The community waste sector and waste services in the UK: current state and future prospects

YesTheory predicts that the voluntary or community sector will contribute a range of services that are not delivered by the state or private sectors. This paper examines the changing contributions of the community waste sector in the UK to reflect upon these claims. A rosy picture of the community waste sector is presented from research on the sector in 2002, with a growing number of organisations carrying out a range of services, drawing on multiple and diverse sources of funding. More recent evidence, and information drawn from outside the sector, however, suggests that regulation, competition, and changes to funding regimes are putting the sector under considerable pressure, such that it is likely to change, and that some parts of it will contract. In terms of the claims from theory, the paper finds evidence that the community sector can and has been innovative in the services it provides and the way that it provides them, though similar innovations may emerge from the private and public sectors. The sparse evidence on participation and recycling rates in kerbside and civic amenity sites are equivocal on whether the sector provides enhanced communication as theory would predict. Overall, the paper highlights the difficulty in achieving direct comparisons between the waste sectors without specific focused research for this purpose. It concludes that the challenge for European, national and local government is to influence the necessarily constructed waste markets in a way which will enhance rather than discourage service providers to innovate in the waste material collected, and to communicate effectively with the public whom they serve. Such policies promise to encourage the effective delivery of sustainable waste services from all three - public, private and community - sectors

Valuing nature-conservation interests on agricultural floodplains

The ecosystem approach and evaluation of ecosystem services is gaining increasing attention from scientists, practitioners and policy makers. An important part of this process is to establish the `value' of the nature-conservation assets within an area. This value can then be compared with data for other ecosystem services to identify management priorities under different future scenarios. However, there is little consensus on how to perform such an evaluation. In this study, we assess seven methods of valuing nature-conservation interest and compare their utility. Five agricultural land drainage schemes across lowland England were selected for study. The current land-use was determined and four different scenarios of future management were developed. The land-use and habitats predicted under each scenario were assessed using seven methods of determining value, namely: Ecological Impact Assessment method, reserve-selection criteria, target-based criteria, stakeholder-choice analysis, reserve-selection criteria guided by stakeholders, agri-environment scheme payments and contingent valuation. The first three methods derive values based on pre-defined priorities, the next two use stated preferences of stakeholders, and the last two methods derive monetary values based on revealed and expressed preference, respectively. The results obtained from the different methods were compared. The methods gave broadly similar results and were highly correlated, but each method emphasized a different aspect of conservation value, leading to different possible outcomes in some cases. The advantages and disadvantages of each method were evaluated. Synthesis and applications. As the ecosystem services approach becomes embedded in decision-making, ecologists are increasingly called upon to value the biodiversity of a site or to compare the value of different sites. This study has shown that seven different valuation methods, although all giving significantly correlated findings, resulted in seven different rankings of nature-conservation value for the 25 situations studied. This difference occurred in spite of the sites being of the same landscape type and occurring within the same country. The discussion concludes that each method has its strengths; monetary valuations are appropriate in some contexts, stakeholder preferences are paramount in others, but where objectivity is key, then assessment against independently defined criteria or targets should be the preferred method

Enhanced broadband access as a solution to the social and economic problems of the rural digital divide

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The ecosystem approach as a framework for understanding knowledge utilisation

The Ecosystem Approach is used to analyse four case studies from England to determine what kind of ecosystem knowledge was used by people, and how it shaped their arguments. The results are reported across decisions making venues concerned with: innovation; conflict management; maintenance of ecosystem function; and, recognising the environment as an asset. In each area we identify the sources and uses of conceptual, instrumental, political and social knowledge. We found that the use of these knowledges can benefit the process as well as the quality of outcomes, and so ‘add value’ to the decision making process. However, the case studies did not exhibit any simple linear-rational model of knowledge use. Ecosystems thinking took many forms and depended on different institutional settings. As an argument making device, the Ecosystem Approach must be seen in the context of a wider set of social and political processes, which involves a range of complex strategies and motives that explain the apparent ‘messiness’ of environmental decision making. The paper demonstrates that as conceptual framework, the ‘ecosystem approach’ provides a valuable theoretical template to help us discover how and what knowledge is used in deliberative styles of decision making

Exploring Entrepreneurial Skills and Competencies in Farm Tourism

Diversification to farm tourism is increasingly seen as a viable development strategy to promote a more diverse and sustainable rural economy and to counter declining farm incomes. However, our understanding of the dynamics of the modern farm tourism business and the entrepreneurial and competitive skills farmers require in making the transition from agriculture to a diversified - and service based - enterprise remains limited. Hence, the aim of this paper is to explore the range of skills and competencies that farmers in the North West of England identify as important when adopting a diversification strategy to farm tourism. With the findings indicating that that whilst a range of managerial skills are valued by farmers, they lack many of the additional business and entrepreneurial competencies required for success. Moreover, this paper acknowledges the need to generate consensus on the requisite skill-set that farm tourism operators require, along with a need for a currently fragmented rural tourism literature to acknowledge the significance of rural entrepreneurship and the characteristics of successful farmers and farm tourism ventures

Local Flood Risk Management Strategies in England: Patterns of Application

In England, the Flood and Water Management Act 2010 provides specific roles for Lead Local Flood Authorities in flood and coastal erosion risk management. Under Section 9 of the Act, authorities are responsible for preparing, applying and monitoring a local flood risk management strategy that balances community input into flood management with national policy objectives. Authorities are legally obliged to consider specified requirements in strategy production, including consultation with the public. Using an evaluative framework based on legal requirements and local government guidelines, this article assesses the extent to which these requirements have been met in a sample of 43 strategies. Our findings suggest that strategies generally meet minimal legal requirements, although variance exists in approaches adopted, particularly in respect of consultation and links to other environmental management aspects. Recommendations for enhancing future practice are provided

The costs of beekeeping for pollination services in the UK? An explorative study

Honey bees are a key managed pollination service resource in crop agriculture, providing flexible, highly generalist and resilient pollination service delivery to a broad range of UK crops. Despite their potential economic impacts, there is little information on the actual costs involved in providing pollination services experienced by UK beekeepers. Utilizing an online survey of UK beekeepers, this study examines the full economic costs of providing pollination services to crops in the UK, as well as examining the differences in costs experienced by different beekeepers. The findings indicate that <10% of respondent beekeepers, mainly professionals, actively provide pollination services to crops, and rarely receive payment for this in field crops. In apple orchards, where beekeepers most often receive payments, the benefits to the orchard are estimated at 86–149 times the payments received by beekeepers. Although exploratory, the findings highlight the need for wider collection of information on beekeeping costs and several key knowledge gaps that could influence future development of the UK bee farming industry

Wildlife surveillance using deep learning methods

Wildlife conservation and the management of human–wildlife conflicts require cost‐effective methods of monitoring wild animal behavior. Still and video camera surveillance can generate enormous quantities of data, which is laborious and expensive to screen for the species of interest. In the present study, we describe a state‐of‐the‐art, deep learning approach for automatically identifying and isolating species‐specific activity from still images and video data. We used a dataset consisting of 8,368 images of wild and domestic animals in farm buildings, and we developed an approach firstly to distinguish badgers from other species (binary classification) and secondly to distinguish each of six animal species (multiclassification). We focused on binary classification of badgers first because such a tool would be relevant to efforts to manage Mycobacterium bovis (the cause of bovine tuberculosis) transmission between badgers and cattle. We used two deep learning frameworks for automatic image recognition. They achieved high accuracies, in the order of 98.05% for binary classification and 90.32% for multiclassification. Based on the deep learning framework, a detection process was also developed for identifying animals of interest in video footage, which to our knowledge is the first application for this purpose. The algorithms developed here have wide applications in wildlife monitoring where large quantities of visual data require screening for certain species

Public engagement with carbon and climate change: To what extent is the public 'carbon capable'?

The relevance of climate change for society seems indisputable: scientific evidence points to a significant human contribution in causing climate change, and impacts which will increasingly affect human welfare. In order to meet national and international greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets, there is an urgent need to understand and enable societal engagement inmitigation. Yet recent research indicates that this involvement is currently limited: although awareness of climate change is widespread, understanding and behavioral engagement are far lower. Proposals for mitigative ‘personal carbon budgets’ imply a need for public understanding of the causes and consequences of carbon emissions, as well as the ability to reduce emissions. However, little has been done to consider the situated meanings of carbon and energy in everyday life and decisions. This paper builds on the concept of ‘carbon capability’, a term which captures the contextual meanings associated with carbon and individuals’ abilities and motivations to reduce emissions. We present empirical findings from a UK survey of public engagement with climate change and carbon capability, focusing on both individual and institutional dimensions. These findings highlight the diverse public understandings about ‘carbon’, encompassing technical, social, and moral discourses; and provide further evidence for the environmental value-action gap in relation to adoption of low-carbon lifestyles. Implications of these findings for promoting public engagement with climate change and carbon capability are discussed