Coping with Uncertainty in River Management:Challenges and Ways Forward

Coping with uncertainties is inherent to river management planning and policymaking. Yet, policymakers often perceive uncertainty as a complicating factor. We examine the challenges faced by policymakers when coping with uncertainties and provide an action perspective on how to best cope with these challenges to inform the policy debate. Integrating social and natural scientist’s perspectives on uncertainties and learning theories, we present a holistic, management perspective for coping with uncertainty. Based on a literature review about uncertainty concepts, strategies and learning, we identify three challenges in current river management: balancing social and technical uncertainties, being conservative and avoiding to end up a lock-in situation. We then provide a step-wise strategy and concrete actions for policymakers, which are illustrated with several examples. We conclude that coping with uncertainty may require paradigm shifts that can only be achieved through organisational learning. This, we claim, requires reflection, learning and flexibility of policymakers and their organisation

Sustainable consensus? the NISTO evaluation framework to appraise sustainability and stakeholder preferences for mobility projects

AbstractWhile sustainability of transport projects is of increasing importance, the concept of sustainability can be understood in many different ways by the stakeholders that are involved in or affected by mobility projects. In this paper, we compare the outcomes of the assessment of sustainability of projects through a multi-criteria analysis (MCA) and the appraisal of stakeholder preferences through the multi-actor multi-criteria analysis (MAMCA). Evaluating projects with both tools and comparing the outcomes can provide insight into the stakeholder support of sustainable solutions and the sustainability of alternatives preferred by stakeholders. The sustainability of projects is assessed through 16 criteria grouped under the three pillars of sustainability. They were selected by in-depth review of 16 case studies of mobility projects, 18 transport evaluation schemes and the ranking of potential criteria by 214 stakeholders in North-West Europe. These criteria were weighted by 93 representatives of decision makers in the mobility domain. Stakeholder preferences were appraised through the criteria identified for each stakeholder group. We illustrate the framework by evaluating alternative solutions to improve cycling connections between the towns of Tilburg and Waalwijk in the Netherlands. The results of the comparison show that stakeholder preferences are biased towards one or two of the sustainability pillars (economy, environment, society) in three ways: through the selection of the criteria by the stakeholders, the weights of each criterion by each stakeholder group and differences in the final ranking of alternatives between the stakeholder groups and the MCA

A compact and versatile cryogenic probe station for quantum device testing

Fast feedback from cryogenic electrical characterization measurements is key for the development of scalable quantum computing technology. At room temperature, high-throughput device testing is accomplished with a probe-based solution, where electrical probes are repeatedly positioned onto devices for acquiring statistical data. In this work we present a probe station that can be operated from room temperature down to below 2$\,$K. Its small size makes it compatible with standard cryogenic measurement setups with a magnet. A large variety of electronic devices can be tested. Here, we demonstrate the performance of the prober by characterizing silicon fin field-effect transistors as a host for quantum dot spin qubits. Such a tool can massively accelerate the design-fabrication-measurement cycle and provide important feedback for process optimization towards building scalable quantum circuits