Farming the floodplain: New England river governance in a changing climate

Climate change is increasingly impacting marine protected areas (MPAs) and MPA networks, yet adaptation strategies are rarely incorporated into MPA design and management plans according to the primary scientific literature. Here we review the state of knowledge for adapting existing and future MPAs to climate change and synthesize case studies (n=27) of how marine conservation planning can respond to shifting environmental conditions. First, we derive a generalized conservation planning framework based on five published frameworks that incorporate climate change adaptation to inform MPA design. We then summarize examples from the scientific literature to assess how conservation goals were defined, vulnerability assessments performed and adaptation strategies incorporated into the design and management of existing or new MPAs. Our analysis revealed that 82% of real-world examples of climate change adaptation in MPA planning derive from tropical reefs, highlighting the need for research in other ecosystems and habitat types. We found contrasting recommendations for adaptation strategies at the planning stage, either focusing only on climate refugia, or aiming for representative protection of areas encompassing the full range of expected climate change impacts. Recommendations for MPA management were more unified and focused on adaptative management approaches. Lastly, we evaluate common barriers to adopting climate change adaptation strategies based on reviewing studies which conducted interviews with MPA managers and other conservation practitioners. This highlights a lack of scientific studies evaluating different adaptation strategies and shortcomings in current governance structures as two major barriers, and we discuss how these could be overcome. Our review provides a comprehensive synthesis of planning frameworks, case studies, adaptation strategies and management actions which can inform a more coordinated global effort to adapt existing and future MPA networks to continued climate change.

Over the past twenty years, China has become a key manufacturer in the global industrial chain, a global financial heavyweight, and a growing important player in the international political arena. These developments are mirrored by rapidly increasing energy demand, which have turned China into a net oil importing country since 1993. In order to maintain its domestic development, the country started to secure supplies through progressive energy diplomacy and through turning its nationally owned energy companies into internationally operating ones. China's outbound foreign direct investment in oil and gas surpassed US$15 billion in 2010. Its largest oil firm, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), is currently operating eighty upstream projects with over 80 million tons of oil operated in 29 countries, spearheading the country's drive of energy expansion as a flagship globally. China has been primarily concerned with the sustainable development of its domestic economy. Yet the country's role in energy issues on the global level has exposed it to growing international expectations. Even if bilateral and multilateral relations on energy issues are a challenge under the current governance structure, China has begun to play a more proactive role in regional energy governance platforms over the past years and will continue to do so globally. I discuss three governance areas of particular importance from a Chinese perspective: (1) global energy security, the challenge of establishing international regimes securing access to and flow of energy independent of particular political issues; (2) resource governance in host countries, the responsibility to develop and deploy tools and initiatives to help avoid the resource curse syndrome and foster development in resource-rich developing countries; and (3) climate change, the necessity to agree to effective mechanisms to reduce C02 emissions without compromising the right to development of individual countries. Cooperation with the IEA, IEF, and G20 to Deal with Global Energy Issues The International Energy Agency (IEA), the energy arm of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), began to strengthen its relations with non-member countries in the early 1990s. Among key non-member states are Russia, China, Brazil, and India. The IEA reached an agreement with China in 1996 when the country realized the importance of working with the intergovernmental organization on issues such as strategic reserves, price monitoring, and statistical reviews. In the wake of several dialogues and workshops, the parties encountered some difficulties in expanding their cooperation because of both the IEA's narrow focus on the interests of its members and Chinese limits to deeper cooperation. The IEA is an energy club of the OECD countries and an energy watchdog of its key members like the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Japan. China, as a non-member country, had been reluctant to disclose data at similar levels as IEA members. Even if overall exchanges with the IEA have been satisfactory, China remains less likely to fully cooperate with the IEA on energy policy reviews or as a full IEA member. After a few years of stagnation (2002-2008), cooperation restarted in 2009 through initiatives such as pilot development of new energy, technology development, and energy management. It is valuable for China to learn about advanced country expertise and experiences from OECD countries through the IEA. Likewise, the IEA has come to a better understanding of China's energy policy and how it may contribute to enhancing governance. In order to strengthen global energy governance, advisers to Western countries requested to bring China and India into the global energy system. This can be relevant in the sense that the global energy market cannot be well governed without Chinese and Indian participation. This message is well received in Beijing and understood. …

This study attempts to investigate potential impacts of future climate change on streamflow and reservoir operation performance in a Northern American Prairie watershed. System Dynamics is employed as an effective methodology to organize and integrate existing information available on climate change scenarios, watershed hydrologic processes, reservoir operation and water resource assessment system. The second version of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis Coupled Global Climate Model is selected to generate the climate change scenarios with daily climatic data series for hydrologic modeling. Watershed-based hydrologic and reservoir water dynamics modeling focuses on dynamic processes of both streamflow generation driven by climatic conditions, and the reservoir water dynamics based on reservoir operation rules. The reliability measure describes the effectiveness of present reservoir operation rules to meet various demands which are assumed to remain constant for the next 100 years in order to focus the study on the understanding of the structure and the behaviour of the water supply. Simulation results demonstrate that future climate variation and change may bring more high-peak-streamflow occurrences and more abundant water resources. Current reservoir operation rules can provide a high reliability in drought protection and flood control.

The case presented in this chapter provides a prototype for using collaborative processes in large-scale conservation. The most important lesson of the chapter is that developing a program that addresses real-world social and environmental problems in ways that truly meet the common interest is both slow and time consuming. The Humboldt Bay Initiative (HBI) is composed of scientists, resource managers, and community members who came together to address the environmental problems of Humboldt Bay and its surrounding lands. The initial impetus for the group’s formation was frustration with the existing arena for addressing natural resource issues in the region. The arena featured polarized public discourse, fragmented jurisdictions, and decision making that was insufficiently contextual, both socially and biophysically. In its place, the group adopted an ecosystem-based management approach that is not only rooted in ecological science but also recognizes the importance of using governance mechanisms to solve environmental problems. Its successes to date have relied on strong leadership and robust collaboration among stakeholders. Its future depends on developing an institutional structure that enables it to interface with policy makers despite the fact that the current governance and constitutive structures are not designed to allow an independent group such as HBI to integrate easily into the decision-making processes.

The exceptional low water inflows and the inadequate water allocation during the early 21st century led to a crisis in the Colorado River Basin (CRB). The crisis revealed the vulnerability of the system and the needed of changes of the water policies. Climate change worsen water scarcity and increase the risk of extreme drought events, with impacts on the water-dependent economic sectors in the USA and Mexico. Water management requires policy interventions to address the emerging conditions resulting from climate change. The submitted paper analyzes the risk and economic impacts of climate change in the CRB. Using a hydro-economic model (HEM), we compare the economic benefit of the current allocation rules with alternative policies: cap-and-trade and social planner allocations. The HEM incorporates hydrology, agriculture (39 crops across 2.2 million acres distributed in 40 irrigation districts), urban water use (379 cities, 33.4 million people), and hydropower generation (9 plants, 10,225 gigawatt-hours annually). Future runoff simulations are based on climate change projections and a statistical method called copula, which generates synthetic time series of water inflows with similar characteristics to the projections. The model operates on a monthly temporal scale over a simulation window of 30 years. The model operates on a monthly timescale over 30 years, with 100 simulations for each policy under both historical and projected climate conditions.The results are interpreted statistically to provide a range of potential outcomes and their likelihood. The analysis reveals the probabilistic distribution of water curtailments and their impacts on different users and regions. The analysis provides insights into the basin's vulnerability to climate change. The economic benefits of the social planner water allocation are compared under the current policy and a cap-and-trade policy to assess the costs associated with each. The analysis explores the potential benefits of water trade among sectors, states, and Tribal Nations, identifying potential cooperative arrangements among stakeholders. Inter-state cooperation and economically beneficial arrangements among stakeholders could enhance water use efficiency. The rigidity of the current system can lead to maladaptation to climate change. The agricultural sector is examined to identify potential crop pattern changes for adaptation. Additionally, the analysis assesses risks within urban areas. The shadow price of water in the border between the USA and Mexico is estimated as a proxy of the compensation from water users in United States to those in Mexico.

The current growth of individualisation, rising middle classes and diversified mobility have been significant in the development of theoretical approaches to mobility in China. Recreational second homes, intended for consumption purposes including health, retirement and lifestyle, are growing in amenity destinations. This is significantly driven by tourism development, land economy and ambitions for growth from multiple governmental scales, and it is closely linked with the wider context of migration, housing, equity and sustainability. Despite the scale and quantity of second home growth, governance development is lagging behind. The current urban governance structure is formulated for a static and immobile society rather than responding to a rapidly changing and fluid society. Second home ownership therefore poses significant challenges for governing with respect not only to managing the balance of permanent and temporary residents, but also the dynamics of political representation, sustainable neighbourhood development and destination communities. Yet, no research has been carried out addressing this emerging and important challenge in China. This chapter seeks a contextual understanding of how frameworks at multiple levels are entwined and articulated in the locale and demonstrates the differentiated political schema and power structures motivating the development of second home migration and challenges to governance structures. A case study is conducted in Sanya, a city in Hainan province, where in-depth analysis examines the conflict and negotiation of mobility governance, political regime and economic development strategies. Further investigation will look into the special trajectory of development and the neighbourhood impacts of second homes.

Background: Sterile processing departments (SPDs) are foundational to perioperative safety and play a critical role in preventing surgical-site infections and ensuring procedural reliability. Despite this essential function, SPD professionals often report limited organizational visibility and constrained decision-making authority. Many also experience insufficient integration into formal governance structures. Empirical literature examining the relationship among reporting structures, professional autonomy, and patient safety outcomes in SPDs remains limited. Methods: A convergent mixed-methods design was used in this study. A structured survey of 89 SPD professionals was conducted to quantify perceptions of reporting relationships, leadership support, and adherence to sterilization protocols. Open-ended responses were also collected to capture qualitative insights. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Qualitative responses were examined through inductive thematic coding to identify recurring organizational and cultural factors influencing professional autonomy and operational performance. Results: Most respondents reported administratively reporting to nursing or supply chain leadership. Participants generally expressed low to moderate confidence in leadership's understanding of SPD workflows. In addition, 43% of respondents reported experiencing pressure to circumvent established sterilization protocols. Qualitative analysis identified 13 dominant themes. Key themes included the need for greater professional autonomy, formal leadership development, stronger interdisciplinary alignment, standardized credentialing, and improved professional recognition. Conclusion: The findings suggested that current governance structures may limit SPD operational authority and introduce potential risks to patient safety. Organizational restructuring may help strengthen SPD leadership and decision-making capacity. Establishing formal credentialing standards and leadership development pathways may also be beneficial. Greater integration of SPD leadership into executive decision-making processes could improve compliance with sterilization standards and support higher-quality perioperative outcomes.

Identifying deficits in Ukrainian law: Forensic psychiatry misuse in proceedings of administrative offenses

Black CarbonThe Dark Horse of Climate Change Drivers F or decades, efforts to slow global warming have mostly aimed to limit heat-trapping emissions of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ).Now scientists are pointing to a different class of warming agents they say also must be targeted to keep global temperatures in check.Dubbed "shortlived climate forcings" (SLCFs), these other emissionsnamely, black carbon particles, methane, hydrofluorocarbons, and tropospheric ozone-are even more powerful than CO 2 in terms of their warming potential.But they persist in the atmosphere for much shorter durations than CO 2 , which can linger airborne for hundreds to thousands of years. 1 Steve Seidel, vice president for policy analysis at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, says the recent emphasis on SLCFs represents new policy thinking on climate change."We thought the Kyoto Protocol and its follow-on agreements would get us to where we need to be, but that's not working out the way we hoped it would," he says."So, we're broadening the discussion and opening up new pathways for going forward."More than three-quarters of the world's black carbon is thought to come from developing countries, discharged from cookstoves, open burning, and older diesel engines.This data visualization uses data from NASA's GEOS-5 Goddard Chemistry Aerosol and Transport (GOCART) climate model to show atmospheric concentrations of black carbon on 26 September 2009.Aerosol optical thickness ranges nonlinearly from 0.002 (transparent) to 0.02 (purple) to 0.2 (white).Animations of global black soot transport are available at

Climate change and accelerating socioeconomic developments increasingly challenge flood-risk management in the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta—a typical large, economically dynamic and highly vulnerable delta. This study identifies and addresses the emerging challenges for flood-risk management. Furthermore, we identify and analyse response solutions, focusing on meaningful configurations of the individual solutions and how they can be tailored to specific challenges using expert surveys, content analysis techniques and statistical inferences. Our findings show that the challenges for flood-risk management are diverse, but critical challenges predominantly arise from the current governance and institutional settings. The top-three challenges include weak collaboration, conflicting management objectives and low responsiveness to new issues. We identified 114 reported solutions and developed six flood management strategies that are tailored to specific challenges. We conclude that the current technology-centric flood management approach is insufficient given the rapid socioecological changes. This approach therefore should be adapted towards a more balanced management configuration where technical and infrastructural measures are combined with institutional and governance resolutions. Insights from this study contribute to the emerging repertoire of contemporary flood management solutions, especially through their configurations and tailoring to specific challenges.

Governance of climate change has become a major global environmental issue in the 21st century, and in the absence of wider citizen engagement poses risks of global proportions. Much of the current climate governance debate, unfortunately, is limited to scientists, politicians, and interest groups. With few exceptions, everyday citizens are spectators at best, their views, if not absent, are dismally represented in policy processes. To close the widening gap between citizens and policymakers, thereby increasing the sense of ownership of environmental policies by ordinary people, several methods of citizen engagement for global environmental governance have emerged. The effectiveness of these methods, however, relies upon the ability of citizens to deliberate meaningfully, especially in issues such as climate change. We conducted a study in conjunction with World Wide Views on Climate and Energy, a global citizen consultation that aims to solicit carefully considered public views on pressing issues, to determine whether American citizens are receptive to deliberation, and to ascertain what effect it had on their opinions, if any, could be observed. Along with the descriptive analysis, we performed a non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test of selected pre-and post-event opinions of the participants from the US. Our study revealed that providing US citizens with the opportunity to engage in deliberation resulted in increased awareness regarding climate change and greater trust in science, technology, and international agreements. The change in opinion was more pronounced among people whose political orientation titled to the right or who considered themselves as neutral. Citizen’s opinions, especially after the event, resulted in less polarized views towards the global consensus on climate change. This finding suggests that US citizens are receptive to scientific information if it is communicated in an appropriate manner – a characteristic necessary for the creation of deliberative democratic governance on socially contested issues.

This article describes the implementation of a trust-wide shared governance structure in Barts and The London National Health Service Trust in the United Kingdom. Barts and The London is a large teaching trust, employing over 6,500 staff. The implementation process is described in detail and is followed by details of the current shared governance structure, an overview of the evaluation of the structure, and the objectives of each of the four nursing teams: the Quality, Management, Education, and Clinical Practice Teams. Also included are examples of the achievements of each of the teams and a personal account of one nurse who joined the Trust after shared governance had been implemented.

The paper studies the changes of welfare and ecosystem service value (ESV) in urbanization process under the fact that the land is a kind of ecological capital. We develop a model to analyze the impact of the current hybrid governance structure on the welfare changes for different groups of actors and calculate the ESV changes caused by the urbanization in the Hang-Jia-Hu region (China) between 1994 and 2003. The results show that the farmers’ welfare and the net social welfare will be changed comparing to the results of Rong TAN, Futian QU (2011) and the ESV decreases; the declines of ESV can reach up to 3% of the GDP in the study region.

This paper interrogates the nexus between climate justice and policy-driven equity, placing a spotlight on the disproportionate vulnerabilities faced by marginalized groups, including women, Indigenous peoples, and low-income communities, in the global climate arena. It argues for incorporating diverse perspectives in decision-making processes and shows how historical injustices, particularly those rooted in colonial legacies, continue to shape current climate governance structures. Using illustrative examples, the manuscript demonstrates how local initiatives that prioritize community engagement and empowerment can effectively tailor climate strategies to address the specific needs of impacted populations. Moreover, it emphasizes the critical role of interdisciplinary collaboration, spanning public health, urban planning, and environmental protection, in crafting climate policies that mitigate environmental impacts while promoting social justice. Ultimately, this study offers practical insights and strategies for policymakers, researchers, and advocates committed to building resilient and inclusive climate policies, underscoring that embedding equity in global climate action is essential for achieving a sustainable and just future for all communities.

Subsidiarity and Environmental Federalism: The Emergence of 'New Governance' in Finfish Aquaculture in Canada