The fall and rise of the green economy

It is five years since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and its knock-on effects are still playing out in ways that are likely to have longer-term implications than those purely financial in nature; namely, its impact on the green agendas of governments and industries and the brake it has placed on an emerging green economy. The green economy has been identified as the next major long wave of structural economic and socio-technical change at a global level (see key reference list at end of article). It can be expected to exert a more significant triple bottom line impact than that of the information economy, the last major post-industrial societal transition whose emergence accelerated through the latter half of the 20th century and continues to exert transformational change today via its links with new media and communications, the knowledge economy and the creative economy. The drivers of a green economy are different but equally powerful and go to the heart of global sustainability in the 21st century: averting highly disruptive climate change, living within the finite resource limits of the planet, avoiding the environmental degradation currently associated with industrial and urban development, and supporting a projected nine billion population

HERA Diffractive Structure Function Data and Parton Distributions

Recent diffractive structure function measurements by the H1 and ZEUS experiments at HERA are reviewed. Various data sets, obtained using systematically different selection and reconstruction methods, are compared. NLO DGLAP QCD fits are performed to the most precise H1 and ZEUS data and diffractive parton densities are obtained in each case. Differences between the Q^2 dependences of the H1 and ZEUS data are reflected as differences between the diffractive gluon densities.Comment: Contributed to the Proceedings of the Workshop on HERA and the LHC, DESY and CERN, 2004-200

Perth freight link: good idea, wrong port

The Perth Freight Link (PFL) has been announced as a major transport opportunity to solve the heavy goods truck problems in Perth. By taking trucks via a toll road around an extended Roe Highway, through Stock Road and Leach Highway to the Fremantle Inner Harbour it has been proposed to alleviate the current congestion and match the expected increase in truck traffic over the coming years. This paper takes a contrary view by analyses and suggests that the PFL is very poor planning; it is likely to harm the city of Fremantle and damage the operations of the port. The findings demonstrate the real need is to create good road and rail connections to a new container port in the Fremantle Outer Harbour

Emergent Urbanism as the Transformative force in Saving the Planet

The most significant force in saving the planet is when cities begin to grow without using fossil fuels. The great urban revolution of the twentieth century was based around a continuing growth in the total and per capita consumption of fossil fuels leading to the problems of climate change, oil security, air pollution and urban sprawl. The twenty-first century is beginning to show that this reversal may well be underway and that a new kind of city is emerging where economic growth is decoupling from fossil fuel growth and new greener, more competitive cities are emerging (Glaeser 20 I 0). Some of this evidence will be presented before outlining how we can ensure the trends continue

The rise and rise of renewable cities

The decoupling of fossil fuels from growth in economic activity has been proceeding rapidly for most of the 21st century and is analysed globally in terms of structures and technologies for energy efficiency and for switching to renewable energy in the world’s cities. This is leading to the decline of coal and oil. The evidence suggests that the changes are based on demand for the structures and technologies that are emerging, facilitating a disruptive process. The rise of renewable cities can therefore be expected to accelerate

Density, the Sustainability Multiplier: Some Myths and Truths with Application to Perth, Australia

The paper suggests that the divisive urban issue of density has criticalimportance for sustainability. It is particularly important to resolve for the low density cardependent cities of the world as they are highly resource consumptive. Ten myths aboutdensity and 10 truths about density are proposed to help resolve the planning issues socommonly found to divide urban communities. They are applied with data to Perth toillustrate the issues and how they can be resolved

Constraints on the thermal and tectonic evolution of Greymouth coalfield

The southern end of the Paparoa Range in Westland, South Island, New Zealand, comprises an asymmetrical, southward plunging, faulted (Brunner-Mt Davy) anticline, the eastern limb of which is common with the western limb of an asymmetrical (Grey Valley) syncline forming a Neogene foreland basin (Grey Valley Trough). The faulted anticline is a classic inversion structure: compression during the Neogene, associated with the development of the modern Australia-Pacific plate boundary, caused a pre-existing normal fault zone, about which a late Cretaceous-Oligocene extensional half graben had formed (Paparoa Trough), to change its sense of displacement. The resulting basement loading formed the foreland basin, containing up to 3 km of mainly marine sedimentary section. Fission track results for apatite concentrates from 41 shallow drillhole and outcrop samples from the Greymouth Coalfield part of the Brunner-Mt Davy Anticline are reported and interpreted, to better establish the timing and amount of inversion, and hence the mechanism of inversion. The fission track results integrated with modelling of vitrinite reflectance data, show that the maximum paleotemperatures experienced during burial of the Late Cretaceous and mid-Eocene coal-bearing succession everywhere exceeded 85deg.C, and reached a peak of 180deg.C along the axis of the former basin. Cooling from maximum temperatures occurred during three discrete phases: 20-15 Ma, 12-7 Ma, and c. 2 Ma to the present. The amount of denudation has been variable across the inverted basin, decreasing westward from a maximum of c. 2.5 km during the first deformation phase, c. 1.2 km during the second phase, and 1.4 km during the third phase. It appears that exhumation over the coalfield continued for about 2 m.y. beyond the biostratigraphically determined time ranges of each of two synorogenic unconformities along the western limb of the Grey Valley Syncline. Stick-slip behaviour on the range front fault that localised the inversion is inferred. The tectonic evolution of the anticline-syncline pair at the southern end of the Paparoa Range, is therefore identical in style, and similar in timing, to the development of the Papahaua Range-Westport Trough across the Kongahu Fault Zone, in the vicinity of Buller Coalfield