Net Gain: Seeking better outcomes for local people when mitigating biodiversity loss from development

Economic development projects are increasingly applying the mitigation hierarchy to achieve No Net Loss, or even a Net Gain, of biodiversity. Because people value biodiversity and ecosystem services, this can affect the wellbeing of local people, however these types of social impacts from development receive limited consideration. We present ethical, practical and regulatory reasons why development projects applying the mitigation hierarchy should consider related social impacts. We highlight risks to local wellbeing where projects restrict access to biodiversity and ecosystem services in biodiversity offsets. We then present a framework laying out challenges and associated opportunities for delivering better biodiversity and local wellbeing outcomes. Greater coordination between social and biodiversity experts, and early and effective integration of local people in the process, will ensure that efforts to reduce the negative impacts of development on biodiversity can contribute to, rather than detract from, local people’s wellbeing

Modelling welsh cultural events

This paper describes the development of a best practice managerial model for Welsh cultural events. A theoretical model, comprising four stages: decision; planning; implementation; evaluation, was synthesized from an extensive review of the literature. The theoretical model was then used as a projective instrument for in-depth interviews with managers of three Welsh cultural events: Llangollen International Music Festival, the May Fair at the Museum of Welsh Life, and the Urdd Eisteddfod. From the interviews, three reasonably similar practical models were developed. These late models were then unified in a single best practice model, through the use of Delphi technique. The initial decision phase for the first year of each event differed markedly between events. However, the event managers were able to achieve consensus on a best practice annual managerial model for cultural events

FireGrid: Integrated emergency response and fire safety engineering for the future built environment

FireGrid is researching the development and integration of modelling, sensors, Grid, HPC, and C/C technologies. It will stimulate further research, in new safety systems and strategies, in new sensor technologies, in improved modelling techniques and in Grid technologies and operation. By integrating previously uncoupled tools, FireGrid will allow true performance-based design for the built environment. It will introduce a new emergency response paradigm, using scenarios planned and stored in advance in conjunction with super-real-time simulation. Deployment of FireGrid will reduce costs and save lives

High-pressure single-crystal neutron diffraction to 10 GPa by angle-dispersive techniques

Techniques have been developed that allow the measurement of accurate single-crystal neutron-diffraction data at pressures up to 10 GPa, using angle-dispersive methods. High-quality data have been collected up to 10 GPa, to a resolution of sinθ/λ ≃ 1.5 Å−1, from samples of size 3–4 mm^{3}. This article presents the methods developed to mount and centre the sample accurately on the instrument; to reduce the background and hence increase the precision of the measured reflection intensities; and to increase further the accessible region of reciprocal space with a single sample loading. Developments are also highlighted, with a view to increasing the range of both science and pressures that can be achieved at the Institut Laue–Langevin reactor source using single-crystal techniques.</jats:p

Barbary Coast in the expansion of international society: piracy, privateering and corsairing as primary institutions

From the ‘long’ sixteenth century the Ottoman regencies of North Africa operated as major centres of piracy and privateering across the Mediterranean sea. Though deemed by emerging European powers to be an expression of the ‘barbarian’ status of Muslim and Ottoman rulers and peoples, piracy and corsairing in fact played a major role in the development of the ‘primary’ or ‘master’ institutions of international society such as sovereignty, war and international law. Far from representing a ‘barbarian’ challenge to the European ‘standard of civilization’, piracy and privateering in the modern Mediterranean acted as contradictory vehicles in the affirmation of that very standard. This paper explores in some historical detail the ways in which piracy and corsairing off the Barbary Coast in effect acted as ‘derivative’ primary institutions of international society, as Barry Buzan has labelled them. It argues that piracy and corsairing simultaneously contributed to the construction of north African sovereignty whilst also prompting successive wars and treaties aimed at outlawing such practices. The cumulative effect of these complex historical experiences was certainly the expansion of international society and its accompanying master institutions. Yet the manner of their consolidation – at least in the western Mediterranean - suggests that primary institutions of international society owe much more to ‘barbarism’ and ‘illegality’ than is commonly acknowledged