Governance of water-energy-food nexus: A social network analysis approach to understanding agency behaviour

Research seeks to treat each resource embedded in the nexus as connected to the other resources. This approach is unique from other natural resource research agendas where the primary focus is on system efficiencies or examinations of a single resource. The nexus by emphasizing trade-offs places a premium on coordination. From a governance perspective coordination is not limited to decisions involving finances and allocation of trained human resources among different agencies organized both vertically and horizontally within a multi-level governance framework. Coordination could also be extended to include uses of data between public agencies, private sector and individuals. Due to nexus interconnectivity, we suggest here that social network analysis (SNA) is an appropriate tool that can divulge and highlight the relational complexities that exist within the nexus and among stakeholders that work with the singular elements of the nexus. We suggest that in the cases of organisations with a high institutional capacity by means of expertise, resources, and other assets, the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) network will be highly connected between resource areas in the overall network. Two network tie characteristics—density and centrality—are particularly important to understand a critical mass of interests within a multi-level governance framework. The paper concludes by arguing for the organisation of data covering different dimensions of the Water-Energy-Food nexus through the mechanism of an observatory that could potentially improve our understanding of thresholds of environmental resource use and the incentives required for public agencies to act in support of sustainable development

No pet or their person left behind increasing the disaster resilience of vulnerable groups through animal attachment, activities and networks /

Increased vulnerability to natural disasters has been associated with particular groups in the community. This includes those who are considered de facto vulnerable (children, older people, those with disabilities etc.) and those who own pets (not to mention pets themselves). The potential for reconfiguring pet ownership from a risk factor to a protective factor for natural disaster survival has been recently proposed. But how might this resilience-building proposition apply to vulnerable members of the community who own pets or other animals? This article addresses this important question by synthesizing information about what makes particular groups vulnerable, the challenges to increasing their resilience and how animals figure in their lives. Despite different vulnerabilities, animals were found to be important to the disaster resilience of seven vulnerable groups in Australia. Animal attachment and animal-related activities and networks are identified as underexplored devices for disseminating or ‘piggybacking’ disaster-related information and engaging vulnerable people in resilience building behaviors (in addition to including animals in disaster planning initiatives in general). Animals may provide the kind of innovative approach required to overcome the challenges in accessing and engaging vulnerable groups. As the survival of humans and animals are so often intertwined, the benefits of increasing the resilience of vulnerable communities through animal attachment is twofold: human and animal lives can be saved together

Fisheries Centre research reports, Vol. 29, no. 3

This report presents the key results of a multi-year activity of the Sea Around Us devoted to assessing the status of marine fisheries globally. This was accomplished by estimating, for the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) of all maritime countries and the high seas, the fraction currently left in the sea of the exploited populations of fish and invertebrates that occurred before the onset of large-scale industrial fishing. More precisely, the ‘fraction left’ is the current biomass (B) of a stock relative to its initial biomass (B0), i.e., B/B0. This fraction was estimated for multiple exploited populations (or ‘stocks’) by applying a versatile stock assessment method (CMSY++), whose main features are also described. Altogether, over 2,500 stocks of fish and marine invertebrates (mainly crustaceans such as lobsters and mollusks such as squids) were assessed in the EEZs of countries on five continents and the high seas. These assessments were based mainly on long catch time series (typically 1950 to 2018) but considered, wherever they were available, the results of earlier assessments made by national or international fisheries management bodies. Thus, the evaluations of fisheries status presented herein are not defined by data scarcity; rather, we used all available data pertinent to the status of fisheries in all maritime countries to reduce the uncertainty inherent in all stock assessments. The detailed results of these stock assessments and their supporting data are available on the Sea Around Us website (www.seaaroundus.org). These results will also be used by the Flourishing Ocean Initiative of the Minderoo Foundation, which kindly funded a large part of our catch reconstruction update to 2018 and the stock assessment work described herein.Science, Faculty ofNon UBCOceans and Fisheries, Institute for theUnreviewedFacultyResearche