Flexible decision making in the wake of large scale nuclear emergencies:long-term response

We develop a decision-making model that describes optimal protection and recovery strategies for a single economic location affected by radioactive release from the nearby Nuclear Power Plant. The initial period of release and deposition is characterised by high degrees of uncertainty, which is likely to lead to precautionary emergency measures being carried out regardless of the actual dangers to the public, and therefore it is excluded from the optimisation problem. Instead, the analysis is performed on the timescale of weeks, months, years and decades after the accident, implying that the problem is largely deterministic if one disregards long-term economic uncertainties. It is on these longer timescales that economically-driven decisions could be made on whether or not to implement various protection and recovery measures, which include relocation, remediation, repopulation and food banning. Our model allows one to find the joint cost-minimal strategy across the set of measures, providing certain spatial and temporal flexibilities are permitted. Several qualitatively different strategies are identified, including those with no relocation and delayed remediation. Which strategy is optimal depends on the initial radiation levels, the rates and costs of the individual actions, and the preferred economic valuation of the relevant health effects associated with radiation. Our main message is that in many possible settings relocation should be used sparingly and repopulation should be delayed to exploit natural decay of the radioactive elements. These findings could provide useful recommendations to regulators in civil nuclear industry and help devise better policies for implementing emergency response and recovery measures

Towards a balanced view of Arctic shipping : estimating economic impacts of emissions from increased traffic on the Northern Sea Route

The extensive melting of Arctic sea ice driven by climate change provides opportunities for commercial shipping due to shorter travel distances of up to 40% between Asia and Europe. It has been estimated that around 5% of the world’s trade could be shipped through the Northern Sea Route (NSR) in the Arctic alone under year-round and unhampered navigability, generating additional income for many European and East Asian countries. Our analysis shows that for Arctic sea ice conditions under the RCP8.5 emissions scenario and business restrictions facing shipping companies, NSR traffic will increase steadily from the mid-2030s onwards, although it will take over a century to reach the full capacity expected for ice-free conditions. However, in order to achieve a balanced view of Arctic shipping, it is important to include its detrimental environmental impacts, most notably emissions of short-lived pollutants such as black carbon, as well as CO2 and non-CO2 emissions associated with the additional economic growth enabled by NSR. The total climate feedback of NSR could contribute 0.05% (0.04%) to global mean temperature rise by 2100 under RCP8.5 (RCP4.5), adding $2.15 trillion ($0.44 trillion) to the NPV of total impacts of climate change over the period until 2200 for the SSP2 socio-economic scenario. The climatic losses offset 33% (24.7%) of the total economic gains from NSR under RCP8.5 (RCP4.5), with the biggest losses set to occur in Africa and India. These findings call for policy instruments aimed at reducing emissions from Arctic shipping and providing compensation to the affected regions

Revenue management of airport car parks in continuous time

We study the revenue management (RM) problem encountered in airport car parks, with the primary objective to maximize revenues under a continuous-time framework. The implementation of pre-booking systems for airport car parks has spread rapidly around the world and pre-booking is now available in most major airports. Currently, most RM practises in car parks are simple adjustments of those developed for hotels, exploiting the similarities between the two industries. However, airport car parks have a distinct setting where the price per day of a parking space is heavily discounted by the length of stay (LoS) of the booking. This is because the customer decision tends to be made after the length of the trip is already set, and it becomes a choice between parking or alternative modes of transport. Consequently, the LoS becomes a critical variable for revenue optimization. Since customers are able to book the parking by the minute, the resulting state space is very large, making a conventional network solution intractable . Instead, decomposed single-resource problems need to be considered. Here we develop a bid-price control strategy to manage the bookings and propose novel approaches to define such bid prices depending on the LoS, which could be utilized in real-time RM algorithms. Managing stochastic car park bookings by LoS in the decomposed single-resource approximation allowed us to achieve within 5% of the expected revenues for a multi-resource approximation, with a fraction of the computational effort. When expected demand exceeds the available parking capacity, the method increases the revenues by up to 45% relative to the first come, first served acceptance policy

Mapping regional impacts of agricultural expansion on terrestrial carbon storage

As a result of growing food demands, the area of land used globally for agriculture has rapidly increased over the last 300 years. Clearance of natural vegetation and conversion of land to agriculture is often associated with terrestrial carbon loss, from both vegetation and soil stores. Changes in terrestrial carbon storage has implications for food production, climate and water regulation. Quantifying these changes is therefore vital to understand the risks to and resilience of these benefits. Land use in the East of England has significantly changed during this period and is now predominantly used for agriculture, specifically arable use. In order to map changes to terrestrial carbon storage in this region since 1700, we apply a plant–soil system biogeochemistry model, N14CP. The model indicates carbon storage in the East of England has decreased by 109 Mt (−35.7%) during the study period, and whilst losses are observed in both soil and vegetation stores, vegetation losses as a result of forest clearance dominate. These findings have implications for carbon sequestration strategies; the largest carbon storage gains within the region are likely to be achieved through land-use transitions such as afforestation, rather than soil sequestration through changing arable management practices

WOT 1_2 Insights into the flows and fates of e-waste in the UK

In 2019 the EU Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive documented a sizable increase in e-waste collection targets alongside widening the scope of electrical and electronic products covered by the legislation. These changes have significant impact for the UK, where e-waste collection has been below the levels necessary to meet the targets. Understanding the flows and fates of products on and off the market becomes of paramount importance, especially for producer-led organisations who have the responsibility to achieve the targets and cover the operational costs. Historic e-waste estimation methods often assume that one product on the market will equate to one product in the waste stream. In this article, we introduce our research commissioned by one of the largest UK producer-led organisations, REPIC Ltd, to explain the gap in products on the market and WEEE collected, and the relationship between the two. We argue that we should move away from the “one-in-one-out” estimation to include a wider set of parameters that are tailored specifically for the UK, including those linked with the state of the market for electronic and electrical products and a broader range of socioeconomic indicators. We show how this can be achieved by adapting a state-of-the-art e-waste estimation model, Waste Over Time, to the UK context and developing it further to include additional drivers

Climate policy implications of nonlinear decline of Arctic land permafrost and other cryosphere elements

Arctic feedbacks accelerate climate change through carbon releases from thawing permafrost and higher solar absorption from reductions in the surface albedo, following loss of sea ice and land snow. Here, we include dynamic emulators of complex physical models in the integrated assessment model PAGE-ICE to explore nonlinear transitions in the Arctic feedbacks and their subsequent impacts on the global climate and economy under the Paris Agreement scenarios. The permafrost feedback is increasingly positive in warmer climates, while the albedo feedback weakens as the ice and snow melt. Combined, these two factors lead to significant increases in the mean discounted economic effect of climate change: +4.0% ($24.8 trillion) under the 1.5 °C scenario, +5.5$33.8 trillion) under the 2 °C scenario, and +4.8% ($66.9 trillion) under mitigation levels consistent with the current national pledges. Considering the nonlinear Arctic feedbacks makes the 1.5 °C target marginally more economically attractive than the 2 °C target, although both are statistically equivalent.This work is part of the ICE-ARC project funded by the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme, (grant 603887, contribution 006). D.Y. received additional funding from ERIM, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Paul Ekins at the ISR, University College London. K.S. was funded by NSF (grant 1503559) and NASA (grants NNX14A154G, NNX17AC59A). E.J. was funded by the NGEE Arctic project supported by the BER Office of Science at the U.S. DOE. Y.E. was funded by the NSF (grant 1900795). E.B. was supported by the UK Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme funded by BEIS and DEFRA