A Tale of Three Cities : a comparative analysis of climate policy formulation in Swedish municipalities

The adage “think global, act local” can be a fitting description of how to address climate change. Municipalities are often responsible for implementing the measures required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and shift to a more climate-neutral development trajectory. However, there is a vast spectrum of municipal ambition regarding climate, and not all municipalities manage to have robust and ambitious climate policies. Sweden is a country that both has ambitious climate goals and affords a high amount of autonomy to local-level governing bodies. This thesis investigates how municipalities in Skåne, Sweden develop policies to address climate change, with a focus on how they approach the national “reduced climate impact” environmental quality objective. It seeks to unveil the conditions that enable ambitious climate policy at the municipal level by comparing Hässleholm, Vellinge, and Kristianstad, which exhibit many similar characteristics but have varying levels of climate policy success – which I define as having in place an ambitious and robust program to reduce climate impact. The theory of governmentality provides a lens through which to analyze my results. Via a coding process, I categorize the results for each case into the three components of governmentality: problematization, regimes, and endpoint. I look for similarities and differences across cases that could correspond with the municipalities’ levels of success, paying particular attention to characteristics that are present in Vellinge and Kristianstad but absent in Hässleholm. I then synthesize these findings and present them in their order of significance in determining climate policy success. This research suggests that the features most influential in enabling ambitious climate policy are driven individuals, a clear organizational structure, a strategic approach, and having clear political motivations such as a vision or reputational ambitions. A sense of municipal responsibility to address climate change and maintaining harmonized, up-to-date policy documents also have a notable influence. Public awareness of climate change impacts, membership of trans-municipal networks, and a desire for economic benefits associated with climate action seem to play a minor role in shaping municipal climate governance. Climate awareness amongst companies and being a signatory of a voluntary initiative to eliminate fossil fuels do not seem to impact climate policy success. This study contributes to sustainability science by offering insights on policymaking that could enhance coordination between multiple stakeholders and levels of governance as they seek practical solutions to the complex challenge of climate change

Systems Analysis: A Missing Element in Foreign Policy Planning

Systems analysis is sometimes seen as an effort to quantify with modern data processing equipment all of the factors involved in high-level decision-making. In reality, systems analysis includes many non-quantitative techniques which have a wide application to the problems of foreign policy and defense

Evaluating Urban Forms for Comparison Studies in the Massing Design Stage

We introduce five performance indicators to facilitate the comparison of urban massingdesign in the early design stages. The five simple indicators are based on existing studies andcover three main performance areas that are sensitive to urban form changes: solar, ventilation,and connectivity potentials. The first three indicators-the non-solar heated façade to floor areaindex, daylight façade to floor area index, and photovoltaics envelope to floor area index-measurethe solar potential. The frontal area index measures the ventilation potential and the route-directnessindex measures the connectivity potential. The indicators are simple to use, as they only requireurban geometry data for their calculation. We demonstrate the indicators in two case studies;variations in the values of these indicators show that they are sensitive to urban form changesand can be used in comparative studies to identify better performing urban forms among massingdesigns. We implement the indicators as an open-source Python library, Pyliburo, that designers andresearchers can readily access and integrate into their existing design workflows. Keywords:performance-based urban design; performance indicators; connectivity; urban ventilation; solar analysi

Adaptation to Climate Change in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Investigation of Capacity-Building and National Adaptation Programs of Action

The phenomenon of anthropogenic climate change requires immediate attention. Many of the most severe effects of climate change will occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. Least-developed countries (LDCs) in this region are particularly vulnerable to climate change, due to their geographical location and their poor ability to cope with the consequences. This study examines the various impacts, vulnerabilities, and adaptation strategies associated with climate change in sub-Saharan African LDCs, using Tanzania, Burkina Faso, and Senegal as case studies. Each of these three countries has developed a National Adaptation Program of Action (NAPA), a country-specific climate change adaptation plan designed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. A number of theories on adaptation emphasize the importance of having the capacity to adapt. Interestingly, the NAPAs do not include capacity-building in their prioritized lists of adaptation strategies. I hypothesize that this omission can be attributed in part to the countries’ adaptation priorities and to the countries’ low levels of extant capacity. It may be the desire of the LDCs to create technology-based adaptation plans that can be implemented by even their most vulnerable groups, namely poor rural populations. Furthermore, colonial legacies and low levels of development have, in some cases, compromised the capacity of governments to carry out the most basic and immediate tasks. Building the capacity to respond to climate change is not always possible for the governments of LDCs

Analysis and Experimental Implementation of Grid Frequency Regulation using Behind-the-Meter Batteries Compensating for Fast Load Demand Variations

This paper proposes a new grid frequency regulation (GFR) scheme using behind-the-meter battery energy storage systems (BESSs). The fast dynamic responses of the electrical BESSs enable buildings to compensate for the high-frequency components of load demand variations, through direct load control (DLC). An electrical system in a building, along with its building-level and device-level controllers, is considered to address the difficulties in the application of DLC, especially in communicating with several small-scale BESSs. A small-signal analysis is carried out using the aggregated responses of the generators and the DLC-enabled buildings to investigate the proposed GFR scheme, particularly with respect to the feedback controllers for the buildings. Simulation studies are performed using a test grid for various penetrations of the DLC-enabled buildings, and the test grid is implemented using a laboratory-scale microgrid. The proposed GFR is effective in reducing the frequency deviations and required reserve capacity of the generators, which is achieved by making small variations in the state-of-charge of the behind-the-meter battery.1172Ysciescopu

Transport processes in and above two-dimensional urban street canyons under different stratification conditions: results from numerical simulation

Thermal stratification (neutral, unstable and stable) plays an important role in determining the transport processes in and above urban street canyons. This paper summarizes the recent findings of the effect of thermal stratification on the transport of momentum, heat, and pollutants in the two-dimensional (2D) urban street canyons in the skimming flow regime. Special attention is paid to the results from large-eddy simulations (LESs), while other experimental and numerical results are referred to when necessary. With increasing Richardson number, Ri, the drag coefficient of the 2D street canyon as felt by the overlying atmosphere decreases in a linear manner. Under neutral and stable stratification, a nearly constant drag coefficient of 0.02 is predicted by the LESs. Under unstable stratification, the turbulent pollutant transport is dominated by organized turbulent motions (ejections and sweeps), while under stable stratification, the unorganized turbulent motion (inward interactions) plays a more important role and the sweeps are inhibited. The unstable stratification condition also enhances the ejections of turbulent pollutant flux, especially at the leeward roof-level corner, where the ejections dominate the turbulent pollutant flux, outweighing the sweeps. With increasing Ri, both the heat (area active scalar source) and pollutant (line passive scalar source) transfer coefficients decrease towards a state where the transfer coefficients become zero at Ri≈0.5. It should be noted that, due to the limit of the 2D street canyon configuration discussed in this paper, great caution should be taken when generalising the conclusions drawn here.Singapore. National Research FoundationSingapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. Center for Environmental Sensing and Modelin

Pedestrian-Level Urban Wind Flow Enhancement with Wind Catchers

Dense urban areas restrict air movement, causing airflow in urban street canyons to be much lower than the flow above buildings. Boosting near-ground wind speed can enhance thermal comfort in warm climates by increasing skin convective heat transfer. We explored the potential of a wind catcher to direct atmospheric wind into urban street canyons. We arranged scaled-down models of buildings with a wind catcher prototype in a water channel to simulate flow across two-dimensional urban street canyons. Velocity profiles were measured with Acoustic Doppler Velocimeters. Experiments showed that a wind catcher enhances pedestrian-level wind speed in the target canyon by 2.5 times. The flow enhancement is local to the target canyon with little effect in other canyons. With reversed flow direction, a “reversed wind catcher” has no effect in the target canyon but reduces the flow in the immediate downstream canyon. The reversed wind catcher exhibits a similar blockage effect of a tall building amid an array of lower buildings. Next, we validated Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of all cases with experiments and extended the study to reveal impacts on three-dimensional ensembles of buildings. A wind catcher with closed sidewalls enhances maximum pedestrian-level wind speed in three-dimensional canyons by four times. Our results encourage better designs of wind catchers to increase wind speed in targeted areas

System and Spectrality: Investigating David Bordwell's Manual(s) of Classical Narrative Cinema

This paper undertakes a deconstructive reading of David Bordwell's three-tiered conception of the Hollywood "system," demonstrating that his articulation of the latter results in a spectral logic of deferral whose atemporal spacing problematizes the stability and linearity that he claims define classical narrative structure and Hollywood industrial practices. This spectral interruption of "system," moreover, is also explored as regards Bordwell's description of the conditions of possibility of his own scholarship: the monolithic presence and conventions of an institution that both constitute his professional identity and efface it through its subjection to a logic of homogeneity. The paper attempts to demonstrate that the apparently synonymous relationship between the Hollywood "system" and Bordwell's scholarly institution render the meta-narrative that he proposes untenable, not the least because it blurs the lines between (objective) history and (subjective) literature. In addition, Bordwell's cognitive project results in a tropic play that dramatizes the tension between self and system, part and whole, particular and universal.English Departmen

Impact of urbanization patterns on the local climate of a tropical city, Singapore: An ensemble study

The effect of urbanization and urbanization pattern on the thermal environment and local rainfall is investigated in the tropical coastal city, Singapore. The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is employed with 5 one-way nested domains and the highest horizontal resolution is 300 m. The urban effect is taken into account by a single-layer urban canopy model. Several scenarios with idealized urbanization patterns are designed and simulated for an ensemble of 28 members. In the asymmetric urbanization scenarios, in which either the southern or northern part of Singapore is urbanized while the other part is forest, the magnitude of urban heat island (UHI) intensity is higher than that in the symmetric urbanization scenario, in which the urban and forest land use is homogeneously distributed in Singapore. The anthropogenic heat (AH) associated with the urban areas will exacerbate the UHI intensity. Most of the rainfall in the examined cases occurs from late morning to afternoon when the sea breeze blows northeastward. The results suggest that sea breezes have stronger influence on the rainfall than the urbanization pattern since the downwind part always gets more rainfall than the upwind part. The urbanization and associated AH can have two opposite effects on the rainfall amount: increasing rainfall through increasing buoyancy by AH and decreasing rainfall through reducing evaporation by converting greenery to impervious surfaces. The ultimate effect is dependent on the relative strength of these two influences