Financing Natural Infrastructure for Coastal Flood Damage Reduction

This paper explores financial tools for investing in natural infrastructure to reduce current and future risks from flooding. The key conclusions are: 1) There is a large and growing pool of funding for natural infrastructure, but the availability is geographically uneven and providing sufficient resources will require significant actions by industry, government, scientists, and communities. There are both public and private sources that can fund natural infrastructure for flood risk reduction. Approaches vary among the U.S., Europe, and international development organizations. For example, funding for natural flood control infrastructure is a byproduct of other purposes in the U.S., but recognized as a specific purpose in Europe and by development organizations. The opportunities for investments in natural infrastructure are shaped by various factors, including local geography, type and extent of ecosystems, knowledge about local flood risks, approaches to funding ecosystem conservation, the capacity of financing systems, and the socioeconomic status of communities. The types and amounts of funding for natural infrastructure can be expected to grow because of innovations such as catastrophe bonds, but current institutional structures are often ill-suited to take advantage of existing and emerging opportunities and are not prepared to meet increasing risk. 2) There is no single appropriate financing mechanism for natural infrastructure. Financing should reflect the distribution of public or private benefits of flood protection through the payment mechanism as determined by specific local conditions. The appropriate funding approach will depend on several factors, including local natural conditions (geography, ecosystems), local governance (including the socioeconomic status of communities), the condition of national financial systems (including the robustness of public or private property insurance markets), and public policies that explicitly support the use of natural infrastructure. We identify the key characteristics of these factors that should influence decisions on appropriate funding mechanisms. 3) he largest opportunities for funding are in the redirection of post-disaster recovery funds to pre-disaster investments in risk reduction. Flood risk reduction should be undertaken before the flood occurs, but we currently spend much more on recovery efforts than on risk reduction. The greatest opportunities to increase resources for risk reduction lie in combining funds for risk reduction with funds for flood recovery. These investments will further reduce damages to lives, properties, and communities over time. • Recent innovations such as catastrophe and resilience bonds offer potential approaches to combining recovery and risk reduction, while green bonds may provide pre-disaster financing under appropriate conditions. 4) The largest barriers for securing adequate resources are: identifying locations where natural infrastructure can play a significant role in flood risk reduction; developing the experience and standards to overcome institutional biases in favor of “proven” gray infrastructure; and developing institutional arrangements capable of matching available funding with the needs of individual situations. To develop new financing, it is critical to develop a body of experience that would expand the existing foundation of natural systems management, risk assessment, and valuation analysis of natural infrastructure, and increase its acceptance and use. The identification of viable projects for nature based risk reduction is critical for expanding pools of available funds. The identification of specific projects- including the location, the ecosystem restoration methods, the expected benefits, and the regulatory feasibility- will often need to be included in the up-front costs of the development of new financing vehicles. Infrastructure banks are an example of institutions that can be structured to match funders with specific needs. These banks can pool the funding needs of different natural infrastructure projects to make them attractive to private capital markets. It will be necessary to create special purpose organizations that can capture the benefits of risk reduction in ways that support market-based finance. The funding strategy to be used for any specific project will depend primarily on the geographic, economic, and institutional circumstances in each location. But it is possible to create a general framework to catalogue the different approaches to financing, from which locally-determined funding strategies can be formed. This paper proposes such a framework, then outlines and examines the options currently available under the framework, and concludes with an assessment of how funding may expand in the future

Light Curves of Type Ia Supernovae and Preliminary Cosmological Constraints from the ESSENCE Survey

The ESSENCE survey discovered 213 type Ia supernovae at redshifts 0.10 < z < 0.81 between 2002 and 2008. We present their R and I band light curve measurements, obtained using the MOSAIC II imager at the CTIO 4 m, along with rapid response spectroscopy for each object from a range of large aperture ground based telescopes. We detail our program to obtain quantitative classifications and precise redshifts from our spectroscopic follow-up of each object. We describe our efforts to improve the precision of the calibration of the CTIO 4 m natural photometric system. We use several empirical metrics to measure our internal photometric consistency and our absolute calibration of the survey. We assess the effect of various sources of systematic error on our measured fluxes, and estimate that the total systematic error budget from the photometric calibration is ~1%. We combine 108 ESSENCE SNIa that pass stringent quality cuts with a compilation of 441 SNIa from 3 year results presented by the Supernova Legacy Survey and Baryon Acoustic Oscillation measurements from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to produce preliminary cosmological constraints employing the SNIa . This constitutes the largest sample of well-calibrated, spectroscopically confirmed SNIa to date. Assuming a flat Universe, we obtain a joint constraint of $\Omega_M = 0.266^{+0.026}_{-0.016}(stat 1\sigma)$, and $w = -1.112^{+0.069}_{-0.072}(stat 1\sigma)$. These measurements are consistent with a cosmological constant.Physic

Computations in Symmetric Fusion Categories in Characteristic

We study properties of symmetric fusion categories in characteristic p. In particular, we introduce the notion of a super Frobenius-Perron dimension of an object X of such a category and derive an explicit formula for the Verlinde fiber functor F(X) of X (defined by the 2nd author) in terms of the usual and super Frobenius-Perron dimensions of X. We also compute the decomposition of symmetric powers of objects of the Verlinde category, generalizing a classical formula of Cayley and Sylvester for invariants of binary forms. Finally, we show that the Verlinde fiber functor is unique and classify braided fusion categories of rank 2 and triangular semisimple Hopf algebras in any characteristic

Precise Throughput Determination of the PanSTARRS Telescope and the Gigapixel Imager using a Calibrated Silicon Photodiode and a Tunable Laser: Initial Results

We have used a precision calibrated photodiode as the fundamental metrology reference in order to determine the relative throughput of the PanSTARRS telescope and the Gigapixel imager, from 400 nm to 1050 nm. Our technique uses a tunable laser as a source of illumination on a transmissive flat-field screen. We determine the full-aperture system throughput as a function of wavelength, including (in a single integral measurement) the mirror reflectivity, the transmission functions of the filters and the corrector optics, and the detector quantum efficiency, by comparing the light seen by each pixel in the CCD array to that measured by a precision-calibrated silicon photodiode. This method allows us to determine the relative throughput of the entire system as a function of wavelength, for each pixel in the instrument, without observations of celestial standards. We present promising initial results from this characterization of the PanSTARRS system, and we use synthetic photometry to assess the photometric perturbations due to throughput variation across the field of view.Physic

Return on investment for mangrove and reef flood protection

There is a growing need for coastal and marine restoration, but it is not clear how to pay for it given that environmental funding is low, and national budgets are stretched in response to natural hazards. We use risk-industry methods and find that coral reef and mangrove restoration could yield strong Return on Investment (ROI) for flood risk reduction on shorelines across more than 20 Caribbean countries. These results are robust to changes in discount rates and the timing of restoration benefits. Data on restoration costs are sparse, but the Present Value (PV) of restored natural infrastructure shows that ROI would be positive in many locations even if restoration costs are in the hundreds of thousand per hectare for mangroves and millions per km for reefs. Based on these benefits, we identify significant sources of funding for restoring these natural defenses.This work was supported in part by the Kingfisher Foundation, the World Bank, AXA XL, AXA Research Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) on the basis of a decision adopted by the German Bundestag. We thank Chris Lowrie for help with the figures

Harnessing big data to support the conservation and rehabilitation of mangrove forests globally

Mangrove forests are found on sheltered coastlines in tropical, subtropical, and some warm temperate regions. These forests support unique biodiversity and provide a range of benefits to coastal communities, but as a result of large-scale conversion for aquaculture, agriculture, and urbanization, mangroves are considered increasingly threatened ecosystems. Scientific advances have led to accurate and comprehensive global datasets on mangrove extent, structure, and condition, and these can support evaluation of ecosystem services and stimulate greater conservation and rehabilitation efforts. To increase the utility and uptake of these products, in this Perspective we provide an overview of these recent and forthcoming global datasets and explore the challenges of translating these new analyses into policy action and on-the-ground conservation. We describe a new platform for visualizing and disseminating these datasets to the global science community, non-governmental organizations, government officials, and rehabilitation practitioners and highlight future directions and collaborations to increase the uptake and impact of large-scale mangrove research. This Perspective reviews the role of global-scale research in stimulating policy action and on-the-ground conservation for mangrove ecosystems. We outline the current state of knowledge in terms of global analyses and examine the challenge of translating this research in action

PS1-10afx at z = 1.388: Pan-STARRS1 Discovery of a New Type of Superluminous Supernova

We present the Pan-STARRS1 discovery of PS1-10afx, a unique hydrogen-deficient superluminous supernova (SLSN) at redshift z = 1.388. The light curve peaked at z P1 = 21.7 mag, making PS1-10afx comparable to the most luminous known SNe, with Mu = –22.3 mag. Our extensive optical and near-infrared observations indicate that the bolometric light curve of PS1-10afx rose on the unusually fast timescale of ~12 days to the extraordinary peak luminosity of 4.1 × 1044 erg s–1 (M bol = –22.8 mag) and subsequently faded rapidly. Equally important, the spectral energy distribution is unusually red for an SLSN, with a color temperature of ~6800 K near maximum light, in contrast to previous hydrogen-poor SLSNe, which are bright in the ultraviolet (UV). The spectra more closely resemble those of a normal SN Ic than any known SLSN, with a photospheric velocity of ~11, 000 km s–1 and evidence for line blanketing in the rest-frame UV. Despite the fast rise, these parameters imply a very large emitting radius (gsim 5 × 1015 cm). We demonstrate that no existing theoretical model can satisfactorily explain this combination of properties: (1) a nickel-powered light curve cannot match the combination of high peak luminosity with the fast timescale; (2) models powered by the spindown energy of a rapidly rotating magnetar predict significantly hotter and faster ejecta; and (3) models invoking shock breakout through a dense circumstellar medium cannot explain the observed spectra or color evolution. The host galaxy is well detected in pre-explosion imaging with a luminosity near L*, a star formation rate of ~15 M ☉ yr–1, and is fairly massive (~2 × 1010 M ☉), with a stellar population age of ~108 yr, also in contrast to the young dwarf hosts of known hydrogen-poor SLSNe. PS1-10afx is distinct from known examples of SLSNe in its spectra, colors, light-curve shape, and host galaxy properties, suggesting that it resulted from a different channel than other hydrogen-poor SLSNe.Astronom