Decentralizing water resource management : economic incentives, accountability, and assurance

Private sector involvement and user participation in water resource management are not new, say the authors. They give examples that demonstrate how willing users and the private sector are able to improve water use and play a larger role in water resources management. User participation and private sector involvement, if properly structured, can provide the incentives needed to stabilize and improve the efficiency of irrigation and water supply systems. They can add flexibility, transparency, and accountability and can reduce the state's administrative and financial burden. A 1989 World Bank review of 21 impact evaluations of irrigation projects, for example, found cost recovery to be excellent in those projects in which water management and operations and maintenance had been entrusted to water users. Greater private sector and user participation can effectively increase user responsibility for managing and financing water projects while freeing governments to focus on broader water resource management concerns. The authors provide examples of decentralized water management in developing country water supply and irrigation systems. Governments should: more actively regulate private sector exploitation of groundwater, especially for irrigation; take measures to encourage price competition among private suppliers of water for both domestic and agricultural uses; and play an active role in organizing water user associations, especially for irrigation and rural water supply systems, and in giving them technical assistance. As numerous examples highlight, such activities should be designed to reduce the transaction costs of organizing and to establish a sense of assurance and accountability within the water user community. Once this is done, the community can deal with problems associated with excludability and unwillingness to pay.Water Supply and Sanitation Governance and Institutions,Water and Industry,Water Use,Water Conservation,Town Water Supply and Sanitation

Fuel treatment planning: Fragmenting high fuel load areas while maintaining availability and connectivity of faunal habitat

Reducing the fuel load in fire-prone landscapes is aimed at mitigating the risk of catastrophic wildfires but there are ecological consequences. Maintaining habitat for fauna of both sufficient extent and connectivity while fragmenting areas of high fuel loads presents land managers with seemingly contrasting objectives. Faced with this dichotomy, we propose a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model that can optimally schedule fuel treatments to reduce fuel hazards by fragmenting high fuel load regions while considering critical ecological requirements over time and space. The model takes into account both the frequency of fire that vegetation can tolerate and the frequency of fire necessary for fire-dependent species. Our approach also ensures that suitable alternate habitat is available and accessible to fauna affected by a treated area. More importantly, to conserve fauna the model sets a minimum acceptable target for the connectivity of habitat at any time. These factors are all included in the formulation of a model that yields a multi-period spatially-explicit schedule for treatment planning. Our approach is then demonstrated in a series of computational experiments with hypothetical landscapes, a single vegetation type and a group of faunal species with the same habitat requirements. Our experiments show that it is possible to fragment areas of high fuel loads while ensuring sufficient connectivity of habitat over both space and time. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the habitat connectivity constraint is more effective than neighbourhood habitat constraints. This is critical for the conservation of fauna and of special concern for vulnerable or endangered species

An optimisation approach for fuel treatment planning to break the connectivity of high-risk regions

Uncontrolled wildfires can lead to loss of life and property and destruction of natural resources. At the same time, fire plays a vital role in restoring ecological balance in many ecosystems. Fuel management, or treatment planning by way of planned burning, is an important tool used in many countries where fire is a major ecosystem process. In this paper, we propose an approach to reduce the spatial connectivity of fuel hazards while still considering the ecological fire requirements of the ecosystem. A mixed integer programming (MIP) model is formulated in such a way that it breaks the connectivity of high-risk regions as a means to reduce fuel hazards in the landscape. This multi-period model tracks the age of each vegetation type and determines the optimal time and locations to conduct fuel treatments. The minimum and maximum Tolerable Fire Intervals (TFI), which define the ages at which certain vegetation type can be treated for ecological reasons, are taken into account by the model. Examples from previous work that explicitly disconnect contiguous areas of high fuel load have often been limited to using single vegetation types implemented within rectangular grids. We significantly extend such work by including modelling multiple vegetation types implemented within a polygon-based network to achieve a more realistic representation of the landscape. An analysis of the proposed approach was conducted for a fuel treatment area comprising 711 treatment units in the Barwon-Otway district of Victoria, Australia. The solution of the proposed model can be obtained for 20-year fuel treatment planning within a reasonable computation time of eight hours

A model for solving the prescribed burn planning problem

The increasing frequency of destructive wildfires, with a consequent loss of life and property, has led to fire and land management agencies initiating extensive fuel management programs. This involves long-term planning of fuel reduction activities such as prescribed burning or mechanical clearing. In this paper, we propose a mixed integer programming (MIP) model that determines when and where fuel reduction activities should take place. The model takes into account multiple vegetation types in the landscape, their tolerance to frequency of fire events, and keeps track of the age of each vegetation class in each treatment unit. The objective is to minimise fuel load over the planning horizon. The complexity of scheduling fuel reduction activities has led to the introduction of sophisticated mathematical optimisation methods. While these approaches can provide optimum solutions, they can be computationally expensive, particularly for fuel management planning which extends across the landscape and spans long term planning horizons. This raises the question of how much better do exact modelling approaches compare to simpler heuristic approaches in their solutions. To answer this question, the proposed model is run using an exact MIP (using commercial MIP solver) and two heuristic approaches that decompose the problem into multiple single-period sub problems. The Knapsack Problem (KP), which is the first heuristic approach, solves the single period problems, using an exact MIP approach. The second heuristic approach solves the single period sub problem using a greedy heuristic approach. The three methods are compared in term of model tractability, computational time and the objective values. The model was tested using randomised data from 711 treatment units in the Barwon-Otway district of Victoria, Australia. Solutions for the exact MIP could be obtained for up to a 15-year planning only using a standard implementation of CPLEX. Both heuristic approaches can solve significantly larger problems, involving 100-year or even longer planning horizons. Furthermore there are no substantial differences in the solutions produced by the three approaches. It is concluded that for practical purposes a heuristic method is to be preferred to the exact MIP approach

Tumor site immune markers associated with risk for subsequent basal cell carcinomas.

BackgroundBasal cell carcinoma (BCC) tumors are the most common skin cancer and are highly immunogenic.ObjectiveThe goal of this study was to assess how immune-cell related gene expression in an initial BCC tumor biopsy was related to the appearance of subsequent BCC tumors.Materials and methodsLevels of mRNA for CD3ε (a T-cell receptor marker), CD25 (the alpha chain of the interleukin (IL)-2 receptor expressed on activated T-cells and B-cells), CD68 (a marker for monocytes/macrophages), the cell surface glycoprotein intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1), the cytokine interferon-γ (IFN-γ) and the anti-inflammatory cytokine IL-10 were measured in BCC tumor biopsies from 138 patients using real-time PCR.ResultsThe median follow-up was 26.6 months, and 61% of subjects were free of new BCCs two years post-initial biopsy. Patients with low CD3ε CD25, CD68, and ICAM-1 mRNA levels had significantly shorter times before new tumors were detected (p = 0.03, p = 0.02, p = 0.003, and p = 0.08, respectively). Furthermore, older age diminished the association of mRNA levels with the appearance of subsequent tumors.ConclusionsOur results show that levels of CD3ε, CD25, CD68, and ICAM-1 mRNA in BCC biopsies may predict risk for new BCC tumors

Pressure-induced amorphization and polyamorphism in one-dimensional single crystal TiO2 nanomaterials

The structural phase transitions of single crystal TiO2-B nanoribbons were investigated in-situ at high-pressure using the synchrotron X-ray diffraction and the Raman scattering. Our results have shown a pressure-induced amorphization (PIA) occurred in TiO2-B nanoribbons upon compression, resulting in a high density amorphous (HDA) form related to the baddeleyite structure. Upon decompression, the HDA form transforms to a low density amorphous (LDA) form while the samples still maintain their pristine nanoribbon shape. HRTEM imaging reveals that the LDA phase has an {\alpha}-PbO2 structure with short range order. We propose a homogeneous nucleation mechanism to explain the pressure-induced amorphous phase transitions in the TiO2-B nanoribbons. Our study demonstrates for the first time that PIA and polyamorphism occurred in the one-dimensional (1D) TiO2 nanomaterials and provides a new method for preparing 1D amorphous nanomaterials from crystalline nanomaterials.Comment: 4 figure

Discriminative characteristics of marginalised novel psychoactive users: A transnational study

New psychoactive substances (NPS) continue to be considered as a major public health concern in many European countries. The study was implemented within the framework of a transnational project of six European countries (Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal). Our aim here is to report on the distinct and differentiating characteristics of marginalised NPS users. Three subgroups of a total of 3023 adult NPS users (socially marginalised, night life, online community) were examined regarding their socio-demographic characteristics, substance use, and external motives towards NPS use. Poland and Hungary reported higher rates of NPS use in comparison to traditional controlled drugs. The external/contextual motives did not play a central role in the background of NPS use, the least important motives were alleged legality and non-detectability of these substances. Marginalised (defined as those accessing low threshold harm reduction services) users’ substance use patterns are different from the other two groups in terms of showing more intense and riskier drug use. The most important variables which contributed to be categorised as a marginalised NPS user were lower level education, being older, having an unfavourable labour market position and using drugs intravenously. Contextual motives did not play a decisive role in being categorised as a marginalised user when drug use pattern was controlled. These identified discriminative features of marginalised drug users should inform policy makers to develop and implement tailor-made interventions targeting this user group to successfully tackle the elevated public health concerns associated with NPS use

Why do people use new psychoactive substances? Development of a new measurement tool in six European countries.

This study was supported by the European Union (New Psychoactive Substances: transnational project on different user groups, user characteristics, extent and patterns of use, market dynamics, and best practices in prevention [HOME/2014/JDRU/AG/DRUG/7077]), the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office (Grant number: KKP126835; NKFIH1157-8/2019-DT). The study was also supported for the realization of this international cofinanced science project in 2016-2017 by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Máté Kapitány-Fövény acknowledges the support by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the support by the ÚNKP-19 New National Excellence Program of the Hungarian Ministry for Innovation and Technology. The funding institutions had no role in the study design or the collection, analysis and interpretation of the data, writing the manuscript, or the decision to submit the paper for publication

Tamoxifen for prevention of breast cancer: extended long-term follow-up of the IBIS-I breast cancer prevention trial

© Cuzick et al. Open Access article distributed under the terms of CC BY.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1470-2045(14)71171-

Loss of heterozygosity at 7p in Wilms' tumour development

Chromosome 7p alterations have been implicated in the development of Wilms' tumour (WT) by previous studies of tumour cytogenetics, and by our analysis of a constitutional translocation (t(1;7)(q42;p15)) in a child with WT and radial aplasia. We therefore used polymorphic microsatellite markers on 7p for a loss of heterozygosity (LOH) study, and found LOH in seven out of 77 informative WTs (9%). The common region of LOH was 7p15–7p22, which contains the region disrupted by the t(1;7) breakpoint. Four WTs with 7p LOH had other genetic changes; a germline WT1 mutation with 11p LOH, LOH at 11p, LOH at 16q, and loss of imprinting of IGF2. Analysis of three tumour-associated lesions from 7p LOH cases revealed a cystic nephroma-like area also having 7p LOH. However, a nephrogenic rest and a contralateral WT from the two other cases showed no 7p LOH. No particular clinical phenotype was associated with the WTs which showed 7p LOH. The frequency and pattern of 7p LOH demonstrated in our studies indicate the presence of a tumour suppressor gene at 7p involved in the development of Wilms' tumour. © 2000 Cancer Research Campaig