Business models for climate services: An analysis

Climate services support mitigation and adaptation to climate change and encourage a science-based and climate-informed policy development. A performing market is vital for supporting uptake of climate services. The diffusion of innovations depends on how business models – meant as firms’ strategic choices to create, capture and share value within a value network – are employed. Innovation in business model, rather than product innovation only, has been proved useful for overcoming bottlenecks associated with development and diffusion of technologies. But only few studies have analysed how business models are used within the context of climate services. We fill this gap by using a sample of 32 climate services provisions at different stage of development. We use an original and revised version the Business Model Canvas as a framework to facilitate the data collection and analysis processes. A quali-quantitative approach is employed to tackle the content of the administered semi-structured interviews and to map them into a connected set of nodes representing concepts as provided by the selected informants. By combining Content and Network Analysis we present how business model aspects interact both within and across components. We find that the Value Network in which climate services operate is crucial for success, while a subscription, online-based infrastructure is a widespread tool in reaching the target users. The creation of partnerships and consortia of organisations allows mutual learning opportunities to happen and boosts the innovation behind these products. We focus on the graph giant component to highlight the role of co-creation approach in generating direct and indirect incremental innovations while delivering seasonal forecasts and tailor-made services. Finally, we call for tighter link between business and climate-related aspects to enhance the importance of financial considerations around climate services provision

Finding the right partners? Examining inequalities in the global investment landscape of hydropower

Clean and affordable energy is crucial to achieve a sustainable future. Despite being controversial, hydropower remains the predominant low-cost and reliable source of energy at global level, as it stabilizes the provision of electricity and it bears the power peaks without losing efficiency. However, hydropower requires huge upfront investments and patient functional capital. Under the Paris Agreement, countries committed to direct financial capital flows towards a low-emission pathway in order to enable the transition. Furthermore, private capital strongly engaged with a transition towards a climate-smart economy. The aim of this work is to study the investment system behind hydropower, investors’ behaviour and the optimal allocation of finance to favour the deployment of capital flows. We use Bloomberg Energy Finance database to track public–private investments over the past century (1903–2020). We use network models to represent the hydropower project financing landscape as a network of co-investments. We find that investors are highly localized, with continental players mostly interacting with counterparts in the same area of the world. Powerful exceptions are international organisations and multilateral banks which coinvest across the globe. They also tend to support low-income and fragile countries, meeting their mandate of sustainable development champions. Multilateral banks and international organisations are the most critical actors in enabling public–private co-investments; they activate partnerships with a wider diversity of investors within the network creating more opportunities for blended finance tools. Our results offer a novel perspective on finance for the energy transition: it challenges the idea that more capital invested is better and calls for a more efficient allocation of the available resources

Kemampuan Mengonstruksi Teks Laporan Hasil Observasi Siswa Kelas X SMA Negeri 7 Medan Tahun Pembelajaran 2016/2017

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui dan mendeskripsikan kemampuan mengonstruksi teks laporan hasil observasi oleh siswa kelas X SMA Negeri 7 Medan tahun pembelajaran 2016/2017. Populasi penelitian ini adalah seluruh siswa kelas X SMA Negeri 7 Medan tahun pembelajaran 2016/2017 yang terdiri dari 8 kelas dan berjumlah 309 orang. Sampel penelitian ini diambil dengan cara random sampling. Sampel penelitian diambil 20% dari populasi sehingga sampel penelitian ini adalah 62 orang siswa.Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah metode deskriptif kualitatif, yaitu mendeskripsikan suatu keadaan alamiah mengenai kegiatan mengonstruksi teks laporan hasil observasi siswa kelas X SMA Negeri 7 Medan. Instrumen yang digunakan untuk memperoleh data adalah tes essay. Data penelitian menunjukkan bahwa kemampuan siswa dalam mengonstruksi teks laporan hasil observasi memiliki nilai rata-rata (mean) 78,87 dan berada pada kategori baik. Hal ini dapat dilihat dari rentang nilai 86-100 dengan kategori sangat baik diperoleh sebanyak 15 orang (24,19%), rentang nilai 76-85 dengan kategori baik diperoleh sebanyak 24 orang (38.71%), rentang nilai 56-75 dengan kategori cukup diperoleh sebanyak 20 orang (32,25%), rentang nilai 10-55 dengan kategori kurang diperoleh sebanyak 3 orang (4,83%). Berdasarkan analisis data diatas maka dapat disimpulkan bahwa kemampuan mengonstruksi teks laporan hasil observasi pada siswa kelas X SMA Negeri 7 Medan Tahun Pembelajaran 2016/2017 termasuk dalam kategori baik

The Application of Landsat TM Data and SRTM Data for Detection Vulnerability Assessment of Flood in Bengawan Solo Watershed

Bengawan Solo watershed is one of watershed that has frequent floods. Due to high rainfall in the rainy season, the river can't accommodate the surface runoff and resulted flooding around the area. The high rainfall is not only causing flood in some areas upstream watershed, but also threaten the downstream areas in East Java province, especially Bojonegoro, Lamongan, Tuban and Gresik. Data of remote sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) could detect assessment vulnerability of flooding. The research objective is to study flood vulnerability assessment in Bengawan Solo watershed using remote sensing data. The method is the combination of information from remote sensing data, i.e.. (1) to combine band 4 with band 7 Landsat TM in which the flood pixel value is ≤ 78; (2) to detect flow accumulation using SRTM data; and (3) to detect flooding areas at the altitude of 0-50 m. The result obtained from the study is the flood vulnerability in Bengawan Solo watershed including Sragen District (Masaran, Plupuh, Gesi, Sidoharjo Sub District); Ngawi (Widodaren, Kedungalar, Pitu SubDistrict); Tuban District (Rengel, Plumpang, Widang Sub District); Bojonegoro (Padangan, Malo, Kalitidu, Trucuk, Bojonegoro,Dander, Kanor, Baureno, Sumberejo Sub District); Lamongan (Laren, Solokuro, Karanggeneng, Kalitengah Sub District); Gresik Regency (Hamlet and Bungah Sub District)

Investment suitability and path dependency perpetuate inequity in international mitigation finance toward developing countries

Developed country pledges to provide finance to developing countries for their mitigation actions sit at the heart of international climate cooperation. Currently, climate finance largely flows to big and fast-growing developing countries while low-income and vulnerable countries are underserved. Here, using wind and solar project data, we highlight inequities in the distribution of international investments in mitigation across developing countries and explore the factors that influence public and private investment flows. Results show that public actors are influenced by domestic climate policies since the Paris Agreement, while private finance flows are shaped by investment suitability conditions, which restricts access to both types of finance in the poorest countries. Further, public and private flows are strongly shaped by path dependency, generating an “investment lock-in” that perpetuates distributional inequities. Future international commitments to direct climate finance should address distributional issues to meet countries’ needs and the goals of the Paris Agreement

Assessing the Feasibility of Cosmic-Ray Acceleration by Magnetic Turbulence at the Galactic Center

The presence of relativistic particles at the center of our galaxy is evidenced by the diffuse TeV emission detected from the inner $\sim$$2^\circ$ of the Galaxy. Although it is not yet entirely clear whether the origin of the TeV photons is due to hadronic or leptonic interactions, the tight correlation of the intensity distribution with the distribution of molecular gas along the Galactic ridge strongly points to a pionic-decay process involving relativistic protons. In earlier work, we concluded that point-source candidates, such as the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (identified with the HESS source J1745-290), or the pulsar wind nebulae dispersed along the Galactic plane, could not account for the observed diffuse TeV emission from this region. Motivated by this result, we consider here the feasibility that the cosmic rays populating the Galactic Center (GC) region are accelerated in situ by magnetic turbulence. Our results indicate that even in a highly conductive environment, this mechanism is efficient enough to energize protons within the intercloud medium to the \ga TeV energies required to produce the HESS emission.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap

The magnetic environment in the central region of nearby galaxies

The central regions of galaxies harbor some of the most extreme physical phenomena, including dense stellar clusters, non-circular motions of molecular clouds and strong and pervasive magnetic field structures. In particular, radio observations have shown that the central few hundred parsecs of our Galaxy has a striking magnetic field configuration. It is not yet clear whether these magnetic structures are unique to our Milky Way or a common feature of all similar galaxies. Therefore, we report on (a) a new radio polarimetric survey of the central 200 pc of the Galaxy to better characterize the magnetic field structure and (b) a search for large-scale and organized magnetized structure in the nuclear regions of nearby galaxies using data from the Very Large Array (VLA) archive. The high angular resolution of the VLA allows us to study the central 1 kpc of the nearest galaxies to search for magnetized nuclear features similar to what is detected in our own Galactic center. Such magnetic features play a important role in the nuclear regions of galaxies in terms of gas transport and the physical conditions of the interstellar medium in this unusual region of galaxies.Comment: 8 pages; Proceedings for "The Universe under the Microscope" (AHAR 2008), held in Bad Honnef (Germany) in April 2008, to be published in Journal of Physics: Conference Series by Institute of Physics Publishing, R. Schoedel, A. Eckart, S. Pfalzner, and E. Ros (eds.

Diagnostic and prognostic role of renal histopathology in rheumatic diseases

The objective was to evaluate renal involvement in several rheumatic diseases (i.e. rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, Sjögren syndrome, systemic sclerosis, systemic vasculitides). The method chosen was to define histopathological profiles reported in renal biopsies performed on patients with renal involvement due to different rheumatic diseases. Renal involvement observed in patients with rheumatic disease can be the direct result of the disease per se and/or a complication of drugs used in the disease treatment. The clinical-pathological correlations derived from the study of renal tissues can be useful for differential diagnosis, prognosis assessment and therapeutic decisions. Renal biopsy should be considered as an important tool for the management of nephropathies in patients with systemic rheumatic diseases