Responsibility, opportunity, and vision for higher education in urban and regional carbon management

This is a summary of the conversation among scholars attending the special session on "Responsibility, Opportunity, and Vision for Higher Education in Urban and Regional Carbon Management" at the First International Conference on Carbon Management at Urban and Regional Levels: Connecting Development Decisions to Global Issues in Mexico City Sept. 4–8, 2006. It includes The Declaration for Carbon Management Education, agreed upon by the participants. Obstacles to such a vision were discussed along with exemplar models of transdisciplinary curricula and suggestions for scholarship

Impact of opioid-free analgesia on pain severity and patient satisfaction after discharge from surgery: multispecialty, prospective cohort study in 25 countries

Background: Balancing opioid stewardship and the need for adequate analgesia following discharge after surgery is challenging. This study aimed to compare the outcomes for patients discharged with opioid versus opioid-free analgesia after common surgical procedures.Methods: This international, multicentre, prospective cohort study collected data from patients undergoing common acute and elective general surgical, urological, gynaecological, and orthopaedic procedures. The primary outcomes were patient-reported time in severe pain measured on a numerical analogue scale from 0 to 100% and patient-reported satisfaction with pain relief during the first week following discharge. Data were collected by in-hospital chart review and patient telephone interview 1 week after discharge.Results: The study recruited 4273 patients from 144 centres in 25 countries; 1311 patients (30.7%) were prescribed opioid analgesia at discharge. Patients reported being in severe pain for 10 (i.q.r. 1-30)% of the first week after discharge and rated satisfaction with analgesia as 90 (i.q.r. 80-100) of 100. After adjustment for confounders, opioid analgesia on discharge was independently associated with increased pain severity (risk ratio 1.52, 95% c.i. 1.31 to 1.76; P < 0.001) and re-presentation to healthcare providers owing to side-effects of medication (OR 2.38, 95% c.i. 1.36 to 4.17; P = 0.004), but not with satisfaction with analgesia (beta coefficient 0.92, 95% c.i. -1.52 to 3.36; P = 0.468) compared with opioid-free analgesia. Although opioid prescribing varied greatly between high-income and low- and middle-income countries, patient-reported outcomes did not.Conclusion: Opioid analgesia prescription on surgical discharge is associated with a higher risk of re-presentation owing to side-effects of medication and increased patient-reported pain, but not with changes in patient-reported satisfaction. Opioid-free discharge analgesia should be adopted routinely

The social and economic impacts of geothermal development in Hawaii

"Work done under a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy by contract (#3415609) through the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory of the University of California.

Global Carbon Project (GCP) Report No. 3

The document contains the opening addresses of the conveners and presentation slides of the presenters in the Tokyo Office of the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) event. The conference was organized around the idea of introducing two important groups to each other to stimulate new ideas to break through barriers for carbon management, a major environmental and social challenge in the 21st Century

Science-Journalism Collaboration: An Experiment In Closing The Communication Gap

Barriers that impede effective communication between scientists and journalists include communication styles and skills, professional jargon, mistrust, time constraints, and orientation to knowledge types and facts. Here we describe an experiment in building bridges between journalists and scientists in Southeast Asia and Japan in a three-day training workshop. Tangible outcomes include the publication of news articles about the workshop; co-authored science journalism articles pertaining to the Mekong River basin; publication of the workshop proceedings; a poster presented at the IHDP Open Science Meetings; and, continued publication collaboration among the participants

Responsibility, Opportunity, And Vision For Higher Education In Urban And Regional Carbon Management

This is a summary of the conversation among scholars attending the special session on Responsibility, Opportunity, and Vision for Higher Education in Urban and Regional Carbon Management at the First International Conference on Carbon Management at Urban and Regional Levels: Connecting Development Decisions to Global Issues in Mexico City Sept. 4-8, 2006. It includes The Declaration for Carbon Management Education, agreed upon by the participants. Obstacles to such a vision were discussed along with exemplar models of transdisciplinary curricula and suggestions for scholarship. © 2006 Canan and Schienke; licensee BioMed Central Ltd

GCP Report

This proceedings provides possible answer to the question of what social network analysis can contribute to addressing the problem of climate change. In the workshop, social scientists from Japan, the USA, and Europe reported on social network theory, applications and methodology to envision their use for on-the-ground social change regarding carbon management. The earth has always cycled carbon in the atmosphere (mainly as CO2); in the oceans (surface, intermediate waters, deep waters and marine sediments); in terrestrial ecosystems (vegetation, litter and soil); in rivers and estuaries; and in fossil carbon, which is being remobilized by human activities. However, with the rate of fossil fuel burning feeding industrialization, urbanization and transportation and with large scale land clearing, the naturally balanced carbon cycle is in a non-analogous and dangerous state. The participants agreed that current management of the carbon cycle is piecemeal, careless, inconsistent, profligate and shortsighted. Enabled by past and current networks of power, the world has embraced a carbon culture that has spun out of control in the past 100 years. This issue has often been referred to as a problem of scale in the climate change research community (or frames in the social science community). Climate researchers have focused their analyses on global level simulations that are too abstract and removed from local level policy concerns. Successful carbon management in the future will have to bridge this gap by mapping different stakeholder needs and finding synergistic intersections for policy implementation

How Science Guides Industry Choice Of Alternatives To Ozone-Depleting Substances

This chapter documents how scientific discovery and international cooperation protect the stratospheric ozone layer and the climate. It describes how citizens, nongovernmental organizations, policy makers, and company executives historically responded to new discoveries in stratospheric ozone science and how new scientific discoveries have motivated the strengthening of the Montreal Protocol by accelerating the phaseout of hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). At each stage of a historic scientific breakthrough, a different set of actors were the drivers of social change. Using case studies, we identify similarities and differences in how science is important to the evolving policy to protect the Earth for future generations. This chapter contrasts the historic response to science regarding chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) with the current policy response to new scientific evidence that was the foundation of the recent global agreement accelerating the HCFC phaseout under the Montreal Protocol. The new science quantifies how the HCFC phaseout can significantly protect the climate in the immediate future, particularly if low-Global Warming Potential (GWP) refrigerants, not-in-kind alternatives, and high-efficiency technologies are encouraged by regulatory, market, and other incentives. Finally, the spatial relationship between significant scientific announcements and several of the path-breaking corporate leadership pledges that transformed markets toward ozone-safe technology are introduced. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009