A sectorial approach to international environmental agreements - the case of the maritime sector

Despite overwhelming scientific consensus on the importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it has proven very difficult to create a comprehensive international environmental agreement targeted at limiting these emissions. Sectorial agreements have been proposed as a means of bypassing many of the more difficult parts of negotiating an economy-wide agreement. Despite being a hot topic in the environmental debate, the subject of sectorial agreements is under-studied within the field of economics. My contribution to this topic will be a survey of the existing literature on international environmental and sectorial agreements, where I define six essential criteria that any successful environmental agreement should meet. I later apply these criteria to the maritime sector, where several propositions for a sectorial agreement are currently discussed within the International Maritime Organization (IMO). My main conclusions from this qualitative study of sectorial agreements are firstly that sectorial agreements can ensure that a higher percentage of emissions from the sector are included. There are several reasons for this. Asymmetry between countries is reduced when only looking at one sector, and they thus have more common ground. If fewer countries are large producers of the good in question, fewer participants are needed. Additionally, costs are more certain, eliminating uncertainty that could make countries less inclined to sign. Secondly, it is easier to impose credible threats when the scope is limited because gains from participation can be clearly stated. Trade restrictions can be imposed on goods from non-signatories. Thirdly, a tax is the more efficient instrument to reduce CO2 in general because it is a stock pollutant, and in sectorial agreements in particular because price stability is more important than the yearly quantity of emissions. And lastly, in the case of the maritime sector, a combination of taxes and command-and-control instruments should be employed. A tax because it is the most efficient instrument. Command-and-control instruments because maritime sector is a carbon-intensive sector with high abatement costs and long-lived investments. If carbon-intensive ships are built now because the tax is lower than the marginal abatement cost, the sector will be “locked” to a more emission-heavy path, making abatement costs even higher in the future

Palliative care in the homecare setting

This literature reviewed research was aiming at capturing the actual or predominant roles nurses play within the home care setting when caring for the terminally ill. The intended purpose is to summarize and produce evidence-based knowledge on the role that nurses play while taking care of the terminally ill patient. The design of the study utilizes three main electronic database search engines: Science Direct, EBSCO (academic search elite), and Saga journal. The authors used systematic inductive content analysis to analyze the 20 articles, that they retrieved from the database mentioned above. The study done prioritized the primary goal of our research, which was to get to know the actual role nurses play in palliative homecare. We used the Humanistic nursing theory (HNT) as our theoretical framework. Each of the 20 articles addresses the nurse’s role in palliative home care in their own way. The most predominant role which was addressed in most of the articles was Availability/Present while performing the basic tenet of nursing, Symptoms management (pain management inclusive), Patient Autonomy, and the spider in a web role. Among these four significant roles, Availability/Present, while performing the basic tenet of a nurse, was found to be superior, for most articles addressed it quite often and as many times compared to the other three roles. Symptoms management was second while spiders in the web role and patient Autonomy followed, respectively. The study found that caring for the critically ill requires training/education, which is lacking in most Finnish university nursing curriculum. Thus, the authors recommend that nursing programs in universities should incorporate palliative care in their plans, for it will go a long way to get nurses much more prepared in this field of work

The Scandinavian singer-translator’s multisemiotic voice as performance

Most current research on translator’s voice within Translation Studies focuses on voice in written communication. The present chapter seeks to expand the concept to include multisemiotic voice – ways of expressing (inter)subjectivity/agency/identity across several channels, including the visual and auditory. The notion of multisemiotic voice is illustrated through the case of the Scandinavian song translator, more specifically the singer-translator, that is, song translators who translate songs as well as perform them. The chapter also discusses the relationship between the translators’ textual and contextual displays of voice, arguing that they converge on the notion of performativity: they are social rituals whereby (singer-)translators build their identities as performers, in a literal or non-literal sense