the electrification of primary healthcare facilities (PHCs) through Renewable Energy (RE) in Nigeria. The PHCs using Luminous or lithium batteries require careful allocation of costs potentially among the government, financial institutions and donors. PHCs are unable to bear the operation and maintenance costs, as well as battery replacement in the long term. The university teaching hospitals and small and medium-sized businesses in the surrounding areas can be an option to keep the system working. The Nigerian Rural Electrification Agency (REA) is strategically positioned to coordinate initiatives in integrating the health and energy sectors

Barriers to early diagnosis of symptomatic breast cancer: a qualitative study of Black African, Black Caribbean and White British women living in the UK

Objectives: Understanding barriers to early diagnosis of symptomatic breast cancer among Black African, Black Caribbean and White British women in the UK. Design: In-depth qualitative interviews using grounded theory methods to identify themes. Findings validated through focus groups. Participants: 94 women aged 33–91 years; 20 Black African, 20 Black Caribbean and 20 White British women diagnosed with symptomatic breast cancer were interviewed. Fourteen Black African and 20 Black Caribbean women with (n=19) and without (n=15) breast cancer participated in six focus groups. Setting: Eight cancer centres/hospital trusts in London (n=5), Somerset (n=1), West Midlands (n=1) and Greater Manchester (n=1) during 2012–2013. Results: There are important differences and similarities in barriers to early diagnosis of breast cancer between Black African, Black Caribbean and White British women in the UK. Differences were influenced by country of birth, time spent in UK and age. First generation Black African women experienced most barriers and longest delays. Second generation Black Caribbean and White British women were similar and experienced fewest barriers. Absence of pain was a barrier for Black African and Black Caribbean women. Older White British women (≥70 years) and first generation Black African and Black Caribbean women shared conservative attitudes and taboos about breast awareness. All women viewed themselves at low risk of the disease, and voiced uncertainty over breast awareness and appraising non-lump symptoms. Focus group findings validated and expanded themes identified in interviews. Conclusions: Findings challenged reporting of Black women homogenously in breast cancer research. This can mask distinctions within and between ethnic groups. Current media and health promotion messages need reframing to promote early presentation with breast symptoms. Working with communities and developing culturally appropriate materials may lessen taboos and stigma, raise awareness, increase discussion of breast cancer and promote prompt help-seeking for breast symptoms among women with low cancer awareness

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Risk Allocation and Distributive Justice in the Energy Industry: Law, Policy and Practice

This book examines the practice of risk allocation in the offshore energy industry through the public policy lens and offers a novel perspective on the concept of gross negligence in risk allocation. This perspective is founded on the proportionality element of distributive justice in burden distribution. The assessment of how mutual indemnity clauses apply as an absolute shield against liability arising from gross negligence reveals that moral hazard can result from the practice. In the analysis, this book considers the risk allocation practice in PSC and Concession regimes and how parties' liability is determined in drilling contracts. This book considers gross negligence a sui generis risk and provides a definitional pathway for determining when gross negligence occurs and how it should apply to offshore drilling contracts. Thus, it advances an environmental sustainability approach to offshore petroleum drilling operations. This book will be useful to operators and contractors, resource-rich countries, insurance companies, practitioners, scholars, and academics interested in risk allocation in the petroleum industry