Climate Adaptation Law: Governing Multi-Level Public Goods Across Borders

The increasingly severe and irreversible effects of climate change around the world make adaptation to a changing climate an immediate and urgent global priority, as the Paris Agreement on Climate Change acknowledged. Yet adaptation investment--to make communities and ecosystems more resilient to climate change--has been slow to materialize. Closing the finance gap and rising to the challenge of adaptation requires two conceptual shifts in how we think about adaptation law and governance. The first is that optimal adaptation is a public good, much like a healthy climate or safe streets. Everyone is better off in a resilient community that can thrive despite climate impacts, whether they contributed to resilience or not. This means adaptation investment will likely continue to be underprovided by the market in the absence of an effective legal regime. The second shift is that adaptation is not merely a local matter, though it is still largely treated as such. In several important scenarios, it will also be an international public good requiring international cooperation. Parties to the Paris Agreement seemingly recognized this when they described adaptation as a global challenge with local, subnational, national, regional and international dimensions. However, they did not consider what this means in practical terms for law and governance, and the literature is still largely silent on this issue. This Article seeks to move the analysis forward. It makes three principal contributions. First, building on economic analysis of collective action problems, externalities, and public goods, it develops an analytical framework to examine the adaptation challenge and similar cross-cutting legal issues. In particular, it reconceptualizes climate adaptation as a multi-level public good (MLPG)--with domestic, transboundary, and global dimensions. Second, it explores the implications of this conceptual shift for institutional and legal design at each level of governance. It considers the efficacy of different market-based mechanisms (Coasean private contracting) and prescriptive regulation in the light of this framework and explores the distinctions between the domestic and the international realms. Third, it proposes a multi-level governance model that could help produce what I call optimal adaptation and help optimize legal design. In particular, it identifies three priority areas for institution building in the transboundary setting that pose particular challenges for legal design. This framework will open avenues for more granular and critical study of the legal design and contracting required to rise to the challenge of multi-level public goods

Analisis Pengendalian Intern Piutang Usaha Pada PT. ANI Unit Percetakan Arnoldus Ende

This research is to analyze the Accounts Receivable Internal Control at PT. ANI Arnoldus Ende Printing Unit. The research method used is descriptive qualitative research methods. Sources of data in this study are using primary and secondary data. The results achieved in this study are to show that the company's internal control for trade receivables actually exists, but it does not function properly which can be seen in the inefficient internal control procedures for providing accounts receivable. During the initial process, the internal control procedure for giving accounts receivable, which checks customer credit data, should have been carried out by the sales department. At the stage of delivery of ordered goods or finished goods it should be done by the shipping department, but at PT. ANI Arnoldus Printing unit is carried out by the Production Department. Approval of accounts receivable is carried out by company managers, but in the organizational structure there is an internal control team (budget), where in this study the main tasks and functions of the internal supervisory team (budget) are not visible

FAKTOR-FAKTOR YANG MEMPENGARUHI AUDITOR SWITCHING SECARA VOLUNTARY PADA PERUSAHAAN MANUFAKTUR YANG TERDAFTAR PAD BURSA EFEK INDONESIA

This study aims to determine the effect of management change, audit opinion, client size and financial distress on voluntary auditor switching at manufacturing companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange for the period 2010-2014. The population in this study are all manufacturing companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange. The number of manufacturing companies that were sampled using the purposive sampling method was 64 companies for 5 years of observation. Hypothesis testing in this study uses logistic regression analysis. Based on the results of the logistic regression test, the results of this study indicate that the independent variable management change, audit opinion, client size and financial distress have a negative effect on the dependent variable auditor switching voluntarily

Expanding tropical forest monitoring into Dry Forests: The DRYFLOR protocol for permanent plots

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordSocietal Impact Statement Understanding of tropical forests has been revolutionized by monitoring in permanent plots. Data from global plot networks have transformed our knowledge of forests’ diversity, function, contribution to global biogeochemical cycles, and sensitivity to climate change. Monitoring has thus far been concentrated in rain forests. Despite increasing appreciation of their threatened status, biodiversity, and importance to the global carbon cycle, monitoring in tropical dry forests is still in its infancy. We provide a protocol for permanent monitoring plots in tropical dry forests. Expanding monitoring into dry biomes is critical for overcoming the linked challenges of climate change, land use change, and the biodiversity crisis.Newton FundNatural Environment Research Council (NERC)Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São PauloCYTE

HIV-1 and recombinant gp120 affect the survival and differentiation of human vessel wall-derived mesenchymal stem cells

BAckground:HIV infection elicits the onset of a progressive immunodeficiency and also damages several other organs and tissues such as the CNS, kidney, heart, blood vessels, adipose tissue and bone. In particular, HIV infection has been related to an increased incidence of cardiovascular diseases and derangement in the structure of blood vessels in the absence of classical risk factors. The recent characterization of multipotent mesenchymal cells in the vascular wall, involved in regulating cellular homeostasis, suggests that these cells may be considered a target of HIV pathogenesis. This paper investigated the interaction between HIV-1 and vascular wall resident human mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). RESULTS: MSCs were challenged with classical R5 and X4 HIV-1 laboratory strains demonstrating that these strains are able to enter and integrate their retro-transcribed proviral DNA in the host cell genome. Subsequent experiments indicated that HIV-1 strains and recombinant gp120 elicited a reliable increase in apoptosis in sub-confluent MSCs. Since vascular wall MSCs are multipotent cells that may be differentiated towards several cell lineages, we challenged HIV-1 strains and gp120 on MSCs differentiated to adipogenesis and endotheliogenesis. Our experiments showed that the adipogenesis is increased especially by upregulated PPAR\u3b3 activity whereas the endothelial differentiation induced by VEGF treatment was impaired with a downregulation of endothelial markers such as vWF, Flt-1 and KDR expression. These viral effects in MSC survival and adipogenic or endothelial differentiation were tackled by CD4 blockade suggesting an important role of CD4/gp120 interaction in this context. CONCLUSIONS: The HIV-related derangement of MSC survival and differentiation may suggest a direct role of HIV infection and gp120 in impaired vessel homeostasis and in genesis of vessel damage observed in HIV-infected patients

Association of respiratory symptoms and lung function with occupation in the multinational Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease (BOLD) study

Background Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease has been associated with exposures in the workplace. We aimed to assess the association of respiratory symptoms and lung function with occupation in the Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease study. Methods We analysed cross-sectional data from 28 823 adults (≥40 years) in 34 countries. We considered 11 occupations and grouped them by likelihood of exposure to organic dusts, inorganic dusts and fumes. The association of chronic cough, chronic phlegm, wheeze, dyspnoea, forced vital capacity (FVC) and forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1)/FVC with occupation was assessed, per study site, using multivariable regression. These estimates were then meta-analysed. Sensitivity analyses explored differences between sexes and gross national income. Results Overall, working in settings with potentially high exposure to dusts or fumes was associated with respiratory symptoms but not lung function differences. The most common occupation was farming. Compared to people not working in any of the 11 considered occupations, those who were farmers for ≥20 years were more likely to have chronic cough (OR 1.52, 95% CI 1.19–1.94), wheeze (OR 1.37, 95% CI 1.16–1.63) and dyspnoea (OR 1.83, 95% CI 1.53–2.20), but not lower FVC (β=0.02 L, 95% CI −0.02–0.06 L) or lower FEV1/FVC (β=0.04%, 95% CI −0.49–0.58%). Some findings differed by sex and gross national income. Conclusion At a population level, the occupational exposures considered in this study do not appear to be major determinants of differences in lung function, although they are associated with more respiratory symptoms. Because not all work settings were included in this study, respiratory surveillance should still be encouraged among high-risk dusty and fume job workers, especially in low- and middle-income countries.publishedVersio

Crowdsourcing digital health measures to predict Parkinson's disease severity: the Parkinson's Disease Digital Biomarker DREAM Challenge

Consumer wearables and sensors are a rich source of data about patients' daily disease and symptom burden, particularly in the case of movement disorders like Parkinson's disease (PD). However, interpreting these complex data into so-called digital biomarkers requires complicated analytical approaches, and validating these biomarkers requires sufficient data and unbiased evaluation methods. Here we describe the use of crowdsourcing to specifically evaluate and benchmark features derived from accelerometer and gyroscope data in two different datasets to predict the presence of PD and severity of three PD symptoms: tremor, dyskinesia, and bradykinesia. Forty teams from around the world submitted features, and achieved drastically improved predictive performance for PD status (best AUROC = 0.87), as well as tremor- (best AUPR = 0.75), dyskinesia- (best AUPR = 0.48) and bradykinesia-severity (best AUPR = 0.95)

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead