Suchergebnisse

"This book examines water resource management in China's electric power sector and the implications for energy provision in the face of an emerging national water crisis and global climate change. Over seventy five percent of China's current electricity comes from coal. Coal-fired power plants are reliant on water, with plants using significant volumes of water every year, yet water resources are unevenly distributed. In the face of serious environmental concerns and increasing electricity demand, this book examines the environmental impacts coal power plants have on water resources and the impact water availability has on the electricity sector in a country with a significant number of water-scarce provinces and a large number of power plants located on inland waterways. It discusses the water impacts and constraints for transforming the electric power sector away from coal to renewable energy sources, such as hydropower and Concentrated Solar Power. The book adopts a mix-method approach combining a plant-level quantitative analysis on water impacts and dependencies in China's electricity sector and a qualitative analysis of relevant institutions in both sectors. By reviewing policy and institution cases in China's water and electricity sectors, the book provides important recommendations calling for coordinated institutions shifting away from the current paradigm where water and electricity are governed independently. Enriching the water-energy nexus literature, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars working on water resource management, energy industries and Chinese environmental policy, as well as policymakers and practitioners in those fields."

"This volume provides an introduction for flood risk management practitioners, up-to-date methods for analysis of uncertainty and its use in risk-based decision making. It addresses decision making for both short-term (real-time forecasting) and long-term (flood risk planning under change) situations. It aims primarily at technical practitioners involved in flood risk analysis and flood warning, including hydrologists, engineers, flood modelers, risk analysts and those involved in the design and operation of flood warning systems."--

The implementation of large-scale containment measures by governments to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus has resulted in large impacts to the global economy. Here, we derive a new high-frequency indicator of economic activity using empirical vessel tracking data, and use it to estimate the global maritime trade losses during the first eight months of the pandemic. We go on to use this high-frequency dataset to infer the effect of individual non-pharmaceutical interventions on maritime exports, which we use as a proxy of economic activity. Our results show widespread port-level trade losses, with the largest absolute losses found for ports in China, the Middle-East and Western Europe, associated with the collapse of specific supply-chains (e.g. oil, vehicle manufacturing). In total, we estimate that global maritime trade reduced by -7.0% to -9.6% during the first eight months of 2020, which is equal to around 206-286 million tonnes in volume losses and up to 225-412 billion USD in value losses. We find large sectoral and geographical disparities in impacts. Manufacturing sectors are hit hardest, with losses up to 11.8%, whilst some small islands developing states and low-income economies suffered the largest relative trade losses. Moreover, we find a clear negative impact of COVID-19 related school and public transport closures on country-wide exports. Overall, we show how real-time indicators of economic activity can inform policy-makers about the impacts of individual policies on the economy, and can support economic recovery efforts by allocating funds to the hardest hit economies and sectors.

AbstractPotential increases in water demand, alongside uncertainties in water availability due to climate change, mean that Britain's water supply system could become increasingly stressed over the coming decades. Along with the need for secure water supplies, we must ensure that the supply is affordable and that sufficient water is available to safeguard the natural environment. Meeting these three separate goals of security, affordability and sustainability, with their inevitable trade‐offs, can be termed the 'water trilemma'. In this novel approach we simulate projections of river flows under population and climate change by using an aggregated national water resource model to test potential policies to manage demand and investments in water supply infrastructure in order to assess Britain's ability to meet its needs into the future. The results indicate that a balanced approach which allows for some inter‐basin water transfers while also engaging local solutions, including water re‐use, combined with scalable actions for demand management and leakage reduction, will best enable Britain to navigate this water trilemma.

This valuable edition brings together 25 peer reviewed articles on technical, socio-economic, environmental and policy aspects of flood risk management. Some emerging technologies are presented and several future challenges are identified. Thus the book forms an excellent reference for the engineers, scientists, planners, policy-makers, researchers, insurance industry and all the practitioners involved in flood risk management.

AbstractScour (localized erosion by water) is an important risk to bridges, and hence many infrastructure networks, around the world. In Britain, scour has caused the failure of railway bridges crossing rivers in more than 50 flood events. These events have been investigated in detail, providing a data set with which we develop and test a model to quantify scour risk. The risk analysis is formulated in terms of a generic, transferrable infrastructure network risk model. For some bridge failures, the severity of the causative flood was recorded or can be reconstructed. These data are combined with the background failure rate, and records of bridges that have not failed, to construct fragility curves that quantify the failure probability conditional on the severity of a flood event. The fragility curves generated are to some extent sensitive to the way in which these data are incorporated into the statistical analysis. The new fragility analysis is tested using flood events simulated from a spatial joint probability model for extreme river flows for all river gauging sites in Britain. The combined models appear robust in comparison with historical observations of the expected number of bridge failures in a flood event. The analysis is used to estimate the probability of single or multiple bridge failures in Britain's rail network. Combined with a model for passenger journey disruption in the event of bridge failure, we calculate a system‐wide estimate for the risk of scour failures in terms of passenger journey disruptions and associated economic costs.

AbstractInfrastructure adaptation measures provide a practical way to reduce the risk from extreme hydrometeorological hazards, such as floods and windstorms. The benefit of adapting infrastructure assets is evaluated as the reduction in risk relative to the "do nothing" case. However, evaluating the full benefits of risk reduction is challenging because of the complexity of the systems, the scarcity of data, and the uncertainty of future climatic changes. We address this challenge by integrating methods from the study of climate adaptation, infrastructure systems, and complex networks. In doing so, we outline an infrastructure risk assessment that incorporates interdependence, user demands, and potential failure‐related economic losses. Individual infrastructure assets are intersected with probabilistic hazard maps to calculate expected annual damages. Protection measure costs are integrated to calculate risk reduction and associated discounted benefits, which are used to explore the business case for investment in adaptation. A demonstration of the methodology is provided for flood protection of major electricity substations in England and Wales. We conclude that the ongoing adaptation program for major electricity assets is highly cost beneficial.

The United Nations Broadband Commission has committed the international community to accelerate universal broadband, but the cost of meeting these objectives in the context of rapid technological change are not well understood. Using scenario analysis, this paper compares the global cost-effectiveness of different infrastructure strategies for the developing world to achieve universal 4G or 5G mobile broadband. Utilizing remote sensing and demand forecasting, least-cost network designs are developed for eight representative low- and middle-income countries (Malawi, Uganda, Kenya, Senegal, Pakistan, Albania, Peru, and Mexico), which provide the basis for aggregation to the global level. The cost of meeting UN Broadband Commission targets across the developing world is estimated at $1.6-1.7 trillion over the next decade, approximately 0.5-0.6% of annual gross domestic product for the developing world over the next decade. However, by creating a favorable regulatory environment, governments can bring down these costs by as much as three-quarters – to US$0.5 trillion (around 0.15 percent of annual gross domestic product) – and largely avoid the need for public subsidies. While 4G technology remains somewhat more cost-effective at the global scale, 5G NSA can sometimes prove less costly at the national level, particularly for countries with relatively low existing coverage of 4G technologies, and a tendency to be capacity-constrained in terms of demand. Providing that governments make judicious choices, adopting fiscal and regulatory regimes that are conducive to lowering costs, universal broadband may be within reach of most developing countries over the next decade.

AbstractFailure of critical national infrastructures can result in major disruptions to society and the economy. Understanding the criticality of individual assets and the geographic areas in which they are located is essential for targeting investments to reduce risks and enhance system resilience. Within this study we provide new insights into the criticality of real‐life critical infrastructure networks by integrating high‐resolution data on infrastructure location, connectivity, interdependence, and usage. We propose a metric of infrastructure criticality in terms of the number of users who may be directly or indirectly disrupted by the failure of physically interdependent infrastructures. Kernel density estimation is used to integrate spatially discrete criticality values associated with individual infrastructure assets, producing a continuous surface from which statistically significant infrastructure criticality hotspots are identified. We develop a comprehensive and unique national‐scale demonstration for England and Wales that utilizes previously unavailable data from the energy, transport, water, waste, and digital communications sectors. The testing of 200,000 failure scenarios identifies that hotspots are typically located around the periphery of urban areas where there are large facilities upon which many users depend or where several critical infrastructures are concentrated in one location.

"July 1978." ; "Geotechnical Laboratory." ; "Final report." ; Cover title. ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Mode of access: Internet.

PurposeThe Foresight Future Flooding (FFF) project researched flood risk in the UK to the year 2100 for central government, using scenarios and a national risk assessment model backed by qualitative analysis from panels of some 45 senior scientists. The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of the project, both nationally and internationally.Design/methodology/approachThis paper assesses the impact of the FFF project, both nationally and internationally, using web searches, document analysis, and a questionnaire survey of key actors in the flood risk management policy field.FindingsIt was found that the penetration of the project into professionals' consciousness was high in relation to other comparable projects and publications, and its impact on policy – both immediately and continuing – was profound. The FFF initiative did not create policy change, however, but facilitated its legitimation, adding impetus to what was already there, as one element of a part‐catalytic and part‐incremental process of policy evolution.Research limitations/implicationsSpecial circumstances, internal and external to the project, mean that this cannot be a simple model for matching research to policymakers' needs in the future.Practical implicationsImportant lessons may be learnt from this project about both the methods of forward‐looking foresight‐type research, and the way that its results are disseminated to its target audiences.Originality/valueThis is an innovative attempt to assess the impact of a new type of foresight project.

The much awaited and intensely negotiated Paris Agreement was adopted on 12 December 2015 by the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The agreement set out a more ambitious long-term temperature goal than many had anticipated, implying more stringent emissions reductions that have been under-explored by the research community. By its very nature a multidisciplinary challenge, filling the knowledge gap requires not only climate scientists, but the whole Earth system science community, as well as economists, engineers, lawyers, philosophers, politicians, emergency planners and others to step up. To kick start cross-disciplinary discussions, the University of Oxford's Environmental Change Institute focused its 25th anniversary conference upon meeting the challenges of the Paris Agreement for science and society. This theme issue consists of review papers, opinion pieces and original research from some of the presentations within that meeting, covering a wide range of issues underpinning the Paris Agreement. This article is part of the theme issue 'The Paris Agreement: understanding the physical and social challenges for a warming world of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels'.