Water property rights in investor-state contracts on extractive activities, affects water governance: An empirical assessment of 80 contracts in Africa and Asia

In view of increasing globalization, the ongoing promotion of foreign direct investment and the lack of comparative literature on how water property rights are changing in the global South, this article asks: How have property rights in water evolved through investor-State contracts on mineral, petroleum and land issues in Africa and Asia? We analyse 80 publicly available contracts—22 minerals, 40 petroleum and 18 land—of 34 African and 19 Asian countries. We find that: (i) in addition to a State's water law, water allocation is also implicitly governed by contracts and international investment treaties; (ii) States de facto privatize water by allocating quasi-property rights through the granting of contracts to foreign international investors; (iii) such waters exploited by virtue of contracts reduce the ability of States to regulate water during the term of the contract especially as investors' water use is protected by bilateral investment treaties and potential compensation claims; and (iv) the need of the State to increasingly adaptively govern water as the impacts of climate change on water become more noticeable will be challenged by the long-term quasi property rights granted by States to investors in such contracts

Active noise compensation for multichannel magnetocardiography in an unshielded environment

A multichannel high-T/sub c/-SQUID-based heart scanner for unshielded environments is under development, Outside a magnetically shielded room, sensitive SQUID measurements are possible using gradiometers. However, it is difficult to realize large-baseline gradiometers in high-T/sub c/ materials, Therefore, the authors developed two active noise compensation techniques. In the Total Field Compensation technique, a Helmholtz type coil set is placed around the sensors. One magnetometer is used as a zero detector controlling the compensation current through the coil set. For Individual Flux Compensation, the reference signal is sent to the separate SQUIDs (or their flux transformer circuits) to compensate the local environmental noise fluxes, The latter technique was tested on low-T/sub c/ rf-SQUID magnetometers, each sensor set to a field resolution SQUID magnetometers, i.e. 0.1 pT/sub RMS///spl radic/Hz. The authors were able to suppress the environmental disturbances to such an extent that magnetocardiograms could be recorded in an ordinary environment. Here the two suppression techniques are described and experimental results are presente