Implementing circular public procurement : the case of textiles in the City of Oslo

Public procurements are globally recognized as key to achieving more sustainable consumption and production patterns, not only because of the potential to reduce environmental impact from public services themselves but also due to the potential to incentivise the development of new markets and solutions that can be used in the private sector as well (Alhola et al., 2019; UNEP, n.d.). One approach to addressing more sustainable consumption and production patterns is implementing circular economy principles (Geissdoerfer et al., 2017). As the largest municipality of Norway, the City of Oslo has developed high ambitions for circular public procurement, with textiles as one of several prioritised categories due to textiles’ large environmental impact during their lifecycles. In this thesis I therefore investigate activities connected to textile consumption in the City of Oslo’s health sector in the light of practice theory, where these activities are analysed in terms of the practice elements materials, competence and meanings (Shove et al., 2012). The purpose is to gain an understanding of whether and how these activities can be affected for a more successful implementation of circular public procurement. The investigation is carried out using a mixed-methods approach, where the qualitative strategy is prioritised as the main method. I used interviews, a quantitative data set and documents as data sources. The findings suggest that when implementing circular economy principles, it can be useful to broaden the focus on public procurement to a greater involvement of the use-phase. With this, users of goods and services become more central actors, and their practices are therefore relevant sites for intervention, in addition to the tendering process, which already receives attention in circular public procurement guidelines and research.M-D

Catchments as space-time filters ? a joint spatio-temporal geostatistical analysis of runoff and precipitation

International audienceIn this paper catchments are conceptualised as linear space-time filters. Catchment area A is interpreted as the spatial support and the catchment response time Tis interpreted as the temporal support of the runoff measurements. These two supports are related by T~A? which embodies the space-time connections of the rainfall-runoff process from a geostatistical perspective. To test the framework, spatio-temporal variograms are estimated from about 30 years of quarter hourly precipitation and runoff data from about 500 catchments in Austria. In a first step, spatio-temporal variogram models are fitted to the sample variograms for three catchment size classes independently. In a second step, variograms are fitted to all three catchment size classes jointly by estimating the parameters of a point/instantaneous spatio-temporal variogram model and aggregating (regularising) it to the spatial and temporal scales of the catchments. The exponential, Cressie-Huang and product-sum variogram models give good fits to the sample variograms of runoff with dimensionless errors ranging from 0.02 to 0.03, and the model parameters are plausible. This indicates that the first order effects of the spatio-temporal variability of runoff are indeed captured by conceptualising catchments as linear space-time filters. The scaling exponent ? is found to vary between 0.3 and 0.4 for different variogram models

Focus on practice : A qualitative study of psychiatric nurses' contributions in the specialist health service acte day and night supplies of mental health care

Stadige omstillinger innenfor psykisk helsearbeid og helsevern ligger som bakgrunn for studien. Organiseringen har endret seg og en ser i stortingsmeldingene fra staten at samordning, samhandling og tverrfaglighet har fått styrket sin plass. Samtidig gir forskning et inntrykk av at arbeidet ved de akuttpsykiatriske døgntilbudene innehar et akutt og uforutsigbart preg som kan gi følger for behandlingen. Virksomheten og reorganiseringene stiller store krav til psykiatriske sykepleiere og muligheten til å bevare en meningsfull profesjonell identitet. Hensikten med studien er å belyse hva psykiatriske sykepleiere beskriver som sitt bidrag i det tverrfaglige arbeidet ved det akuttpsykiatriske døgntilbudet. Jeg ønsker økt kunnskap og innsikt i deres kliniske arbeid i en tid som preges av omstillinger. Åtte psykiatriske sykepleiere har deltatt i forskningsintervju. Det ble brukt en semistrukturert intervjuguide og materialet ble analysert etter prinsipper fra den kvalitative innholdsanalyse. Studien er inspirert av en hermeneutisk-fenomenologisk tilnærming med vekt på en deskriptiv design. Samtlige gav et inntrykk av at hverdagen var travel og at eget arbeid bestod av mange og varierte oppgaver. Det kom frem en opplevelse av å være allsidig ved at en kunne bidra med både praktiske gjøremål og oppgaver med større og mindre faglig relevans. Eget bidrag oppleves av flere som utydelig og det virker som det er vanskelig å synliggjøre sin profesjon i det tverrfaglige arbeidet. Noen stiller seg kritiske til innholdet i det samlede arbeidet ved institusjonen. Samlet sett synes det pasientnære arbeidet å være det som oppleves som spennende og faglig utfordrende. En har mulighet til å tilbringe mye tid sammen med pasient og dermed bidra med mengder av observasjoner som tenkes vil kunne være nyttig for det samlede pasientarbeidet. En motsetning synes å være en opplevelse av økende avstand til pasient ved at en pådro seg arbeid av mer administrativ karakter. Flere hadde ofte rollen som ”vaktansvarlig” som innebar at en ikke hadde direkte pasientkontakt.Summary: Continuously restructuring of mental health care and health care is the background for the study. The organization has changed and one can see in the White reports from the state that coordination, collaboration and interdisciplinary have strengthened their position. At the same time research lead to the impressions that the work of the emergency psychiatric day and night supplies possess an acute and unpredictable character that can provide implications for treatment. Activities and the reorganizations require significant demands to psychiatric nurses, and the opportunity to preserve a meaningful professional identity. The purpose of this study is to clarify on what psychiatric nurses describe as their contribution to the interdisciplinary work of the acute psychiatric day and night supplies. I want more knowledge and enlightens into their clinical work in an era marked by restructuring. Eight psychiatric nurses participated in the research interview. It was used a semi-structured interview guide and the material was analyzed according to the principles of the qualitative content analysis. The program is inspired by a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach with emphasis on a descriptive design. All gave the impression that their workdays were busy and that their own work consisted of many and varied tasks. More experienced to be versatile in helping with practical tasks, and assignments with major and minor academic relevance. Some find that their own contribution seems unclear and that it was difficult to visualize their profession in the interdisciplinary work and some were very critical to the content of the overall work of the institution. Overall, it seems patient-centered efforts to be what is perceived as exciting and academically challenging. One has to spend much time with the patient and thereby provide a lot of observations that conceivably could be useful for the overall patient work. A contradiction seems to be an experience of increasing distance from the patient by a sustained work of a more administrative nature. More often had the nurses’ role as "duty manager" which meant that they did not have direct patient contact. The analysis shows consistent and clear outstanding experience but also the variety and some personal experiences

Smooth regional estimation of low-flow indices: physiographical space based interpolation and top-kriging

Recent studies highlight that spatial interpolation techniques of point data can be effectively applied to the problem of regionalization of hydrometric information. This study compares two innovative interpolation techniques for the prediction of low-flows in ungauged basins. The first one, named Physiographical-Space Based Interpolation (PSBI), performs the spatial interpolation of the desired streamflow index (e.g., annual streamflow, low-flow index, flood quantile, etc.) in the space of catchment descriptors. The second technique, named Topological kriging or Top-kriging, predicts the variable of interest along river networks taking both the area and nested nature of catchments into account. PSBI and Top-kriging are applied for the regionalization of <i>Q</i><sub>355</sub> (i.e., a low-flow index that indicates the streamflow that is equalled or exceeded 355 days in a year, on average) over a broad geographical region in central Italy, which contains 51 gauged catchments. The two techniques are cross-validated through a leave-one-out procedure at all available gauges and applied to a subregion to produce a continuous estimation of <i>Q</i><sub>355</sub> along the river network extracted from a 90m elevation model. The results of the study show that Top-kriging and PSBI present complementary features. Top-kriging outperforms PSBI at larger river branches while PSBI outperforms Top-kriging for headwater catchments. Overall, they have comparable performances (Nash-Sutcliffe efficiencies in cross-validation of 0.89 and 0.83, respectively). Both techniques provide plausible and accurate predictions of <i>Q</i><sub>355</sub> in ungauged basins and represent promising opportunities for regionalization of low-flows

eHabitat, a multi-purpose Web Processing Service for ecological modeling

The number of interoperable research infrastructures has increased significantly with the growing awareness of the efforts made by the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). One of the Societal Benefit Areas (SBA) that is benefiting most from GEOSS is biodiversity, given the costs of monitoring the environment and managing complex information, from space observations to species records including their genetic characteristics. But GEOSS goes beyond simple data sharing to encourage the publishing and combination of models, an approach which can ease the handling of complex multi-disciplinary questions. It is the purpose of this paper to illustrate these concepts by presenting eHabitat, a basic Web Processing Service (WPS) for computing the likelihood of finding ecosystems with equal properties to those specified by a user. When chained with other services providing data on climate change, eHabitat can be used for ecological forecasting and becomes a useful tool for decision-makers assessing different strategies when selecting new areas to protect. eHabitat can use virtually any kind of thematic data that can be considered as useful when defining ecosystems and their future persistence under different climatic or development scenarios. The paper will present the architecture and illustrate the concepts through case studies which forecast the impact of climate change on protected areas or on the ecological niche of an African bird

Prediction of streamflow regimes over large geographical areas: interpolated flow–duration curves for the Danube region

ABSTRACTFlow–duration curves (FDCs) are essential to support decisions on water resources management, and their regionalization is fundamental for the assessment of ungauged basins. In comparison with calibrated rainfall–runoff models, statistical methods provide data-driven estimates representing a useful benchmark. The objective of this work is the interpolation of FDCs from ~500 discharge gauging stations in the Danube. To this aim we use total negative deviation top-kriging (TNDTK), as multi-regression models are shown to be unsuitable for representing FDCs across all durations and sites. TNDTK shows a high accuracy for the entire Danube region, with overall Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency values computed in a leave-p-out cross-validation scheme (p equal to one site, one-third and half of the sites), all above 0.88. A reliability measure based on kriging variance is attached to each interpolated FDC at ~4000 prediction nodes. The GIS layer of regionalized FDCs is made available for broader use in the region

Hva vet vi om sitteputers trykkavlastende effekt?

Sammendrag. Denne artikkelen gir et sammendrag av en undersøkelse foretatt ved SINTEF Unimed høsten 2000. Målet med undersøkelsen var å gi en oversikt over hva som gjøres i forebyggende hensikt innenfor feltet sitting og trykksår, med spesiell fokus på trykkavlastende sitteputer. Data ble hentet inn gjennom en litteraturstudie av et utvalg publiserte vitenskapelige artikler, gjennom kontakt med ressursmiljøer i Norden og via en gjennomgang av dokumentasjon gitt av norske leverandører av sitteputer. Undersøkelsen avdekket at vitenskapelige arbeider innen feltet utføres uten enhetlige retningslinjer. Dette fører til at det er vanskelig å bygge opp en kunnskapsbase som kan fungere som et referansemateriale for videre arbeid. Ut fra de funnene vi har gjort i denne undersøkelsen vil vi fremheve følgende anbefalte satsningsområder for nordiske miljøer involvert i sitting og trykksårsproblematikk: Kartlegging av de ulike årsaksfaktorene til utvikling av trykksår, i første rekke trykk over tid, shear, fuktighet og temperatur, utarbeidelse av mer enhetlige metodiske retningslinjer for måling av de faktorene som viser seg å være av betydning, etablering av nordiske nettverk for informasjonsspredning og erfaringsutveksling via internett og konferanser, og utarbeidelse av en samordnet tilnærming til opplæring og kompetanseheving hos formidlere, involvert helsepersonell og brukere.måsjekke

Miljøriktig bruk av husdyrgjødsel

En best mulig utnyttelse av næringsstoffene i husdyrgjødsla og minst mulig risiko for tap til omgivelsene oppnås ved spredning tidlig i vekstsesongen. Høstspredning gir forhold med større risiko for avrenning og derfor generelt større risiko for tap av næringsstoffer sammenlignet med spredning i vekstsesongen.publishedVersio

Evaluering av regionale miljøprogram (RMP). Vurdering av ordningen: “Avrenning til vassdrag”

Denne rapporten er gjennomført for Statens Landbruksforvaltning (SLF) som del av deres evaluering av Regionale miljøprogram. I rapporten evalueres ordningene under “Avrenning til vassdrag “ dvs i hovedsak tilskuddsordningene knyttet til endret jordarbeiding. Beskrivelse av ordningene i utvalgte fylker, gjennomføringsgrad, miljøeffekter og kostnadseffektivitet er vurdert. Se utvidet sammendrag.publishedVersio