Problems and Prospects of Urban Environmental Management in Pakistan

Discussions on environmental conditions often assume that urbanisation contributes to the degradation of the environment. However, urbanisation per se is not detrimental to the environment. Concentrations of population and economic activities through urbanisation offer opportunities in providing environmental infrastructure and health services costeffectively, because of economies of scale. It also provides opportunities to effectively internalise environmental costs; because concentration of economic activities reduces user charges and costs of tax collection, enforcement, and wastes management, which are essential to environmental protection. Nevertheless, while providing opportunities the process of urbanisation also generates environmental pressures. A nation that is unable to utilise the opportunities and alleviate the pressures through integrated environmental, economic and physical planning finds that mismanaged urbanisation can pose enormous environmental and economic problems that become increasingly difficult to solve with time. Unfortunately, Pakistan is one of the countries which have not managed the process of urbanisation effectively. This paper, after tracing the urbanisation trends in Pakistan, discusses the existing and emerging environmental impacts and risks. The country is at the stage of risk transition where modern risks caused by industrial and traffic pollution, such as chemicals, heavy metals and noise, combine with the traditional risks such as bacteriological and parasitic infections caused by inadequate infrastructure facilities particularly water supply and sanitation. The paper also analyses the responses to urban environmental problems in terms of approaches to sustainable urban development. Finally, it outlines the holistic policy directions to environmentally sound and sustainable urban development, including institutional, regulatory, economic and participatory measures.

Bubble Rise Phenomena Through Newtonian & Non-Newtonian Fluids

The characteristics of bubble rise phenomenon in three liquids were investigated and are reported here. The experimental rig consists of two transparent cylindrical columns – one a polycarbonate tube of 125 mm diameter and the other an acrylic tube of 400 mm diameter. The rig also consists of a lifting device designed to hold a video camera for taking bubble images. Water and two non-Newtonian fluids (0.025% and 0.045% by weight of polyacrylamide solutions) were used in this study. The smaller polycarbonate tube was used to study the velocity and the drag coefficient under vacuum. The bigger acrylic tube was used to study the influence of the size of bubbles

Energy-aware peering routing protocol for indoor hospital body area network communication

The recent research in Body Area Networks (BAN) is focused on making its communication more reliable, energy efficient, secure, and to better utilize system resources. In this paper we propose a novel BAN network architecture for indoor hospital environments, and a new mechanism of peer discovery with routing table construction that helps to reduce network traffic load, energy consumption, and improves BAN reliability. We have performed extensive simulations in the Castalia simulation environment to show that our proposed protocol has better performance in terms of reduced BAN traffic load, increased number of successful packets received by nodes, reduced number of packets forwarded by intermediate nodes, and overall lower energy consumption compared to other protocols

Measuring Sustainability - UK wealth accounts for 25 years

What is sustainability and how do we measure it? Sustainability could be achieved through sustainable development and much of the literature on sustainable development has taken human well-being to be the object to be sustained. By constructing a very large and extensive National Accounts consistent database, this study develops an original set of UK wealth accounts for 25 years – 1988 to 2012 – to measure UK sustainability. While doing so, this research calculates the monetary value of UK natural capital and human capital which is then added into produced capital to develop a first comprehensive wealth account for the UK. This thesis argues that both wealth accounting approaches - "top-down" and "bottom-up" - are conceptually the same. They only differ empirically because of the methodologies employed to calculate natural capital, human capital and total wealth. This thesis shows how these both approaches can be combined together to measure UK sustainability. This study concludes that since 2007 UK is not on a sustainable path. Despite a positive genuine savings, since 2007 UK wealth has a negative growth rate and wealth per capita is in decline. A positive genuine savings with a fall in wealth per capita shows that UK savings has not been sufficient to compensate for a fall in wealth and population growth. In order to reverse the trend, either UK has to reduce its population growth or it needs to reinvest in its capital asset bases. This thesis argues that an increase in population does not always decrease per capita wealth because an increase in population driven by a skilled work force increases the value of human capital and thus total wealth. This increase in wealth could offset an increase in population keeping per capita wealth intact. Furthermore, for UK, which is not a resource rich country, investment in human capital is needed to increase the rate of wealth growth

EFFECT ON FLEXIBILITY OF VOLLEYBALL PLAYERS BY SOME SELECTED EXERCISES

The aim of the study was to determine the effect on flexibility of volleyball players by some selected exercises. For this purpose 20 male volley ball players (10 for control group and 10 for experimental group) of Government Boys Higher secondary school Charirshareef Budgam were selected randomly as subject and the age was ranging from 17 to 21 years. Exercises were restricted to Trunk twisting, Rope skipping, Shoulder and chest stretch, Alternative toe touch zigzag Running, Hip stretch and Hamstring stretch. Flexibility was restricted to Trunk and Shoulder flexibility. The data were collected before the start of 8 weeks selected exercise programme (pre test) and immediately after the completion of 8 weeks selected exercise programme (post test) by sit and reach test for the trunk flexibility and shoulder elevation test by using yard stick and ruler and score was recorded in centimeters. To determine the training effect on flexibility Independent and Dependent t-test statistical technique were employed. The level of significance was set at 0.05 to check the significant mean difference. The finding of statistical analysis revealed that there were significant difference between the mean of pre and post test of experimental group and post test of control and experiment group. Experimental group significantly improved the selected flexibility because of systematic training programme.  Article visualizations

Problems and Prospects of Urban Environmental Management in Pakistan

Discussions on environmental conditions often assume that urbanisation contributes to the degradation of the environment. However, urbanisation per se is not detrimental to the environment. Concentrations of population and economic activities through urbanisation offer opportunities in providing environmental infrastructure and health services costeffectively, because of economies of scale. It also provides opportunities to effectively internalise environmental costs; because concentration of economic activities reduces user charges and costs of tax collection, enforcement, and wastes management, which are essential to environmental protection. Nevertheless, while providing opportunities the process of urbanisation also generates environmental pressures. A nation that is unable to utilise the opportunities and alleviate the pressures through integrated environmental, economic and physical planning finds that mismanaged urbanisation can pose enormous environmental and economic problems that become increasingly difficult to solve with time. Unfortunately, Pakistan is one of the countries which have not managed the process of urbanisation effectively. This paper, after tracing the urbanisation trends in Pakistan, discusses the existing and emerging environmental impacts and risks. The country is at the stage of risk transition where modern risks caused by industrial and traffic pollution, such as chemicals, heavy metals and noise, combine with the traditional risks such as bacteriological and parasitic infections caused by inadequate infrastructure facilities particularly water supply and sanitation. The paper also analyses the responses to urban environmental problems in terms of approaches to sustainable urban development. Finally, it outlines the holistic policy directions to environmentally sound and sustainable urban development, including institutional, regulatory, economic and participatory measures