In search of ‘lost’ knowledge and outsourced expertise in flood risk management

This paper examines the parallel discourses of ‘lost’ local flood expertise and the growing use of commercial consultancies to outsource aspects of flood risk work. We critically examine the various claims and counter-claims about lost, local and external expertise in flood management, focusing on the aftermath of the 2007 floods in East Yorkshire, England. Drawing on interviews with consultants, drainage engineers and others, we caution against claims that privilege ‘local’ floods knowledge as ‘good’ and expert knowledge as somehow suspect. This paper urges carefulness in interpreting claims about local knowledge, arguing that it is important always to think instead of hybrid knowledge formations. We conclude by arguing that experiments in the co-production of flood risk knowledge need to be seen as part of a spectrum of ways for producing shared knowledge

No. 3, The Hooper Site (40DV234), A Mississippian Village in Davidson County, Tennessee

https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/govpubs-tn-dept-environment-conservation-archaeology-miscellaneous/1002/thumbnail.jp

Macroalgae Decrease Growth and Alter Microbial Community Structure of the Reef-Building Coral, Porites astreoides

This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the Public Library of Science and can be found at: http://www.plosone.org/home.action.With the continued and unprecedented decline of coral reefs worldwide, evaluating the factors that contribute to coral demise is of critical importance. As coral cover declines, macroalgae are becoming more common on tropical reefs. Interactions between these macroalgae and corals may alter the coral microbiome, which is thought to play an important role in colony health and survival. Together, such changes in benthic macroalgae and in the coral microbiome may result in a feedback mechanism that contributes to additional coral cover loss. To determine if macroalgae alter the coral microbiome, we conducted a field-based experiment in which the coral Porites astreoides was placed in competition with five species of macroalgae. Macroalgal contact increased variance in the coral-associated microbial community, and two algal species significantly altered microbial community composition. All macroalgae caused the disappearance of a γ-proteobacterium previously hypothesized to be an important mutualist of P. astreoides. Macroalgal contact also triggered: 1) increases or 2) decreases in microbial taxa already present in corals, 3) establishment of new taxa to the coral microbiome, and 4) vectoring and growth of microbial taxa from the macroalgae to the coral. Furthermore, macroalgal competition decreased coral growth rates by an average of 36.8%. Overall, this study found that competition between corals and certain species of macroalgae leads to an altered coral microbiome, providing a potential mechanism by which macroalgae-coral interactions reduce coral health and lead to coral loss on impacted reefs

Determinants of environmental management in the red sea hotels: Personal and organizational values and contextual variables

What motivates firms to adopt environmental management practices is one of the most significant aspects in the contemporary academic debate in which the review of the existing literature yields, with an obvious contextual bias toward developed world, contested theories and inconclusive findings. Providing a unique model that brings together the individual and organizational levels of analysis on firms' adoption of environmental management practices, this study aims to provide a new insight from the context of developing world. Data from 158 Red Sea hotels reveal two identifiable dimensions of environmental management-planning and organization, and operations-that can be explained as originating from different values. Whereas organizational altruism is a powerful predictor of both dimensions, managers' personal values and organizational competitive orientation are only relevant to environmental operations. The evidence also indicates that contextual variables such as chain affiliation, hotel star rating, and size are important to explain hotels' environmental management behaviors. © 2012 ICHRIE

Reliable, resilient and sustainable urban drainage systems: an analysis of robustness under deep uncertainty (article)

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the American Chemical Society via the DOI in this record.The dataset associated with this article is available in ORE at: https://doi.org/10.24378/exe.563Reliability, resilience and sustainability are key goals of any urban drainage system. However, only a few studies have recently focused on measuring, operationalizing and comparing such concepts in a world of deep uncertainty. In this study, these key concepts are defined and quantified for a number of gray, green and hybrid strategies, aimed at improving the capacity issues of an existing integrated urban wastewater system. These interventions are investigated by means of a regret-based approach, which evaluates the robustness (that is the ability to perform well under deep uncertainty conditions) of each strategy in terms of the three qualities through integration of multiple objectives (i.e. sewer flooding, river water quality, combined sewer overflows, river flooding, greenhouse gas emissions, cost and acceptability) across four different future scenarios. The results indicate that strategies found to be robust in terms of sustainability were typically also robust for resilience and reliability across future scenarios. However, strategies found to be robust in terms of their resilience and, in particular, for reliability did not guarantee robustness for sustainability. Conventional gray infrastructure strategies were found to lack robustness in terms of sustainability due to their unbalanced economic, environmental and social performance. Such limitations were overcome, however, by implementing hybrid solutions that combine green retrofits and gray rehabilitation solutions.This study was funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through STREAM (EP/G037094/1) with Northumbrian Water Limited, BRIM (EP/N010329/1) and the final author’s fellowship Safe & SuRe (EP/K006924/1)

Sustainable risk management of emerging contaminants in municipal wastewaters

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below. Copyright @ 2009 The Royal Society.The presence of emerging contaminants in municipal wastewaters, particularly endocrine-disrupting compounds such as oestrogenic substances, has been the focus of much public concern and scientific attention in recent years. Due to the scientific uncertainty still surrounding their effects, the Precautionary Principle could be invoked for the interim management of potential risks. Therefore, precautionary prevention risk-management measures could be employed to reduce human exposure to the compounds of concern. Steroid oestrogens are generally recognized as the most significant oestrogenically active substances in domestic sewage effluent. As a result, the UK Environment Agency has championed a ‘Demonstration Programme’ to investigate the potential for removal of steroid oestrogens and alkylphenol ethoxylates during sewage treatment. Ecological and human health risks are interdependent, and ecological injuries may result in increased human exposures to contaminants or other stressors. In this context of limiting exposure to potential contaminants, examining the relative contribution of various compounds and pathways should be taken into account when identifying effective risk-management measures. In addition, the explicit use of ecological objectives within the scope of the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive poses new challenges and necessitates the development of ecosystem-based decision tools. This paper addresses some of these issues and proposes a species sensitivity distribution approach to support the decision-making process related to the need and implications of sewage treatment work upgrade as risk-management measures to the presence of oestrogenic compounds in sewage effluent

Access to shops: The views of low-income shoppers

Concern is mounting as the retail stranglehold upon access to food grows. Research on the implications of restructuring retailing and health inequality has failed to involve low-income consumers in this debate. This paper reports on an exercise conducted for the UK Government's, Social Exclusion Unit's Policy Action Team on Access to Shops. The survey provides a useful baseline of the views of low-income groups in England. The choices that people on low income can make were found to be dominated by certain factors such as income and, most importantly, transport. Consumers reported varying levels of satisfaction with retail provision. The findings suggest gaps between what people have, what they want and what the planning process does and does not offer them. Better policy and processes are needed to include and represent the interests of low-income groups

Greening Capitalism? A Marxist Critique of Carbon Markets

Climate change is increasingly being recognized as a serious threat to dominant modes of social organization, inspiring suggestions that capitalism itself needs to be transformed if we are to ‘decarbonize’ the global economy. Since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, carbon markets have emerged as the main politico-economic tools in global efforts to address climate change. Newell and Paterson (2010) have recently claimed that the embrace of carbon markets by financial and political elites constitutes a possible first step towards the transformation of current modes of capitalist organization into a new form of greener, more sustainable ‘climate capitalism.’ In this paper, we argue that the institutionalization of carbon markets does not, in fact, represent a move towards the radical transformation of capitalism, but is better understood as the most recent expression of ongoing trends of ecological commodification and expropriation, driving familiar processes of uneven and crisis-prone development. In this paper, we review four critical Marxist concepts: metabolic rift (Foster, 1999), capitalism as world ecology (Moore, 2011a), uneven development and accumulation through dispossession (Harvey, 2003, 2006), and sub-imperialism (Marini, 1972, 1977), developing a framework for a Marxist analysis of carbon markets. Our analysis shows that carbon markets form part of a longer historical development of global capitalism and its relation to nature. Carbon markets, we argue, serve as creative new modes of accumulation, but are unlikely to transform capitalist dynamics in ways that might foster a more sustainable global economy. Our analysis also elucidates, in particular, the role that carbon markets play in exacerbating uneven development within the Global South, as elites in emerging economies leverage carbon market financing to pursue new strategies of sub-imperial expansion. </jats:p