After the storm

Even the most sophisticated technology will not predict some natural disasters, but it can help us to prepare, and to deal with the devastation that follows

Violating Displaced Persons Human Rights And Impairing The Quality Of Human Resources

Each year wars force several millions of people to leave their homes to join the ranks of displaced persons (DPs). Displaced women and children are particularly vulnerable to risks of physical abuses. The loss in current and future human resource quality caused by abuses suffered by DPs is an extreme version of the well-known brain drain phenomenon. The paper considers the psychological damage inflicted upon DPs, the possible effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the consequent damage to human resource quality

Governance, Civil Conflict, And Refugee Protection In Sub-Saharan Africa: A Primer

This paper provides an introduction to the concepts of governance and state weakness, fragility or failure.  Selected indices of performance are presented with an emphasis on Sub-Saharan Africa. As noted by the 2005 UK Commission for Africa “The most extreme breakdown of governance is war.” The paper discusses the concepts and definitions of civil conflict and civil war, and the prevalence of civil war in Sub –Saharan Africa.  Among the costs of civil war are the people who are displaced due to their fear for life amidst the conflict.  If displaced persons exit the country they become refugees. The paper provides an introduction to the evolution of international humanitarian law since World War II to protect non-combatants, including refugees

Pollution and economic activity : a theoretical study

This thesis is a theoretical investigation of the basic relationships between pollution and economic activity. The study considers both the positive and normative economic aspects of the pollution problem, although more attention is paid to the latter. Or major interest is the relationship between pollution and economic growth. The main body of the thesis commences with an analysis of an uncontrolled economy. Here we are interested in the stability characteristics of the growth process. From the stability of uncontrolled systems we turn to the optimality of controlled systems. Employing Pontryagin's Maximum Principle we analyse the optimal control of economic activity over time. Initially we consider the control of pollution in the absence of economic growth. The joint problems of optimal investment and pollution control are then considered. In order to better examine the general equilibrium nature of the pollution problem we consider a two sector model

Hydrodynamics of the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky Equation in Two Dimensions

The large scale properties of spatiotemporal chaos in the 2d Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation are studied using an explicit coarse graining scheme. A set of intermediate equations are obtained. They describe interactions between the small scale (e.g., cellular) structures and the hydrodynamic degrees of freedom. Possible forms of the effective large scale hydrodynamics are constructed and examined. Although a number of different universality classes are allowed by symmetry, numerical results support the simplest scenario, that being the KPZ universality class.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

The role of community-based Hubs in reef restoration: Collaborative monitoring at Moore Reef

The Cairns-Port Douglas region is home to multiple coral rehabilitation and stewardship projects supported by scientists, Traditional Owners, and a range of local stakeholders. The Cairns-Port Douglas Reef Hub has been a platform for collaboration across Traditional Owners, tourism operators, not-for-profits and scientists from the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (AIMS and CSIRO) to design and deliver a project at Moore Reef that assesses how new techniques for assisted coral recovery can be applied in rubble habitats. The collaborative project evaluates the viability of newly engineered coral seeding devices developed by AIMS, for deploying coral recruits that were spawned in the National Sea Simulator in December 2022 to sites at Moore Reef close to tourist pontoons. This project provides important data to inform future scaling up of restoration activities and provides a model for active involvement of a range of partners. Through this work, the project builds understanding around key ingredients for best-practice, place-based engagement opportunities for Reef communities and the general public

The devil is in the detail: Metabarcoding of arthropods provides a sensitive measure of biodiversity response to forest stand composition compared with surrogate measures of biodiversity

Gauging trends in forest biodiversity and relating these to forest management practice and environmental change requires effective monitoring and assessment of spatio-temporal trends in forest biodiversity. Taxa- and habitat-based surrogate measures of biodiversity, or ‘biodiversity indicators’, are commonly used to convey information about the state of the biological community since they can be assessed relatively quickly and cheaply by non-experts. Direct measures of a component of biodiversity are also increasingly feasible using DNA metabarcoding; ‘Next Generation Sequencing’ has facilitated the rapid characterisation of combined multiple species samples by sequencing their DNA barcodes in parallel, simultaneously reducing the need for taxonomic expertise and the time and cost required to obtain biodiversity data across a wide range of taxonomic groups. We investigated whether biodiversity information obtained from DNA metabarcoding of mass-trapped arthropods and from a range of taxa-based surrogate measures of biodiversity (e.g. carabid beetles, vascular plants) provide: 1) similar estimates of alpha and beta diversity and 2) provide similar forest management related conclusions. We also explored how well habitat-based surrogate measures of biodiversity (e.g. stand structure, volume of deadwood) predict observed biodiversity patterns. The study was conducted in Thetford Forest, UK within 15 forest plantation stands (5 Scots pine-oak mixtures, 4 Scots pine and 6 oak monocultures). Our results demonstrated a high level of congruence between the metabarcoding and taxa-based surrogate measures of biodiversity. The wider range of taxonomic groups identified using a metabarcoding approach offered the potential to identify taxa sensitive to the environmental variable that was being manipulated experimentally (i.e. the composition of forest stands). Most habitat-based measures of biodiversity failed to predict species assemblage differences between stands