Improving productivity in tropical lakes and reservoirs

Freshwater aquaculture, Inland fisheries

Mid-crisis restructuring law reform in the United Kingdom

Economic shocks create insolvency law-making space, generating opportunities for legal reform that may be absent in good times. Policymakers may suddenly acquire a mandate to resource institutions or drive through a change in the law where in good times such reforms were likely to be foiled by interest group capture, or simply unlikely to get sufficient political traction. A crisis, then, is an opportunity for the well-prepared insolvency policymaker. Insolvency rule-making in crisis conditions is, however, plainly also risky. Making best use of the opportunity implies making more than temporary changes to the regime. But design choices made mid-crisis will almost inevitably be influenced by the features of the crisis itself, generating a risk that the result of the reform effort will be distorted law, ill-suited to the achievement of the lawmaker’s objectives in the long run. This paper considers the permanent restructuring law reforms enacted in the UK during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. At first glance, these reforms appear to exemplify the case of the well-prepared policymaker, poised to drive through carefully planned changes to the law when the opportunity arises. On closer inspection, however, a different picture emerges. The permanent measures, which were enacted in a fast-track legislative process, departed from the Government’s pre-pandemic plan in material and undesirable ways. In some cases, these deviations mean that the original objective has not been achieved at all; in others, the objective has been at least partially achieved, but at unnecessary cost. Overall, the UK experience appears to better exemplify the risks of attempting insolvency law reform in a crisis, than the opportunities that a crisis affords to an insolvency policymaker

Networks and flows of conservation finance: the case of World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)

Against the background of overall decline and inadequacy of funding for nature conservation, the budgets of the five largest nature conservation organisations have been growing significantly since the 1990s to command over 50% of globally available conservation funding. This thesis focusses on World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) to show how large nature conservation organisations maintain and expand funding for global biodiversity conservation. It begins exploratorily with a thematic review of 64 peer-reviewed articles to find dominant themes recurring around the funding of biodiversity conservation between 2010-2016. The principle finding is that the main challenge in biodiversity financing is not only underfunding but that quite often available funds do not go where they are most needed. Conservation networks play a key role in determining financial flows. This informs the choice for a conceptual framework that is inspired by the network theory postulated by Manuel Castells. This thesis examines how WWF uses networking to maintain and expand funding from public sources, and then shows how much financial income WWF receives from the corporate sector in comparison to other income streams, including from market-based approaches. The main finding is that WWF has been successful in increasing its funding from the public sector at 7.5% p.a. by being in “right networks”, speaking the “right language”, and connecting to “relevant flows”, including dominant governmental ministries, bilateral and multilateral organisations, emerging and graduated economies and the private sector that relates closely with them. However, WWF’s income from the corporate sector has remained low at 11% p.a. and stagnant, and its “bankable projects” are yet to produce any income and remain philanthropic. WWF’s most important funding base is private small donors who contribute 40% of its income. Based on these findings, this thesis points to a possible scenario on the future of conservation finance that combines the time-tested reliability of private small donor funding with the potential of blended finance, that would address both underfunding and poor distribution of conservation funds, for future biodiversity conservation

Condition number analysis and preconditioning of the finite cell method

The (Isogeometric) Finite Cell Method - in which a domain is immersed in a structured background mesh - suffers from conditioning problems when cells with small volume fractions occur. In this contribution, we establish a rigorous scaling relation between the condition number of (I)FCM system matrices and the smallest cell volume fraction. Ill-conditioning stems either from basis functions being small on cells with small volume fractions, or from basis functions being nearly linearly dependent on such cells. Based on these two sources of ill-conditioning, an algebraic preconditioning technique is developed, which is referred to as Symmetric Incomplete Permuted Inverse Cholesky (SIPIC). A detailed numerical investigation of the effectivity of the SIPIC preconditioner in improving (I)FCM condition numbers and in improving the convergence speed and accuracy of iterative solvers is presented for the Poisson problem and for two- and three-dimensional problems in linear elasticity, in which Nitche's method is applied in either the normal or tangential direction. The accuracy of the preconditioned iterative solver enables mesh convergence studies of the finite cell method

The Shadow Payment System

Banking, derivatives, and structured finance may attract the lion\u27s share of accolades and approbation in global finance-but payment systems are where the money is. Historically, payment systems in most jurisdictions have been legally and operationally intertwined with the conventional banking system. The stability of these payment systems has thus parasitically benefited from the unique prudential regulatory strategies imposed on deposit-taking banks. These strategies include emergency liquidity assistance or lender of last resort facilities, deposit guarantee schemes, and special bankruptcy or resolution regimes for failing banks. Importantly, these strategies have the practical effect of relaxing the strict application of corporate bankruptcy law, thereby enabling banks-and the payment systems embedded within them-to continue to perform their core payment and other functions even under conditions of severe institutional stress. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a vibrant, diverse, and rapidly growing shadow payment system. This system includes peer-to-peer payment systems such as PayPal, mobile money platforms such as M-Pesa, and crypto-currency exchanges such as Mt. Gox. The defining feature of this shadow payment system is that the financial institutions that populate it perform the same core payment functions as banks, but without benefiting from the prudential regulatory strategies that ensure bank-based payment systems can continue to function during periods of institutional stress. This Article examines the potential risks to both customers and broader financial and economic stability generated by this functional gap, along with the likely effectiveness of various strategies that institutions within the shadow payment system currently--or might in the future--employ to address these risks

Dynamic Characterization of the Crew Module Uprighting System for NASAs Orion Crew Module

The Orion Crew Module Uprighting System is a set of five airbag that are responsible for the uprighting of the crew module in the case of an inverted splashdown. A series of tests during the Underway Recovery Test 7 (URT-7) were run in preparation for the Artemis I mission, where the dynamic characterization of the CMUS in an ocean wave environment was performed. A Datawell Waverider DWR-G4 wave buoy was deployed to the characterize the wave environment during these tests. The heave measurements from this buoy were projected to the Orion Crew Module Buoyancy Test Article location by two different methods: (1) directly time-shifting the data, and (2) performing a frequency-domain, phase-shifting operation. Results demonstrate that the phase-shifting operation led to better correlation with the true crew module response to wave excitation as compared with the purely time-shifted method. Additionally, a novel approach to localize an object in a bidirectional wave field based on its heave response is presented and validated with URT- 7 data. Given a wave measurement device at a known location, one can estimate the relative distance to another object based solely off its heave response. Results show that if signals have sufficiently good correlation, this method can be used to estimate the relative separation between two objects in the same wave field

Engaging local communities in aquatic resources research and activities: a technical manual

This document is part of a series of 5 technical manuals produced by the Challenge Program Project CP34 “Improved fisheries productivity and management in tropical reservoirs”. The objective of this technical manual is to relay the field experience of a group of scientists who have worked extensively in small fisheries in sub-Sahara Africa and Asia and lay out a series of simple and pragmatic pointers on how to establish and run initiatives for community catch assessment. The manual relies in particular on practical experience gained implementing Project 34 of the Challenge Programme on Water and Food: Improved Fisheries Productivity and Management in Tropical Reservoirs. (PDF contains 26 pages