3,594 research outputs found
Exploring the meaning of disproportionate costs for the practical implementation of the Water Framework Directive
The Water Framework Directive (WFD) is perhaps the most ambitious piece of environmental legislation in the history of the European Union. The Directive consolidates existing water-related legislation and has the stated objective of delivering good status (GS) for Europeâs surface waters and groundwaters. But meeting GS is cost dependent, and in some water bodies pollution abatements costs may be high or judged as disproportionate. The exact definition and assessment of disproportionate costs is central for the justification of time-frame derogations and/or lowering the environmental objectives (standards) for compliance at a water body. Official guidance is somewhat discretionary about the interpretation of disproportionate costs. Building on basic cost-benefit theory, this paper attempts to clarify the meaning of disproportionate cost to non-economists, and to convey a consistent interpretation that should underlie the development of a practical derogation decision making across all member statesDerogations, Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (CEA), Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA), Marginal Abatement Costs (MAC), Marginal Social Costs (MSC), Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,
Improving the Accuracy of UK Regulatory Cost Estimates
UK Government departments are required to undertake a Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) when introducing any policy change that places a burden on businesses, charities, the voluntary sector or individuals. Part of this assessment involves the appraisal of the costs (and benefits) associated with complying with all the available options, as well as the wider economic costs. Recent evidence has suggested that the compliance costs, when assessed ex post, tend to be lower than the ex ante assessment made beforehand (see e.g. Harrington et al 1999). Accurate cost estimates are important as errors can lead to under or over regulation. This, in turn, can result in growth and innovation being hindered or, in the case of under regulation, growth being achieved at the expense of the natural resource base (including human health and well being). In order to shed more light on the validity of RIA cost estimates and identify ways of improving their accuracy, Defra decided to commission a study comparing the ex ante and ex post costs of complying with regulatory changes. A total of eight case studies were carried out for this study, covering a range of recent environmental, agricultural and food-related regulations in the UK. Preliminary findings of this study indicate that while ex ante costs are often overestimated, there can also be significant underestimates. Reasons for errors in cost estimation are discussed and strategies for improving their accuracy suggested.Public Economics,
Biological characteristics and mortality of western butterfish (Pentapodus vitta), an abundant bycatch species of prawn trawling and recreational fishing in a large subtropical embayment
The western butterfish (Pentapodus vitta) is numerous in the bycatch of prawn trawling and recreational fishing in Shark Bay, Western Australia. We have thus determined crucial aspects of its biological characteristics and the potential impact of fishing on its abundance within this large subtropical marine embayment. Although both sexes attained a maximum age of 8 years, males grow more rapidly and to a larger size. Maturity is attained at the end of the first year of life and spawning occurs between October and January. The use of a Bayesian approach to combine independent estimates for total mortality, Z, and natural mortality, M, yielded slightly higher point estimates for Z than M. This result indicates that P. vitta is lightly impacted by fishing. It is relevant that, potentially, the individuals can spawn twice before recruitment into the fishery and that 73% of recreationally caught individuals are returned live to the water
Site-Net: Using global self-attention and real-space supercells to capture long-range interactions in crystal structures
Site-Net is a transformer architecture that models the periodic crystal
structures of inorganic materials as a labelled point set of atoms and relies
entirely on global self-attention and geometric information to guide learning.
Site-Net processes standard crystallographic information files to generate a
large real-space supercell, and the importance of interactions between all
atomic sites is flexibly learned by the model for the prediction task
presented. The attention mechanism is probed to reveal Site-Net can learn
long-range interactions in crystal structures, and that specific attention
heads become specialized to deal with primarily short- or long-range
interactions. We perform a preliminary hyperparameter search and train Site-Net
using a single graphics processing unit (GPU), and show Site-Net achieves
state-of-the-art performance on a standard band gap regression task.Comment: 23 pages, 13 figure
Transient and Highly Polarized Double-Peaked H-alpha Emission in the Seyfert 2 Nucleus of NGC 2110
We have discovered an extremely broad, double-peaked H-alpha emission line in
the polarized flux spectrum of NGC 2110, establishing that this well-studied
Seyfert 2 galaxy contains a disk-like hidden broad-line region (BLR). Several
properties of NGC 2110 suggest that it is an obscured twin of Arp 102B, the
prototypical double-peaked emission-line active galactic nucleus (AGN). A
comparison between our data and previous spectra of NGC 2110 indicates that the
double-peaked H-alpha feature is transient. The presence of a disk-like BLR in
NGC 2110 has important implications for AGNs: it expands the range of
properties exhibited by Seyfert 2 galaxies, and the fact that the BLR is
obscured by a torus-like structure provides the first evidence that
double-peaked emitters and classical Seyfert nuclei may have the same basic
parsec-scale geometry.Comment: 5 pages, including 3 postscript figures. Uses emulateapj. Accepted
for publication in ApJ Letter
Marginal abatement cost curves for UK agriculture, forestry, land-use and land-use change sector out to 2022
Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, land use, land use change and forestry (ALULUCF) are a significant percentage of UK industrial emissions. The UK Government is committed to ambitious targets for reducing emissions and all significant industrial sources are coming under increasing scrutiny. The task of allocating shares of future reductions falls to the newly appointed Committee on Climate Change (CCC), which needs to consider efficient mitigation potential across a range of sectors. Marginal abatement cost curves are derived for a range of mitigation measures in the agriculture and forestry sectors over a range of adoption scenarios and for the years 2012, 2017 and 2022. The results indicate that in 2022 around 6.36 MtCO2e could be abated at negative or zero cost. Further, in same year over 17% of agricultural GHG emissions (7.85MtCO2e) could be abated at a cost of less than the 2022 Shadow Price of Carbon (ÂŁ34tCO2e).Environmental Economics and Policy,
MARGINAL ABATEMENT COST CURVES FOR UK AGRICULTURAL GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS
This paper addresses the challenge of developing a âbottom-upâ marginal abatement cost curve (MACC) for greenhouse gas emissions from UK agriculture. A MACC illustrates the costs of specific crop, soil, and livestock abatement measures against a ââbusiness as usualââ scenario. The results indicate that in 2022 under a specific policy scenario, around 5.38 MtCO2 equivalent (e) could be abated at negative or zero cost. A further 17% of agricultural GHG emissions (7.85 MtCO2e) could be abated at a lower unit cost than the UK Governmentâs 2022 shadow price of carbon (ÂŁ34 (tCO2e)-1). The paper discusses a range of methodological hurdles that complicate cost-effectiveness appraisal of abatement in agriculture relative to other sectors.Climate change, Marginal abatement costs, Agriculture, Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Q52, Q 54, Q58,
Gait Analysis of Teenagers and Young Adults Diagnosed with Autism & Severe Verbal Communication Disorders
Both movement differences and disorders are common within autism spectrum disorders (ASD). These differences have wide and heterogeneous variability among different ages and sub-groups all diagnosed with ASD. Gait was studied in a more homogeneously identified group of nine teenagers and young adults who scored as âsevereâ in both measures of verbal communication and overall rating of Autism on the Childhood Autism Rating Scales (CARS). The ASD individuals were compared to a group of typically developing university undergraduates of similar ages. All participants walked a distance of 6-meters across a GAITRite (GR) electronic walkway for six trials. The ASD and comparison groups differed widely on many spatiotemporal aspects of gait including: step and stride length, foot positioning, cadence, velocity, step time, gait cycle time, swing time, stance time, and single and double support time. Moreover, the two groups differed in the percentage of the total gait cycle in each of these phases. The qualitative rating of âBody Useâ on the CARS also indicated severe levels of unusual body movement for all of the ASD participants. These findings demonstrate that older teens and young adults with âsevereâ forms of Verbal Communication Impairments and Autism differ widely in their gait from typically developing individuals. The differences found in the current investigation are far more pronounced compared to previous findings with younger and/or less severely involved individuals diagnosed with ASD as compared to typically developing controls. As such, these data may be a useful anchor-point in understanding the trajectory of development of gait specifically and motor functions generally.
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