275 research outputs found
Firm finances, weather derivatives and geography
This paper considers some intellectual, practical and political dimensions of collaboration between human and physical geographers exploring how firms are using relatively new financial products – weather derivatives – to displace any costs of weather-related uncertainty and risk. The paper defines weather derivatives and indicates how they differ from weather insurance products before considering the geo-political, cultural and economic context for their creation. The paper concludes by reflecting on the challenges of research collaboration across the human–physical geography divide and suggests that while such initiatives may be undermined by a range of institutional and intellectual factors, conversations between physical and human geographers remain and are likely to become increasingly pertinent. The creation of a market in weather derivatives raises a host of urgent political and regulatory questions and the confluence of natural and social knowledges, co-existing within and through the geography academy, provides a constructive and creative basis from which to engage with this new market and wider discourses of uneven economic development and climate change
Recommended from our members
Five ways to enhance the impact of climate science
Policy-making is rarely driven by evidence alone. Thus, climate scientists who adopt an ‘evidence-based’ mindset, expecting more science to lead automatically to better policy, are likely to be disappointed. Instead, embracing an ‘evidence-informed’ attitude to policy-making will be more productive, recognising that evidence must be deployed in such a way as to interact persuasively with other factors. Using the 5th Assessment Report of the IPCC as inspiration, this commentary argues that climate scientists would do well to consider five ideas and ultimately embrace an evidence-informed approach to presenting evidence.This work is taken from a larger PhD project currently
being undertaken in the Department of Geography at
the University of Cambridge. This work is very kindly
funded by the Economic and Social Research Council
(grant number ES/I901957/1) and by the Homerton
College Charter Scholarship scheme. I would like to thank
S. E. Owens, A. Donovan and W. M. Adams for comments,
and D. Watson for help with the figures.This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available in Nature Climate Change 4, 522–524 (2014) doi:10.1038/nclimate2270 . http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n7/full/nclimate2270.htm
Risks, alternative knowledge strategies and democratic legitimacy: the conflict over co-incineration of hazardous industrial waste in Portugal.
The decision to incinerate hazardous industrial waste in cement plants (the socalled
‘co-incineration’ process) gave rise to one of the most heated environmental
conflicts ever to take place in Portugal. The bitterest period was between 1997 and
2002, after the government had made a decision. Strong protests by residents,
environmental organizations, opposition parties, and some members of the
scientific community forced the government to backtrack and to seek scientific
legitimacy for the process through scientific expertise. The experts ratified the
government’s decision, stating that the risks involved were socially acceptable.
The conflict persisted over a decade and ended up clearing the way for a more
sustainable method over which there was broad social consensus – a multifunctional
method which makes it possible to treat, recover and regenerate most
wastes. Focusing the analysis on this conflict, this paper has three aims: (1) to
discuss the implications of the fact that expertise was ‘confiscated’ after the
government had committed itself to the decision to implement co-incineration and
by way of a reaction to the atmosphere of tension and protest; (2) to analyse the
uses of the notions of ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’ in scientific reports from both
experts and counter-experts’ committees, and their different assumptions about
controllability and criteria for considering certain practices to be sufficiently safe
for the public; and (3) to show how the existence of different technical scientific
and political attitudes (one more closely tied to government and the corporate
interests of the cement plants, the other closer to the environmental values of reuse
and recycling and respect for the risk perception of residents who challenged
the facilities) is closely bound up with problems of democratic legitimacy. This
conflict showed how adopting more sustainable and lower-risk policies implies a
broader view of democratic legitimacy, one which involves both civic movements
and citizens themselves
Constructing a new understanding of the environment under postsocialism
This paper introduces a special grouping of papers on the theme of the environment and postsocialism. After the collapse of state socialism in Europe between 1989 and 1991, many immediate approaches to environmental reconstruction assumed that economic liberalisation and democratisation would alleviate problems. Since then, critics have argued that these proposed solutions were themselves problematic, and too closely reflected Western European and North American conceptions of environmental quality and democracy. The result has been a counterreaction focusing on detail and specificity at national levels and below. In this paper, we summarise debates about the environment and postsocialism since the period 1989 - 91. In particular, we examine whether an essentialistic link can be made between state socialism and environmental problems, and how far civil society -- or environmentalism -- may result in an improvement in perceived environmental quality. Finally, we consider the possibility for developing an approach to the environment and postsocialism that lies between crude generalisation and microscale studies
Quark-Hadron Phase Transitions in Brane-World Cosmologies
When the universe was about 10 seconds old, a first order cosmological
quark - hadron phase transition occurred at a critical temperature of around
200 MeV. In this work, we study the quark-hadron phase transition in the
context of brane-world cosmologies, in which our Universe is a three-brane
embedded in a five-dimensional bulk, and within an effective model of QCD. We
analyze the evolution of the physical quantities, relevant for the physical
description of the early universe, namely, the energy density, temperature and
scale factor, before, during, and after the phase transition. To study the
cosmological dynamics and evolution we use both analytical and numerical
methods. In particular, due to the high energy density in the early Universe,
we consider in detail the specific brane world model case of neglecting the
terms linearly proportional to the energy density with respect to the quadratic
terms. A small brane tension and a high value of the dark radiation term tend
to decrease the effective temperature of the quark-gluon plasma and of the
hadronic fluid, respectively, and to significantly accelerate the transition to
a pure hadronic phase. By assuming that the phase transition may be described
by an effective nucleation theory, we also consider the case where the Universe
evolved through a mixed phase with a small initial supercooling and
monotonically growing hadronic bubbles.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Nucl. Phys.
Harnessing theories of the policy process for analysing the politics of sustainability transitions: A critical survey
This paper provides a survey of policy process theories and their usefulness in transitions research. Some research has already used such theories, but often in an ad hoc and relatively cursory way and with little attention to potential alternatives. However, it has been argued that transition scholars need to pay more attention to the politics of policy processes. We argue that a critical stocktaking of policy process theories is a prerequisite for future transition studies that more systematically respond to these challenges. Therefore, we review five prominent policy process theories and their applicability in transition studies. We point to two weaknesses of empirical applications of these approaches that are of particular relevance for transitions research: their focus on single instruments or policy packages, and their neglect of policy outcomes. We conclude by suggesting avenues for research on the linkages between policy processes, policy mixes, and socio-technical change
Suicide risk in Veterans Health Administration patients with mental health diagnoses initiating lithium or valproate: a historical prospective cohort study
Risks, alternative knowledge strategies and democratic legitimacy: the conflict over co-incineration of hazardous industrial waste in Portugal
- …