scholarly journals Climate as an area of strategic intervention in urban development

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (20) ◽  
pp. 109-123
Author(s):  
Klaudia Plac
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Narrow Sense ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Strategic Commitment ◽  
Weather Events ◽  
Eu Policies ◽  
Climate Neutrality

EU policies currently place significant emphasis on the commitment to ensure climate neutrality. A substantial role in these efforts is to be played by cities and local communities. This paper seeks to fill the gap in the research on the strategic commitment in Polish cities regarding the climate issue. This study has two purposes. It aims to highlight the key fields of local authorities’ climate commitment and also ascertain the extent to which climate is approached as an area of strategic intervention in major Polish cities. The research shows that the matter of climate is viewed in a very narrow sense, with the local authorities’ commitment usually being dedicated to a few areas of intervention. The analysis points to three generations of strategic documents and shows that cities are more likely to address climate issues if they are significantly exposed to climate and climate-induced risks and extreme weather events. It is evident that urban development strategies in Polish cities follow EU policies and their commitment rarely surpass the scope of intervention detailed in these policies or mainstream concepts of urban governance and urban planning

A Step Change or a Step Back? The Thames Gateway and the Re-birth of the Urban Development Corporations

2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Raco
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Development Planning ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Sustainable Communities ◽  
Institutional Form ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Strategic Development ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
Development Agendas

The delivery of the government's Sustainable Communities: Building for the Future proposals in the Thames Gateway area will be spearheaded by two new Urban Development Corporations (UDCs). During the 1980s and 1990s, UDCs were at the forefront of property-led regeneration in Britain and their impacts were extremely controversial. For some they represented a necessary institutional form that successfully facilitated and delivered regeneration to areas with chronic social and economic problems. For others they embodied a broader Thatcherite programme that marginalised local authorities and local communities from the heart of development planning. This paper examines their reintroduction and compares and contrasts the new agencies with those that existed in earlier decades. It argues that although the new UDCs will have broadly similar powers, the political contexts in which they are being established differ markedly. They are now expected to embed themselves into regional and national strategic development agendas and work in development partnerships with local authorities and local communities. The paper outlines the possible political and practical impacts that they will have and what their emergence tells us about the nature of Labour's broader modernisation agendas for local governance.

Thunderslide - from rainfall to preliminary landslide mapping: implementing an open data-oriented framework for landscape management authorities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Crema ◽  
Lorenzo Marchi ◽  
Marco Borga ◽  
Marco Cavalli
Keyword(s):  
Debris Flow ◽  
Change Detection ◽  
Shallow Landslide ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Detection Accuracy ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Radar Rainfall ◽  
Weather Events ◽  
Flooded Areas

<p>Gathering systematic information on the effects of extreme weather events (e.g., flooded areas, shallow landslide and debris flow activations, windthrows) is a fundamental prerequisite for local authorities to put into practice management strategies and establishing early-intervention priorities. The collection of these data is a resource-demanding task requiring huge personnel effort and financial means. Furthermore, events occurring in remote areas with a low chance of intersecting human infrastructure, are rarely detected and mapped accurately, thus leading to incorrect assumptions in relation to both extreme events spatial distribution and especially to the real occurrence probability. The present work aims at tackling some of the above-mentioned issues by providing a framework for obtaining the automatic identification of severe weather events that may have caused important erosional processes or vegetation damage, combined with a quick and preliminary change detection mapping over the identified areas.<br>The proposed approach leverages the free availability of both high-resolution global scale radar rainfall products and Sentinel-2 multispectral images to identify the areas to be analyzed and to carry out change detection algorithms, respectively. Radar rainfall data are analyzed and areas where high intensity rainfall and/or very important cumulative precipitation has occurred are used as a mask for restricting the subsequent analysis, which, in turn, is based on a multispectral change detection algorithm.<br>The testing phase of the proposed methodology provided encouraging results:  applications to selected mountain catchments hit by the VAIA storm in northeastern Italy (October 2018) were capable of identifying flooded areas, debris-flow and shallow landslide activations and windthrows with good accuracy and with the ability to distinguish between erosional processes and windthrows.<br>The described approach can serve as a preliminary step toward detailed post-event surveys, but also as a preliminary “<em>quick and dirty</em>” mapping framework for local authorities especially when resources for ad hoc field surveys are not available.<br>Such a systematic potential change identification, in combination with regular expert-driven validation, can finally pave the way for a process of self-improvement in detection and classification accuracy: if classified changes are validated, machine-learning algorithms can be trained to learn and improve performance not only in change detection accuracy but also in single-scene classification. <br>Future improvements of the described procedure could be finally devised for allowing a continuous operational activity and for maintaining an open-source software implementation.</p>

scholarly journals How to Engage with Sustainability Issues We Rarely Experience? A Gamification Model for Collective Awareness Platforms in Water-Related Sustainability

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 712 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ksenia Koroleva ◽  
Jasminko Novak
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Water Scarcity ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Large Majority ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Online Experiments ◽  
Emergency Situations ◽  
Weather Events ◽  
Sustainability Challenges

Collective awareness platforms offer innovative ways to engage citizens in becoming aware of and contributing solutions to sustainability challenges, such as climate change, water scarcity, or extreme weather events. Although such platforms have been successful in engaging citizens to contribute and self-organize during or directly after emergency situations, it has proven rather hard to motivate citizens to participate in preparing their local communities to address sustainability challenges whose effects are likely to be felt in the future and which they have not experienced yet. In this paper, we discuss the development, implementation, and assessment of a gamification model for a collective awareness platform for water-related sustainability challenges. The model is designed to address the motivational drivers of different user types and uses visualization elements to support gamified interaction in a way that relates otherwise intangible, abstract issues to more immediate (short-term), tangible objectives. The model was empirically validated with 507 users through a series of online experiments. The results confirmed a positive motivational effect in a large majority of participants and the suitability of the model to address different user types and various water-related sustainability issues. The findings will inform the design of gamification models for collective awareness platforms in sustainability-related domains.

Modelling the Bioclimatic Niche of a Cohort of Selected Mite Species (Acari, Acariformes) Associated with the Infestation of Stored Products

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (5) ◽  
pp. 399-416
Author(s):  
V. M. Tytar ◽  
Ya. R. Oksentyuk
Keyword(s):  
Potential Evapotranspiration ◽  
Species Distribution Modeling ◽  
Mite Species ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Stored Products ◽  
Weather Events ◽  
Moisture Regimes ◽  
Bioclimatic Variables ◽  
Contemporary Climate ◽  
Future Management

Abstract In this study an attempt is made to highlight important variables shaping the current bioclimatic niche of a number of mite species associated with the infestation of stored products by employing a species distribution modeling (SDM) approach. Using the ENVIREM dataset of bioclimatic variables, performance of the most robust models was mostly influenced by: 1) indices based on potential evapotranspiration, which characterize ambient energy and are mostly correlated with temperature variables, moisture regimes, and 2) strong fluctuations in temperature reflecting the severity of climate and/or extreme weather events. Although the considered mite species occupy man-made ecosystems, they remain more or less affected by the surrounding bioclimatic environment and therefore could be subjected to contemporary climate change. In this respect investigations are needed to see how this will affect future management targets concerning the safety of food storages.

Urban Population Knowledge of Climate Change in Costa Rica and Nicaragua

2013 ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Sergio A. Molina Murillo
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Developing Countries ◽  
Costa Rica ◽  
Urban Population ◽  
Public Understanding ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Weather Events ◽  
International Policies ◽  
General Concern

Most scenarios indicate that people in developing countries are more vulnerable and less capable of adapting to climate change. Since our public understanding of risk toward climate change in developing countries is limited, this article presents results from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, two countries which are socio-economically distinct, but which are expected to suffer similar extreme weather events. From October of 2008 until May 2010, a total of 1,047 respondents were surveyed in cities of both countries. The main results indicate that climate change is a widely known concept but other notions such as “carbon footprint” are foreign to most respondents. Despite the general concern with its negative consequences, respondents’ foremost concern is linked to their socioeconomic situation, and how it will be impacted by climate change in such aspects as poverty and social security. The results presented here contribute to advance national and international policies aiming to support mitigation or adaptation strategies in developing countries.

Reliability, Resilience and the Oncoming Wave of Retiring Baseload Units, Volume I: The Critical Role of Thermal Units During Extreme Weather Events

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter C. Balash, PhD ◽  
Kenneth C. Kern ◽  
John Brewer ◽  
Justin Adder ◽  
Christopher Nichols ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Critical Role ◽  
Extreme Weather ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Weather Events

Governing climate change for sustainable food production: A case study of emerging markets

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-75
Author(s):  
Robert Ddamulira
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Sustainable Food ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Weather Events ◽  
Future Success ◽  
Governance Challenges ◽  
Change Impact ◽  
Document Review

This article addresses three research questions: How does climate change impact food production? What are the governance challenges associated with managing such impacts? What are the conditions for future success in managing the impacts of climate change on food production? To answer these questions, the researcher undertook a document review and analysis to address these various aspects with a major focus on East Africa. The study finds that climate change affects food production largely through its physical impacts on precipitation and increased the frequency of extreme weather events. Within a context of weak governance; climate change further challenges governance institutional structures and mechanisms. The study concludes that specific aspects of the prevailing climate change governance regime require major reforms (particularly the role of the state, corporations and civil society) while other climate governance mechanisms need to be completely overhauled (for example through establishment of a new World Environment Organization).

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