Environmental aspects of health care in the Grampian NHS region and the place of telehealth

Detailed information about the composition of the carbon footprint of the NHS in the Grampian health region, and in Scotland generally, is not available at present. Based on the limited information available, our best guess is that travel emissions in Grampian are substantial, perhaps 49,000 tonnes CO2 per year. This is equivalent to 233 million km of car travel per year. A well-established telemedicine network in the Grampian region, which saves over 2000 patient journeys a year from community hospitals, avoids about 260,000 km travel per year, or about 59 tonnes CO2 per year. Therefore using telehealth as it has been used historically (primarily to facilitate hospital-to-hospital interactions) seems unlikely to have a major environmental impact – although of course there may be other good reasons for persevering with conventional telehealth. On the other hand, telehealth might be useful in reducing staff travel and to a lesser extent, visitor travel. It looks particularly promising for reducing outpatient travel, where substantial carbon savings might be made by reconfiguring the way that certain services are provided

Enhancing engagement with community sector organisations working in sustainable waste management: a case study

Voluntary and community sector organisations are increasingly being viewed as key agents of change in the shifts towards the concepts of resource efficiency and circular economy, at the community level. Using a meta-analysis and questionnaire surveys across three towns in the East Midlands of England, namely Northampton, Milton Keynes and Luton, this study aimed to understand public engagement with these organisations. The findings suggest that these organisations play a significant and wide-spread role, not only with regard to sustainable environmental management, but also a social role in community development and regeneration. The surveys indicated that there were generally high levels of awareness of the organisations and strong engagement with them. Clothes were the items most donated. Key reasons for engagement included the financial value offered and the perception that it helped the environment. However, potential limitations in future public engagement were also determined and recommendations for addressing these suggested

Escaping the rural pay penalty: longitudinal analysis of rural/urban youth earnings in Britain

This article analyses the longitudinal effect of rural/urban migration on labour market outcomes for young people in Britain. It assesses how rural/urban origin and residential location affect career prospects by tracking earnings from youth (defined as aged under 25) into adulthood, using data from British Household Panel Survey waves 1-18. Earnings in rural areas are higher overall, although young people in rural areas are paid less than urban counterparts, and have been since 1993. While earnings increase at a quicker rate for those in rural locations, being from rural origin leads to slower wage growth. Respondents who ‘stay rural’ throughout the full observation period report lower earnings than all other groups

Macroalgae Decrease Growth and Alter Microbial Community Structure of the Reef-Building Coral, Porites astreoides

This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the Public Library of Science and can be found at: http://www.plosone.org/home.action.With the continued and unprecedented decline of coral reefs worldwide, evaluating the factors that contribute to coral demise is of critical importance. As coral cover declines, macroalgae are becoming more common on tropical reefs. Interactions between these macroalgae and corals may alter the coral microbiome, which is thought to play an important role in colony health and survival. Together, such changes in benthic macroalgae and in the coral microbiome may result in a feedback mechanism that contributes to additional coral cover loss. To determine if macroalgae alter the coral microbiome, we conducted a field-based experiment in which the coral Porites astreoides was placed in competition with five species of macroalgae. Macroalgal contact increased variance in the coral-associated microbial community, and two algal species significantly altered microbial community composition. All macroalgae caused the disappearance of a γ-proteobacterium previously hypothesized to be an important mutualist of P. astreoides. Macroalgal contact also triggered: 1) increases or 2) decreases in microbial taxa already present in corals, 3) establishment of new taxa to the coral microbiome, and 4) vectoring and growth of microbial taxa from the macroalgae to the coral. Furthermore, macroalgal competition decreased coral growth rates by an average of 36.8%. Overall, this study found that competition between corals and certain species of macroalgae leads to an altered coral microbiome, providing a potential mechanism by which macroalgae-coral interactions reduce coral health and lead to coral loss on impacted reefs

Rural Development Programme measures on cultivated land in Europe to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions – regional ‘hotspots’ and priority measures

© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.Agriculture is a significant source of GHG emissions, contributing 10% of total emissions within the EU-28. Emissions from European agriculture have been reduced, albeit at the expense of crop yield and the risk of production displacement (the transfer of production, and associated emissions, to land outside of Europe). This article assesses the impact on GHG emissions of selected European Rural Development Program measures, representative of a diversity of management strategies implemented on cultivated land, within nine European Member States. Climatic zone and underlying spatial environmental variables were accounted for using a novel technique, “Regional Variation Categories,” developed with European-scale GIS data sets. Production displacement is assessed with two benchmarks: (1) compared with existing crop production and (2) relative to a “minimum requirement” land management scenario, where an emissions reduction of less than this does not constitute mitigation. Most measures reduce emissions relative to the baseline crop scenario; however, many do not reduce emissions beyond the “minimum requirement,” this being limited to measures such as catch crops and within-field grass areas to prevent soil erosion. The selection and targeting of measures to maximize agricultural GHG mitigation on cultivated land within Europe is discussed...Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Valuing air transportation and sustainability from a public perspective: Evidence from the United Kingdom and the United States

AbstractOne issue with air transportation and sustainability is that although aviation could be considered economically and socially sustainable, it does generate environmental concerns. The aim of this paper is to examine public attitudes towards air transportation and sustainability, in order to determine how individuals value sustainability in relation to air travel. This empirical paper is based on two large survey data sets, one from the East Midlands region of the United Kingdom and one from the East Coast of the United States. After an initial review of relevant literature and policy, a range of attitudinal statements from the surveys are examined. These statements cover the economic and social benefits of air transportation, the contribution of air travel to climate change, and environmental responses. The analysis demonstrates the high value individuals put on the economic and social sustainability aspects of air transportation. Although many acknowledge aviation's contribution to climate change, few are willing to respond in terms of paying more to offset the negative environmental effects of aviation or to fly less. When analysing the value of sustainability by population sub-group, flight frequency and gender are highlighted as key variables in terms of environmental attitudes

Public opinion on energy crops in the landscape: considerations for the expansion of renewable energy from biomass

Public attitudes were assessed towards two dedicated biomass crops – Miscanthus and Short Rotation Coppice (SRC), particularly regarding their visual impacts in the landscape. Results are based on responses to photographic and computer-generated images as the crops are still relatively scarce in the landscape. A questionnaire survey indicated little public concern about potential landscape aesthetics but more concern about attendant built infrastructure. Focus group meetings and interviews indicated support for biomass end uses that bring direct benefits to local communities. Questions arise as to how well the imagery used was able to portray the true nature of these tall, dense, perennial plants but based on the responses obtained and given the caveat that there was limited personal experience of the crops, it appears unlikely that wide-scale planting of biomass crops will give rise to substantial public concern in relation to their visual impact in the landscape

A review of the rural-digital policy agenda from a community resilience perspective

© 2016 The Authors This paper utilises a community resilience framework to critically examine the digital-rural policy agenda. Rural areas are sometimes seen as passive and static, set in contrast to the mobility of urban, technological and globalisation processes (Bell et al., 2010). In response to notions of rural decline (McManus et al., 2012) rural resilience literature posits rural communities as ‘active,’ and ‘proactive’ about their future (Skerratt, 2013), developing processes for building capacity and resources. We bring together rural development and digital policy-related literature, using resilience motifs developed from recent academic literature, including community resilience, digital divides, digital inclusion, and rural information and communication technologies (ICTs). Whilst community broadband initiatives have been linked to resilience (Plunkett-Carnegie, 2012; Heesen et al., 2013) digital inclusion, and engagement with new digital technologies more broadly, have not. We explore this through three resilience motifs: resilience as multi-scalar; as entailing normative assumptions; and as integrated and place-sensitive. We point to normative claims about the capacity of digital technology to aid rural development, to offer solutions to rural service provision and the challenges of implementing localism. Taking the UK as a focus, we explore the various scales at which this is evident, from European to UK country-level

The extent, nature and distribution of child poverty in India

Despite a long history, research on poverty has only relatively recently examined the issue of child poverty as a distinct topic of concern. This article examines how child poverty and well-being are now conceptualized, defined and measured, and presents a portrait of child poverty in India by social and cultural groups, and by geographic area. In December 2006, the UN General Assembly adopted a definition of child poverty which noted that children living in poverty were deprived of (among other things) nutrition, water and sanitation facilities, access to basic health care services, shelter and education. The definition noted that while poverty hurts every human being ‘it is most threatening and harmful to children, leaving them unable to enjoy their rights, to reach their full potential and to participate as full members of the society’. Researchers have developed age-specific and gender-sensitive indicators of deprivation which conform to the UN definition of child poverty and which can be used to examine the extent and nature of child poverty in low and middle-income countries. These new methods have ‘transformed the way UNICEF and many of its partners both understood and measured the poverty suffered by children’ (UNICEF, 2009). This article uses these methods and presents results of child poverty in India based on nationally representative household survey data for India