53 research outputs found
Climate Ready Estuaries - COAST in Action: 2012 Projects from Maine and New Hampshire
In summer 2011 the US EPA’s Climate Ready Estuaries program awarded funds to the Casco Bay Estuary Partnership (CBEP) in Portland, Maine, and the Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership (PREP) in coastal New Hampshire, to further develop and use COAST (COastal Adaptation to Sea level rise Tool) in their sea level rise adaptation planning processes. The New England Environmental Finance Center worked with municipal staff, elected officials, and other stakeholders to select specific locations, vulnerable assets, and adaptation actions to model using COAST. The EFC then collected the appropriate base data layers, ran the COAST simulations, and provided visual, numeric, and presentation-based products in support of the planning processes underway in both locations. These products helped galvanize support for the adaptation planning efforts. Through facilitated meetings they also led to stakeholders identifying specific action steps and begin to determine how to implement them
Investigation of Reactivity of Launch Vehicle Materials with Liquid Oxygen
Impact sensitivity and ignition mechanism of organic compounds in liquid oxygen correlated with chemical and physical propertie
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Pathways to Coastal Resiliency: The Adaptive Gradients Framework
Current and future climate-related coastal impacts such as catastrophic and repetitive flooding, hurricane intensity, and sea level rise necessitate a new approach to developing and managing coastal infrastructure. Traditional “hard” or “grey” engineering solutions are proving both expensive and inflexible in the face of a rapidly changing coastal environment. Hybrid solutions that incorporate natural, nature-based, structural, and non-structural features may better achieve a broad set of goals such as ecological enhancement, long-term adaptation, and social benefits, but broad consideration and uptake of these approaches has been slow. One barrier to the widespread implementation of hybrid solutions is the lack of a relatively quick but holistic evaluation framework that places these broader environmental and societal goals on equal footing with the more traditional goal of exposure reduction. To respond to this need, the Adaptive Gradients Framework was developed and pilot-tested as a qualitative, flexible, and collaborative process guide for organizations to understand, evaluate, and potentially select more diverse kinds of infrastructural responses. These responses would ideally include natural, nature-based, and regulatory/cultural approaches, as well as hybrid designs combining multiple approaches. It enables rapid expert review of project designs based on eight metrics called “gradients”, which include exposure reduction, cost efficiency, institutional capacity, ecological enhancement, adaptation over time, greenhouse gas reduction, participatory process, and social benefits. The framework was conceptualized and developed in three phases: relevant factors and barriers were collected from practitioners and experts by survey; these factors were ranked by importance and used to develop the initial framework; several case studies were iteratively evaluated using this technique; and the framework was finalized for implementation. The article presents the framework and a pilot test of its application, along with resources that would enable wider application of the framework by practitioners and theorists
How Close Do We Live to Water? A Global Analysis of Population Distance to Freshwater Bodies
Traditionally, people have inhabited places with ready access to fresh water.
Today, over 50% of the global population lives in urban areas, and water
can be directed via tens of kilometres of pipelines. Still, however, a large
part of the world's population is directly dependent on access to natural
freshwater sources. So how are inhabited places related to the location of
freshwater bodies today? We present a high-resolution global analysis of how
close present-day populations live to surface freshwater. We aim to increase the
understanding of the relationship between inhabited places, distance to surface
freshwater bodies, and climatic characteristics in different climate zones and
administrative regions. Our results show that over 50% of the
world's population lives closer than 3 km to a surface freshwater body, and
only 10% of the population lives further than 10 km away. There are,
however, remarkable differences between administrative regions and climatic
zones. Populations in Australia, Asia, and Europe live closest to water.
Although populations in arid zones live furthest away from freshwater bodies in
absolute terms, relatively speaking they live closest to water considering the
limited number of freshwater bodies in those areas. Population distributions in
arid zones show statistically significant relationships with a combination of
climatic factors and distance to water, whilst in other zones there is no
statistically significant relationship with distance to water. Global studies on
development and climate adaptation can benefit from an improved understanding of
these relationships between human populations and the distance to fresh
water
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