Cutting the Climate-Development Gordian Knot - Economic options in a politically constrained world

Combating climate change cannot but be a cooperative venture amongst nations. Together with the problem posed by the withdrawal of the US from the Kyoto Protocol, the key challenge for winning the battle is the involvement of developing countries in efforts to alter their GHGs emissions trends. This involvement is necessary technically but also politically to bring the largest emitter of the planet back on the battle field. In the first section we draw on history to outline the intellectual underpinning of North/South divide around climate affairs. In the second section we show the economic basis for a leverage effect between development and climate policies. The third section ventures to propose some guidance to develop a viable climate regime strong enough to support an ambitious effort to decarbonize economies and we show that the Kyoto framework, once re-interpreted and amended is not so far from this working drawing.climate policy; development

Hierarchical modelling of species sensitivity distribution: development and application to the case of diatoms exposed to several herbicides

The Species Sensitivity Distribution (SSD) is a key tool to assess the ecotoxicological threat of contaminant to biodiversity. It predicts safe concentrations for a contaminant in a community. Widely used, this approach suffers from several drawbacks: i)summarizing the sensitivity of each species by a single value entails a loss of valuable information about the other parameters characterizing the concentration-effect curves; ii)it does not propagate the uncertainty on the critical effect concentration into the SSD; iii)the hazardous concentration estimated with SSD only indicates the threat to biodiversity, without any insight about a global response of the community related to the measured endpoint. We revisited the current SSD approach to account for all the sources of variability and uncertainty into the prediction and to assess a global response for the community. For this purpose, we built a global hierarchical model including the concentration-response model together with the distribution law for the SSD. Working within a Bayesian framework, we were able to compute an SSD taking into account all the uncertainty from the original raw data. From model simulations, it is also possible to extract a quantitative indicator of a global response of the community to the contaminant. We applied this methodology to study the toxicity of 6 herbicides to benthic diatoms from Lake Geneva, measured from biomass reduction

Cutting the Climate-Development Gordian Knot - Economic options in a politically constrained world

Climate policies must deal with a contradiction generic to global environment policies: as was recognized as early as in 1972 at the UN conference on Human Environment at Stockholm, the participation of developing countries is essential. The current emissions of developing countries are also significant. If the trend continues, the future share of global emissions from developing countries will be even larger. However, developing countries do not yet see the need to cooperate because they perceive environmental issues to be a form of Malthusianism. Thus, despite repeated calls for sustainable development at Rio (1992), the negotiations for framing a climate regime have remained disengaged from the debates on how to embark on sound development paths, thus tying a Gordian knot through a succession of misunderstandings.This unhappy turn in policy talks is all the more grave as the timing of the climate change issue is inopportune for developing countries. The increasing attention to the climate change phenomenon has coincided with a period in which many developing countries are experiencing rapid economic growth and in which global power equations are changing (military power, globalization of world markets, and control over natural resources). No sword of a present-day Alexander can cut this knot tied by history. The aim of this chapter is to pick out the threads that, when pulled, may untie the knot

Cutting the Climate-Development Gordian Knot - <br />Economic options in a politically constrained world

http://www.cesifo.deCombating climate change cannot but be a cooperative venture amongst nations. Together with the problem posed by the withdrawal of the US from the Kyoto Protocol, the key challenge for winning the battle is the involvement of developing countries in efforts to alter their GHGs emissions trends. This involvement is necessary technically but also politically to bring the largest emitter of the planet back on the battle field. In the first section we draw on history to outline the intellectual underpinning of North/South divide around climate affairs. In the second section we show the economic basis for a leverage effect between development and climate policies. The third section ventures to propose some guidance to develop a viable climate regime strong enough to support an ambitious effort to decarbonize economies and we show that the Kyoto framework, once re-interpreted and amended is not so far from this working drawing

Cutting the Climate-Development Gordian Knot - Economic options in a politically constrained world

Climate policies must deal with a contradiction generic to global environment policies: as was recognized as early as in 1972 at the UN conference on Human Environment at Stockholm, the participation of developing countries is essential. The current emissions of developing countries are also significant. If the trend continues, the future share of global emissions from developing countries will be even larger. However, developing countries do not yet see the need to cooperate because they perceive environmental issues to be a form of Malthusianism. Thus, despite repeated calls for sustainable development at Rio (1992), the negotiations for framing a climate regime have remained disengaged from the debates on how to embark on sound development paths, thus tying a Gordian knot through a succession of misunderstandings.This unhappy turn in policy talks is all the more grave as the timing of the climate change issue is inopportune for developing countries. The increasing attention to the climate change phenomenon has coincided with a period in which many developing countries are experiencing rapid economic growth and in which global power equations are changing (military power, globalization of world markets, and control over natural resources). No sword of a present-day Alexander can cut this knot tied by history. The aim of this chapter is to pick out the threads that, when pulled, may untie the knot.Climate regime; synergies between climate and development; international negotiations

Validation of a French version of the Athlete Burnout Questionnaire: In Competitive Sport and Physical Education Context.

International audienceThe purpose of this research was to develop a psychometrically sound measure of the Athlete Burnout Questionnaire (ABQ, Raedeke & Smith, 2001) in French. First, a preliminary version was developed. Second, 895 French adolescents involved in competitive sport or physical education at school completed the survey. The results showed good internal consistency (all Cronbach's alphas > .75). Confirmatory factor analysis with the three subscales of the ABQ (emotional and physical exhaustion, reduced sense of accomplishment, and devaluation) confirmed the structure of the instrument and good data fit (NNFI = .95, CFI = .96, GFI = .95, RMSEA = .07) in accordance with the results obtained in previous studies (e.g., Cresswell & Eklund, 2005a, 2005b; Raedeke & Smith, 2001). Furthermore, the patterns of relationships between the ABQ subscales and motivation, self confidence, and anxiety provide concurrent validity of the ABQ

Mechanistic analysis of the sub chronic toxicity of La and Gd in <i>Daphnia magna</i> based on TKTD modelling and synchrotron X-ray fluorescence imaging

The release of lanthanides (Ln) into the environment has increased in recent decades due to their expanding applications in society. Studying their toxicity in aquatic ecosystems is urgent and challenging, with contradictory evidence presented in the literature. This study compared the biodistribution of La and Gd in Daphnia magna exposed to sub-chronic conditions and developed the first Toxicokinetic-Toxicodynamic (TKTD) model for these lanthanides with this model crustacean. D. magna were initially exposed for 7 days to concentrations close to the LC50 of La (2.10 mg L-1) and Gd (1.70 mg L−1). After exposure, half of the live daphnids were introduced in a clean media to allow depuration over 24 h, while the other organisms were directly prepared for synchrotron imaging measurements. Synchrotron X-ray fluorescence analysis revealed that metal distribution in the organisms was similar for both La and Gd, predominantly localized in the intestinal tract, even after the depuration process. These results indicate that ingested metal can adversely affect organisms under sub-chronic exposure conditions, highlighting the importance of using nominal concentrations as a more suitable indicator of metal bioavailability for risk assessment. The General Unified Threshold Model of Survival (GUTS) TKTD framework, in its reduced form (GUTS-RED), was developed for La and Gd using dissolved and nominal concentrations. D. magna were exposed for 7 days to concentrations from 0.5 to 5 mg L−1 of La or Gd and mortality monitored daily. The mechanistic model revealed a faster toxicokinetics for La than Gd and a higher toxicity for Gd than La in the organism. This study confirmed, despite similar chemical properties, the variation in both toxicity and toxicokinetics between these two metals