Modeling Infrastructure Vulnerabilities and Adaptation to Climate Change in Urban Systems: Methodology and Application to Metropolitan Boston

Much of the infrastructure in use today was designed and constructed decades if not centuries ago. Many of these infrastructure systems are vulnerable to a variety of anthropogenic or natural disruptions even though their functioning is vital to the creation and maintenance of quality of life in a region. Moreover, concepts and designs have persisted even as technologies have changed. Yet the demands and technologies of the future may require infrastructures ? both material facilities and human institutions ? that are radically different from those of the present. Dealing appropriately with immediate infrastructure vulnerabilities and infrastructure evolution requires a combination of effective short-term crisis management and anticipatory, strategic thinking and planning. Both the "material nature" and institutional issues surrounding urban infrastructure in a changing environment pose formidable challenges to efforts by industrial ecologists to improve the sustainability of urban areas. This presentation describes a collaborative study carried out over the course of more than three years by a group of scientists from engineering, policy analysis, geography and public health, together with a local planning agency and over 200 stakeholders from the public, private and non-profit sectors in metropolitan Boston. The research was conducted as part of the CLIMB project, which explores Climate?s Long-term Impacts on Metro Boston. Special focus was given to vulnerabilities and dynamics of urban infrastructures for energy, communication, transportation, water run-off, and water quality, as well as the interrelatedness of these systems, and implications for public health. Computer-based scenarios are presented for potential future infrastructure dynamics under a variety of assumptions about changes in technology, infrastructure investment, and local climates. The presentation concludes with a set of strategies for environmental investment and policy making that are currently considered for metro Boston, and many of which are highly relevant to, and directly applicable in other locations.

Evolutionary Economics: At the Crossroads of Biology and Physics

For almost a century, evolutionary economics has been based to a significant extent on analogies derived from biology. At the same time the discipline suffered from lack of analytical rigor. Recently, advances in thermodynamics and information theory have provided a new foundation for evolutionary studies in biology and economics alike. As a result, the body of studies in evolutionary economics that imports concepts from thermodynamics and information theory to develop new analogies is growing. This paper surveys recent trends in evolutionary economics at the crossroads of biology and physics, and argues to supplant analogies derived from either of the two disciplines. Albeit powerful means to crystallize thought about evolutionary processes in economic systems, analogies from biology have tended to plaster over the many differences between biological and economic processes that are essential to economic systems. Similarly, thermodynamics and information theory cannot provide a non-anthropocentric evaluation of economic processes. Yet, the concepts and measures available from physics can be used to improve our understanding of economic evolution if properly placed into the context of socioeconomic processes. The paper delineates the realm for non-analogy based applications of concepts from physics for the assessment of economic processes in light of discontinuities and emergent complexities

The Impact of Aid for Trade Facilitation on the Costs of Trading

There have been ongoing discussions within the WTO Doha Round on Trade Facilitation and the wider Aid for Trade agenda to assist developing countries in reducing behind-the-border restrictions and to help them benefit from trade reform. Our paper contributes to this debate by analyzing the impact of foreign aid spent on Aid for Trade and Trade Facilitation on the costs of trading. In our empirical investigation, we conduct a panel data estimation for a sample of 99 developing countries for the period 2004-2009. Overall, we find that our aid measures have a negative effect on the costs of trading. --Trade Facilitation,Aid for Trade,Trade Costs

Entropy, economics, and policy

"The laws of thermodynamics constrain transformation of materials and energy, and thus have implications for material and energy use in the economy, for environmental impact, and for policy. This paper provides an overview over the applications of concepts from thermodynamics in economics at the level of individual processes and explores potential constraints at larger system levels - the economy as a whole and the ecosystems within which economies are embedded. Specific emphasis is placed on the ways in which insights from thermodynamics are used to inform economic and policy decision making." (author's abstract

Integrative environmental research and education

"This paper is based on the premise that without integration of knowledge across disciplines, without integration of research with education, and without dialogue between science and stakeholders, opportunities to bound the complexity of environmental processes will be missed. Without adequate integration, solutions to environmental challenges will be partial at best, and new problems and unintended impacts will likely arise that prevent natural resource, economic and social systems from flourishing. On that premise, the paper explores what specifically needs to be integrated, and why, how that integration may occur, and what emotive, social and institutional conditions need to be achieved that may foster integration." (author's abstract

Integrity and Integration: An Exploration of the Personal, Professional, and Pedagogical in the Professoriate

This paper seeks to explore the connections between the concepts of integrity and integration within the professoriate in Christian higher education. Specifically, it examines commonalities and intersections in the definitions of terms, the gaps between rhetoric and reality, and the reasons for those gaps. Implications for a professor’s inner life, scholarship, and teaching are also discussed, and suggestions for closing the gaps are offered

A NONLINEAR MODEL OF INFORMATION AND COORDINATION IN HOG PRODUCTION: TESTING THE COASIAN-FOWLERIAN DYNAMIC HYPOTHESES

The pig-cycle 'explanation' expunded by Coase and Fowler followed a well-integrated economic logic and provides tremendous insight into our understanding of commodity cycles. The paper presents a simulation model that replicates all of Coase and Fowler's results and tests its robustness with an application to U.S. hog production.Livestock Production/Industries, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Climate's Long-term Impact on New Zealand Infrastructure (CLINZI) - A Case Study of Hamilton City, New Zealand

Infrastructure systems and services (ISS) are vulnerable to changes in climate. This paper reports on a study of the impact of gradual climate changes on ISS in Hamilton City, New Zealand. This study is unique in that it is the first of its kind to be applied to New Zealand ISS. This study also considers a broader range of ISS than most other climate change studies recently conducted. Using historical climate data and four climate change scenarios, we modelled the impact of climate change on water supply and quality, transport, energy demand, public health and air quality. Our analysis reveals that many of Hamilton City's infrastructure sectors demonstrated greater responsiveness to population changes than changes in gradual climate change. Any future planning decisions should be sensitive to climate change, but not driven by it (even though that may be fashionable to do so). We find there is considerable scope for extending this analysis. First, there is a need for local infrastructure managers to improve the coverage of the data needed for this kind of study. Second, any future study of this kind must focus on daily (rather than monthly) time steps and extreme (as well as gradual) climate changes.Climate change, infrastructure, integrated assessment, adaptation, Agricultural and Food Policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Crop Production/Industries, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, International Relations/Trade, Land Economics/Use, Livestock Production/Industries, Political Economy,

Managing the interrelations among urban infrastructure, population, and institutions

"Increases in urban populations, aging infrastructures and global environmental change have begun to highlight the need and urgency to address urban resilience through research and stakeholder-based dialog. The number of case studies for individual locations and on individual challenges - such as meeting water or energy demands - are increasing. Many of those studies reveal the complexity of managing interrelations among population, infrastructure, and institutions, though many ultimately choose a narrow, sector-specific approach to the issue. Few approaches have built on insights from complexity theory and related bodies of knowledge which are more consistent with the perspective that urban infrastructure systems are tightly coupled with one another and must respond to often subtle, long-term changes of technological, social and environmental conditions. Drawing on that knowledge, and building on insights from previous case studies, this paper explores the potential roles of complexity theory in guiding investment and policy decisions in the urban context, focusing on strategies to promote resilience and adaptability in the light of population, infrastructure, and institutional dynamics." (author's abstract

The molluscan fisheries of Germany

The German molluscan fishery has always concentrated on the North Sea. Mollusks occur in the Baltic Sea, but are not as marketable. In prehistory and the Middle Ages, coastal inhabitants gathered mussels, Mytilus edulis, cockles, Cerastoderma edule, and flat oysters, Ostrea edulis, for food and also used mussels as agricultural fertilizer. An organized oyster fishery developed in the 16th century and had considerable economic importance for 300 years. Oysters were dredged with sailing vessels near the coast, as well as far offshore. Catches peaked in the second half of the l 9th century at 3-5 million oysters per year. They declined dramatically in the following decades due to permanent recruitment failures, and the flat oyster finally disappeared from the German coast in the l 950's. An organized fishery for freshwater pearl mussels, Margaritifera margaritifera, also developed at the end of the Middle Ages, but mismanagement and environmental degradation since the late 19th century have brought this species to the brink of extinction as well. Other mollusks harvested on a smaller scale in the past have been softshell clams, Mya arenaria, and whelks, Buccinum undatum. The modern mussel fishery for human food began in 1929 with the introduction of novel dredging methods. Annual catches were in the order of a few thousand tons during the first half of this century and have attained 20,000-60,000 tons since the early l980's; concomitantly, prices have increased five-fold in recent decades. The fishery is now based on 14 highly specialized vessels harvesting from 3,800 ha (9,500 acres) of culture plots which are seeded with mussels from natural beds. Pacific oysters, Crassostrea gigas, were first introduced in the l970's, and a natural population has recently begun to establish itself. They are cultured by one company which imports half-grown seed from the British Isles. A nearshore hydraulic dredge fishery for cockles began in 1973, but was banned for political reasons in 1992. It was replaced by a new offshore fishery for hard clams, Spisula solida, which ended when the clam stock suffered total mortality in the 1995-96 ice winter. The molluscan fisheries and aquaculture sector (production and processing) in 1995 employed almost 100 people year-round and another 50-100 seasonally. The annual product is about US$35 million