The water crisis in Gaborone : investigating the underlying factors resulting in the ‘failure’ of the Gaborone Dam, Botswana

Botswana is an arid country endemic to drought. The major water supply in the capital Gaborone, the Gaborone Reservoir, has received a failed status early this year due to diminishing water levels which have fallen below six percent of the total potential volume in 2014. However, there seems to be no official consensus as to what has caused this extreme decrease in volume. Water scarcity can have great impacts in regards to the economy, development and national security of a country and it is important to grasp the cause of the problem in order to solve it in the most efficient way. By analysing data time series for temperature, rainfall and consumption as well as performing a spatial analysis over the catchment area it was possible to identify the changes that have occurred in the catchment area, the climate and the domestic consumption over the last decade. Poor data resolution and a lack of statistical significance mean that no concrete conclusions can be drawn. In order to sustain a sustainable water future, it is important that water conservation is promoted and that the second phase of the North South Water Carrier Project (with the purpose of pumping water from reservoirs in eastern Botswana and South Africa to Gaborone) keeps to the original timeline and fixes the faults within the pipeline. Keywords: Gaborone Reservoir, drought, catchment area, climate change, consumptionTorka är mycket vanligt i Botswana. I huvudstaden Gaborone har Gaboronedammen klassats som ett misslyckande eftersom vattennivån har sjunkit till under sex procent av den potentiella volymen under 2014. Det finns inte någon officiell enighet om vad som har orsakat denna extrema volymminskning. Vattenbrist kan ha negativa konsekvenser för ett lands ekonomi, utveckling och till och med för den nationella säkerheten eftersom grannländer ofta tycker olika när det gäller vem som ska få utnyttja delade vattendrag. Det är viktigt att förstå orsaken till volymminskningen för att lösa problemet på bästa och effektivaste sätt. Under studien har både en rumslig analys och en analys av tidsserier för data gälande nederbörd, temperatur och konsumtion genomförts. Detta har gjort det möjligt att se vilka förändringar som har skett sedan Gaboronedammen konstruerades 1965. På grund av brister i dataupplösning och trender utan statistisk signifikans så går det inte att dra några slutsatser. För att uppnå en hållbar vattentillgänglighet i Gaborone i framtiden så är det väsentligt att vattenvård främjas och att vattenförsörjning till Gaborone från Gaboronedammen kompletteras med pålitlig vattentillförsel från andra dammar i Botswana, dvs. NSCWP rörledningarna lagas och underhålls. Nyckelord: Gaboronedammen, torka, dräneringsområde, klimatförändring, konsumtio

Evaluating New Digital Technologies Through a Framework of Resilience

© 2015 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This paper explores how an evaluative framework of resilience might be utilised to assess the impact of new digital technologies. This paper outlines key themes and indicators from recent literature on community-level and rural resilience and incorporates insights from work on digital inclusion and rural information and communication technologies to build a framework of rural community resilience. It then highlights a successful case study carried out by the Digital Engagement and Resilience project and describes some of the methodological challenges that can be encountered in cross-cutting evaluative work in a digital economy context. Finally, it contextualises this work in the current policy climate of rural digital agendas to stress the growing need for holistic and critical approaches to ‘resilience’

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

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

Evidence of Inbreeding Depression on Human Height

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