Large-Scale Risk Assessment of Acid Rain Impacts on Fisheries: Models and Lessons

1986 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 900-921 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. K. Minns ◽  
J. R. M. Kelso ◽  
M. G. Johnson

Lakes, streams, and their watersheds in large parts of the world have little ability to neutralize acidity associated with precipitation. Resource management agencies are concerned with the extent of these impacts including the loss/hazard to key fish species, and the likely status of these aquatic systems given alternate emission control scenarios. Two models designed to provide such a large-scale risk assessment are presented herein. The strengths and weaknesses are identified. Since models draw together the best of our theories, experimental, and survey data, these are compared with existing knowledge, theories, and data.

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 321-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimiliano Pittore ◽  
Michael Haas ◽  
Vitor Silva

In risk assessment, the exposure component describes the elements exposed to the natural hazards and susceptible to damage or loss, while the vulnerability component defines the likelihood to incur damage or loss conditional on a given level of hazard intensity. In this article, we propose a novel adaptive approach to exposure modeling which exploits Dirichlet-Multinomial Bayesian updating to implement the incremental assimilation of sparse in situ survey data into probabilistic models described by compositions (proportions). This methodology is complemented by the introduction of a custom spatial aggregation support based on variable-resolution Central Voronoidal Tessellations. The proposed methodology allows for a more consistent integration of empirical observations, typically from engineering surveys, into large-scale models that can also efficiently exploit expert-elicited knowledge. The resulting models are described in a probabilistic framework, and as such allow for a more thorough analysis of the underlying uncertainty. The proposed approach is applied and discussed in five countries in Central Asia.


2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Baba ◽  
◽  
T. Watanabe ◽  
K. Miyata ◽  
H. Matsumoto ◽  
...  

The flooding of the Chao Phraya River in Thailand and the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, both of which occurred in 2011, reminded us of the risks of business disruption and further impacts on national, regional, and global economies through supply chains when disasters occur anywhere in the world. Considering the increasing economic losses attributable to disasters, the fourth session of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (2013) aimed to promote resilience and foster new opportunities for public-private partnerships as part of an overall approach to improving risk governance. Furthermore, it highlighted that a growing world requires a new approach to development action, emphasizing the private sector&rquo;s role in managing disaster risks. One of the most significant private sector contributions to disaster risk management is the creation of the business continuity plan/planning (BCP) and business continuity management (BCM) systems, which were standardized as ISO22301 and disseminated in many business enterprises around the world. However, a BCP or BCM system has been neither formulated for nor implemented in most local enterprises in industry agglomerated areas, even though these are located in areas vulnerable to disasters. Moreover, in the case of large-scale disasters, a business enterprise’s capacity may be too limited to mitigate damages and maintain operations through its own efforts, even if BCPs are prepared. The main reason for this is the disruption of public infrastructure and services. In order to minimize the negative economic impacts or economic losses, particularly in the case of a large-scale disaster that disrupts the fundamental infrastructure in certain areas, it is important to conduct risk assessment on a proper scale and to prepare scenario-based disaster management plans for area-wide damage mitigation. In addition, it is essential to have integrated resource management and strategic recovery plans to support each enterprise&rquo;s BCM actions in coordination with public sector activities. Considering this backgrounds, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the ASEAN Coordination Center for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management (AHA Center) launched the “Natural Disaster Risk Assessment and Area Business Continuity Plan Formulation for Industrial Agglomerated Areas in the ASEAN Region” project in February 2013. The project introduced the new concept of the Area BCP, which, based on a risk assessment of the area, designates a framework and direction for coordinated damage mitigation measures and recovery actions by stakeholders, including individual enterprises, industrial area managers, local authorities, and infrastructure administrators, to allow business continuation of the industrial area as a whole. The project also established Area BCM as a cyclic process of risk assessment, sharing risk and impact information, determining a common strategy of risk management, developing the Area BCP, implementing and monitoring the planned actions to continuously improve the Area BCM system, and coordinating among stakeholders, in order to improve the capability for effective business continuity of the area. This paper aims to evaluate the progress of the project and to explore lessons from the applied process of Area BCM and its benefits.


Check List ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 1627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hector Espinosa Perez ◽  
Montserrat Ramírez H.

This paper presents a list of the exotic fish species introduced in Mexican aquatic systems. This list is the result of the systematized information contained in several databases of ichthyological collections around the world and different publications. A total of 104 species were found, distributed in 19 families and 51 genera. The most species-rich were Cyprinidae with 22 species, Poeciliidae (19 species), Cichlidae (15 species) and Centrarchidae (13 species). A map and an electronic database were created based on the knowledge of the species, showing the known introductions of exotic fishes in the country. The information was obtained from a database stored in the Colección Nacional de Peces IBUNAM, which can be accessed online. This study has a high importance for the knowledge of the exotic fish fauna of Mexico and its current status.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-106
Author(s):  
ASTEMIR ZHURTOV ◽  

Cruel and inhumane acts that harm human life and health, as well as humiliate the dignity, are prohibited in most countries of the world, and Russia is no exception in this issue. The article presents an analysis of the institution of responsibility for torture in the Russian Federation. The author comes to the conclusion that the current criminal law of Russia superficially and fragmentally regulates liability for torture, in connection with which the author formulated the proposals to define such act as an independent crime. In the frame of modern globalization, the world community pays special attention to the protection of human rights, in connection with which large-scale international standards have been created a long time ago. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international acts enshrine prohibitions of cruel and inhumane acts that harm human life and health, as well as degrade the dignity.Considering the historical experience of the past, these standards focus on the prohibition of any kind of torture, regardless of the purpose of their implementation.


Author(s):  
Pooja Sharma ◽  
Karan Veer

: It was 11 March 2020 when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the name COVID-19 for coronavirus disease and also described it as a pandemic. Till that day 118,000 cases were confirmed of pneumonia with breathing problem throughout the world. At the start of New Year when COVID-19 came into knowledge a few days later, the gene sequencing of the virus was revealed. Today the number of confirmed cases is scary, i.e. 9,472,473 in the whole world and 484,236 deaths have been recorded by WHO till 26 June 2020. WHO's global risk assessment is very high [1]. The report is enlightening the lessons learned by India from the highly affected countries.


Water ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quansen Wang ◽  
Jianzhong Zhou ◽  
Kangdi Huang ◽  
Ling Dai ◽  
Gang Zha ◽  
...  

The risk inevitably exists in the process of flood control operation and decision-making of reservoir group, due to the hydrologic and hydraulic uncertain factors. In this study different stochastic simulation methods were applied to simulate these uncertainties in multi-reservoir flood control operation, and the risk caused by different uncertainties was evaluated from the mean value, extreme value and discrete degree of reservoir occupied storage capacity under uncertain conditions. In order to solve the conflict between risk assessment indexes and evaluate the comprehensive risk of different reservoirs in flood control operation schemes, the subjective weight and objective weight were used to construct the comprehensive risk assessment index, and the improved Mahalanobis distance TOPSIS method was used to select the optimal flood control operation scheme. The proposed method was applied to the flood control operation system in the mainstream and its tributaries of upper reaches of the Yangtze River basin, and 14 cascade reservoirs were selected as a case study. The results indicate that proposed method can evaluate the risk of multi-reservoir flood control operation from all perspectives and provide a new method for multi-criteria decision-making of reservoir flood control operation, and it breaks the limitation of the traditional risk analysis method which only evaluated by risk rate and cannot evaluate the risk of the multi-reservoir flood control operation system.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 5208
Author(s):  
Jianpo Liu ◽  
Hongxu Shi ◽  
Ren Wang ◽  
Yingtao Si ◽  
Dengcheng Wei ◽  
...  

The spatial and temporal distribution of tunnel failure is very complex due to geologic heterogeneity and variability in both mining processes and tunnel arrangement in deep metal mines. In this paper, the quantitative risk assessment for deep tunnel failure was performed using a normal cloud model at the Ashele copper mine, China. This was completed by considering the evaluation indexes of geological condition, mining process, and microseismic data. A weighted distribution of evaluation indexes was determined by implementation of an entropy weight method to reveal the primary parameters controlling tunnel failure. Additionally, the damage levels of the tunnel were quantitatively assigned by computing the degree of membership that different damage levels had, based on the expectation normalization method. The methods of maximum membership principle, comprehensive evaluation value, and fuzzy entropy were considered to determine the tunnel damage levels and risk of occurrence. The application of this method at the Ashele copper mine demonstrates that it meets the requirement of risk assessment for deep tunnel failure and can provide a basis for large-scale regional tunnel failure control in deep metal mines.


Epidemiologia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-324
Author(s):  
Juan M. Banda ◽  
Ramya Tekumalla ◽  
Guanyu Wang ◽  
Jingyuan Yu ◽  
Tuo Liu ◽  
...  

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread worldwide, an unprecedented amount of open data is being generated for medical, genetics, and epidemiological research. The unparalleled rate at which many research groups around the world are releasing data and publications on the ongoing pandemic is allowing other scientists to learn from local experiences and data generated on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there is a need to integrate additional data sources that map and measure the role of social dynamics of such a unique worldwide event in biomedical, biological, and epidemiological analyses. For this purpose, we present a large-scale curated dataset of over 1.12 billion tweets, growing daily, related to COVID-19 chatter generated from 1 January 2020 to 27 June 2021 at the time of writing. This data source provides a freely available additional data source for researchers worldwide to conduct a wide and diverse number of research projects, such as epidemiological analyses, emotional and mental responses to social distancing measures, the identification of sources of misinformation, stratified measurement of sentiment towards the pandemic in near real time, among many others.


2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haifeng Huang

AbstractFor a long time, since China’s opening to the outside world in the late 1970s, admiration for foreign socioeconomic prosperity and quality of life characterized much of the Chinese society, which contributed to dissatisfaction with the country’s development and government and a large-scale exodus of students and emigrants to foreign countries. More recently, however, overestimating China’s standing and popularity in the world has become a more conspicuous feature of Chinese public opinion and the social backdrop of the country’s overreach in global affairs in the last few years. This essay discusses the effects of these misperceptions about the world, their potential sources, and the outcomes of correcting misperceptions. It concludes that while the world should get China right and not misinterpret China’s intentions and actions, China should also get the world right and have a more balanced understanding of its relationship with the world.


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