Extensional tectonics and collapse structures in the Suez Rift (Egypt)

The Suez Rift is a 300 km long and 50 to 80 km wide basin which cuts a granitic and metamorphic shield of Precambrian age, covered by sediments of Paleozoic to Paleogene age. The rift structure is dominated by tilted blocks bounded by NW-SE normal faults. The reconstruction of the paleostresses indicates a N 050 extension during the whole stage of rifting. Rifting began 24 My ago with dikes intrusions; main faulting and subsidence occurred during Early Miocene producing a 80 km wide basin (Clysmic Gulf). During Pliocene and Quaternary times, faulting is still active but subsidence is restricted to a narrower area (Present Gulf). On the Eastern margin of the gulf, two sets of fault trends are predominant: (1) N 140 to 150 E faults parallel to the gulf trend with pure dip-slip displacement; and (2) cross faults, oriented NOO to N 30 E that have a strike-slip component consistent with the N 050 E distensive stress regime. The mean dip cross fault is steeper (70 to 80 deg) than the dip of the faults parallel to the Gulf (30 to 70 deg). These two sets of fault define diamond shaped tilted block. The difference of mechanical behavior between the basement rocks and the overlying sedimentary cover caused structural disharmony and distinct fault geometries

Sustainable Finance in Japan

This article examines the role of sustainable finance and investment in Japan and how the Japanese financial sector can mitigate growing climate risks and support Japan's transition towards a zero-carbon, sustainable economy. It first illustrates Japan’s exposure to physical and transitional climate risks before reviewing emerging practices in sustainable finance. These include the growing importance of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria in financial decision-making; more rigid reporting and disclosure standards; and the development of green bond and sustainable investment markets. The article also assesses the role of policies and regulations in scaling up sustainable finance and low-carbon infrastructure investments. Subsequently, it analyses transitional climate risks via scenario analysis, applying the Paris Agreement Capital Transition Assessment (PACTA) tool to examine the exposure of subsectors of the Japanese equity market over several climate scenarios. The article concludes with policy recommendations for aligning Japan’s financial sector with global climate and sustainability goals

Managing nature-related financial risks: A precautionary policy approach for central banks and financial supervisors

This paper considers how financial authorities should react to environmental threats beyond climate change. These include biodiversity loss, water scarcity, ocean acidification, chemical pollution and — as starkly illustrated by the Covid-19 pandemic — zoonotic disease transmission, among others. We first provide an overview of these nature-related financial risks (NRFR) and then show how the financial sector is both exposed to them and contributes to their development via its lending, and via the propagation and amplification of financial shocks. We argue that NRFR — being systemic, endogenous and subject to ‘radical uncertainty’ — cannot be sufficiently managed through ‘marketfixing’ approaches based on information disclosure and quantitative risk estimates. Instead, we propose that financial authorities utilise a ‘precautionary policy approach’, making greater use of qualitative methods of managing risk, to support a controlled regime shift towards more sustainable capital allocation. A starting point would be the identification and exclusion of clearly unsustainable activities (e.g. deforestation), the financing of which should be discouraged via micro- and macro-prudential policy tools. Monetary policy tools, such as asset purchase programmes and collateral operations, as well as central banks’ own funds, should exclude assets linked to such activities

2D Materials: Synthesis, Characterization, and Applications

The isolation of monolayer graphene by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov in 2004 created an explosion of layered materials research in the fields of condensed matter physics, material science, electrical engineering, chemistry, and nanobiology, to name a few. The applications have been broad from enhancing electrode performance in batteries to gas sensing to high-frequency analog flexible electronics. For several years and still to this day, graphene has provided a fertile ground for research due to its superior properties. However, failed efforts to engineer a substantial bandgap, a requirement for digital electronics, led researchers to look elsewhere in the periodic table for other layered materials with rich physics and an even broader application space. Fortunately, the technical expertise developed in the graphene system could, for the most part, be leveraged and modified in these new material systems. This thesis presents a brief history of the field of two-dimensional electronics. The rediscovery - and it can only really be characterized as such since most of these materials were studied in the bulk form going back to the 1960s - of these two-dimensional materials with properties ranging from superconductivity, piezoelectricity, optical and electrical anisotropy, and large magnetoresistivity required the development of new characterization techniques to address the perturbations that accompanied the “thinning” of layers. Several characterization techniques were developed and are presented in this thesis. Moreover, in an effort to push these materials closer towards technological viability, synthesis techniques were developed that enabled the systematic study of a prototypical material system, molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂), in order to address the challenges that accompany scalability and determine the structure-property-function relationship

Options to support sustainable trajectories in a rural landscape : drivers, rural processes, and local perceptions in a colombian coffee-growing region

Altres ajuts: Ean UnivesityUnidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-MTrajectories of many rural landscapes in Latin America remain unsustainable. Options to support sustainable rural trajectories should be comprehensive and rooted in the interests of rural actors. We selected a municipality in a coffee-growing region in Colombia with an increasing urban- rural nexus to describe interactions between rural processes and their drivers while identifying and contextualising the perceptions of local actors on major constraints and opportunities for more inclusive and sustainable rural trajectories. We described these interactions by combining secondary data on main drivers, agricultural census data, and interviews with different local actors. Changes in population structure, volatility in coffee prices, in-/out-migration, deagrarianisation, and rurbanisation, among others, are reconfiguring the rural trajectories of the study area. Despite not being a major coffee region, farmers in the study area have developed different strategies, including intensification, diversification, replacement or abandonment of coffee production, and commercialisation. The perceptions of local actors and the multiplicity of agricultural households, food/land use systems, rural processes, and drivers described in this study suggest that more sustainable rural transitions need to be supported by inclusive, integrated, and transformative landscape planning approaches that align with local priorities. However, this transformation needs to be accompanied by changes at a systemic level that address the fundamental bottlenecks to real sustainability