Religion and migration in Zambia: experiences of christian household hosts of migrant youths in Lusaka’s urban context.

This article interrogated the experiences of Christian hosts of migrant youths in Lusaka’s urban context in order to understand the interconnectedness of religious worldviews and migration in contemporary times through the prism of religion as a basis for the more personal regimes of hospitality, reception and integration of migrants. The article is informed by findings from a qualitative case study in which data were collected through interviews with 14 purposively chosen Christian families that had hosted migrant youths in Lusaka urban district. This was supplemented by document analysis in which documents were chosen based on the availability criteria. The data were thematically analysed and interpreted in light of Groody and Campese (2009)’s Christian notions of the image of God, the mission of God and the word of God in migration. It was established that the host Christian households had hosted youths who had migrated largely in pursuit of education and a livelihood in Lusaka. The study also revealed that the hosted migrant youths did not always belong to the same Christian denominations with the hosting households and neither were they always related through kinship ties. It was further established that hosting the migrant youths was shaped by Christian teachings and practices of hospitality and charity. The article therefore argues that while the discourse on religion and migration had focused on the instrumental use of religion by the cross border migrants, religion also remained a basis for accommodating and integrating the rural-urban migrant youths

Emission ensemble approach to improve the development of multi-scale emission inventories

Many studies have shown that emission inventories are one of the inputs with the most critical influences on the results of air quality modelling. Comparing emission inventories among themselves is, therefore, essential to build confidence in emission estimates. In this work, we extend the approach of Thunis et al. (2022) to compare emission inventories by building a benchmark that serves as a reference for comparisons. This benchmark is an ensemble that is based on three state-of-the-art EU-wide inventories: CAMS-REG, EMEP and EDGAR. The ensemble-based methodology screens differences between inventories and the ensemble. It excludes differences that are not relevant and identifies among the remaining ones those that need special attention. We applied the ensemble-based screening to both an EU-wide and a local (Poland) inventory. The EU-wide analysis highlighted a large number of inconsistencies. While the origin of some differences between EDGAR and the ensemble can be identified, their magnitude remains to be explained. These differences mostly occur for SO2 (sulfur oxides), PM (particulate matter) and NMVOC (non-methane volatile organic carbon) for the industrial and residential sectors and reach a factor of 10 in some instances. Spatial inconsistencies mostly occur for the industry and other sectors. At the local scale, inconsistencies relate mostly to differences in country sectorial shares that result from different sectors/activities being accounted for in the two types of inventories. This is explained by the fact that some emission sources are omitted in the local inventory due to a lack of appropriate geographically allocated activity data. We identified sectors and pollutants for which discussion between local and EU-wide emission compilers would be needed in order to reduce the magnitude of the observed differences (e.g. in the residential and industrial sectors). The ensemble-based screening proved to be a useful approach to spot inconsistencies by reducing the number of necessary inventory comparisons. With the progressive resolution of inconsistencies and associated inventory improvements, the ensemble will improve. In this sense, we see the ensemble as a useful tool to motivate the community around a single common benchmark and monitor progress towards the improvement of regionally and locally developed emission inventories.</p

The HTAP_v3 emission mosaic: merging regional and global monthly emissions (2000–2018) to support air quality modelling and policies

This study, performed under the umbrella of the Task Force on Hemispheric Transport of Air Pollution (TF-HTAP), responds to the global and regional atmospheric modelling community's need of a mosaic emission inventory of air pollutants that conforms to specific requirements: global coverage, long time series, spatially distributed emissions with high time resolution, and a high sectoral resolution. The mosaic approach of integrating official regional emission inventories based on locally reported data, with a global inventory based on a globally consistent methodology, allows modellers to perform simulations of high scientific quality while also ensuring that the results remain relevant to policymakers. HTAP-v3, an ad hoc global mosaic of anthropogenic inventories, has been developed by integrating official inventories over specific areas (North America, Europe, Asia including Japan and South Korea) with the independent Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) inventory for the remaining world regions. The results are spatially and temporally distributed emissions of SO2, NOx, CO, non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs), NH3, PM10, PM2.5, black carbon (BC), and organic carbon (OC), with a spatial resolution of 0.1° × 0.1° and time intervals of months and years, covering the period 2000-2018 (10.5281/zenodo.7516361, Crippa, 2023, https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset-htap-v3, last access: June 2023). The emissions are further disaggregated into 16 anthropogenic emitting sectors. This paper describes the methodology applied to develop such an emission mosaic, reports on source allocation, differences among existing inventories, and best practices for the mosaic compilation. One of the key strengths of the HTAP-v3 emission mosaic is its temporal coverage, enabling the analysis of emission trends over the past 2 decades. The development of a global emission mosaic over such long time series represents a unique product for global air quality modelling and for better-informed policymaking, reflecting the community effort expended by the TF-HTAP to disentangle the complexity of transboundary transport of air pollution

Economic life of Zambia’s university students: the case of the university of Zambia.

The University of Zambia has a cross section of students which includes school leavers, non-school leavers and in-service students. Some of these students are on Government of the Republic of Zambia (GRZ) bursary sponsorship scheme while others, are sponsored by their employers or are self sponsored. However, students indicated that they face economic challenges in pursuit of university education. This study found that 85% of the respondents rated the cost of living at the University of Zambia as high, even though the majority are on Government sponsorship. In order to cope with the high cost of living, 21% of the respondents engage in business activities, 15% in vacation employment while 64% do not engage in any activities to raise extra funds. The high cost of living at the University of Zambia has a negative effect on the academic performance of most students