African Water: Supporting African involvement in the EU Framework Programme.

Water researchers in developing countries have yet to take full advantage of the funding and collaborative research opportunities presented by the EU Framework Programme. There are a variety of reasons for this, such as insufficient information and a lack of previous experience. The African Water initiative aims to increase the involvement of African water researchers through a range of activities including communication and dissemination, capacity building and development, and complementary initiatives. The project has demonstrated that there is a demand for such sector-specific support activities. However, African Water is a small component of a much larger process of partnership between the developed and the less-developed countries of the world, involving many different European and African organisations working across political, institutional and technical domains, and complementing the wide range of actions already being undertaken

The read-across hypothesis and environmental risk assessment of pharmaceuticals

This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. Copyright © 2013 American Chemical Society.Pharmaceuticals in the environment have received increased attention over the past decade, as they are ubiquitous in rivers and waterways. Concentrations are in sub-ng to low μg/L, well below acute toxic levels, but there are uncertainties regarding the effects of chronic exposures and there is a need to prioritise which pharmaceuticals may be of concern. The read-across hypothesis stipulates that a drug will have an effect in non-target organisms only if the molecular targets such as receptors and enzymes have been conserved, resulting in a (specific) pharmacological effect only if plasma concentrations are similar to human therapeutic concentrations. If this holds true for different classes of pharmaceuticals, it should be possible to predict the potential environmental impact from information obtained during the drug development process. This paper critically reviews the evidence for read-across, and finds that few studies include plasma concentrations and mode of action based effects. Thus, despite a large number of apparently relevant papers and a general acceptance of the hypothesis, there is an absence of documented evidence. There is a need for large-scale studies to generate robust data for testing the read-across hypothesis and developing predictive models, the only feasible approach to protecting the environment.BBSRC Industrial Partnership Award BB/ I00646X/1 and BBSRC Industrial CASE Partnership Studentship BB/I53257X/1 with AstraZeneca Safety Health and Environment Research Programme

Technique to detect microclimatic inhomogeneities in historical records of screen-level air temperature.

A new method to detect errors or biases in screen-level air temperature records at standard climate stations is developed and applied. It differs from other methods by being able to detect microclimatic inhomogeneities in time series. Such effects, often quite subtle, are due to alterations in the immediate environment of the station such as changes of vegetation, development (buildings, paving), irrigation, cropping, and even in the maintenance of the site and its instruments. In essence, the technique recognizes two facts: differences of thermal microclimate are enhanced at night, and taking the ratio of the nocturnal cooling at a pair of neighboring stations nullifies thermal changes that occur at larger-than-microclimatic scales. Such ratios are shown to be relatively insensitive to weather conditions. After transforming the time series using Hurst rescaling, which identifies long-term persistence in geophysical phenomena, cooling ratio records show distinct discontinuities, which, when compared against detailed station metadata records, are found to correspond to even minor changes in the station environment. Effects detected by this method are shown to escape detection by current generally accepted techniques. The existence of these microclimatic effects are a source of uncertainty in long-term temperature records, which is in addition to those presently recognized such as local and mesoscale urban development, deforestation, and irrigation. Copyright 2006 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the AMS’s permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form, such as on a web site or in a searchable database, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statement, requires written permission or a license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policy, available on the AMS Web site located at (http://www.ametsoc.org/) or from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or [email protected], Faculty ofGeography, Department ofReviewedFacult