Adaptation policy and community discourse: risk,vulnerability, and just transformation

How can public engagement assist in the development of just processes and outcomes in adaptation discourse and policymaking? A concern with justice is at the center of thinking about adaptation that is not only resilient, but also public, engaging, and transformative. Theoretically, the intersection of adaptation, transformation, and environmental and climate justice is examined, before exploring the specific concerns and normative foundations for adaptation policy articulated by local governments, environmental groups, and local residents engaged in adaptation planning in Australia. Despite a discursive disconnect between governmental focus on a risk or resilience-based approach and a community concern with the vulnerability of basic needs and capabilities of everyday life, deliberative engagement in adaptation planning can both address issues of justice and represent a transformative practice.     

输变电工程电磁环境公众参与及环保对策探讨

以广州市部分变电站环境影响评价及其审批过程中的公众参与为例，归纳公众对输变电工程在电磁环境方面的感受和利益相关方的观点，并从科普宣传、确保达标、建立风险沟通机制、加强科研、改善公众交流策略等方面提出了环保对策。     

Supporting Diverse Data Providers in the Open Water Data Initiative: Communicating Water Data Quality and Fitness of Use

Shared, trusted, timely data are essential elements for the cooperation needed to optimize economic, ecologic, and public safety concerns related to water. The Open Water Data Initiative (OWDI) will provide a fully scalable platform that can support a wide variety of data from many diverse providers. Many of these will be larger, well‐established, and trusted agencies with a history of providing well‐documented, standardized, and archive‐ready products. However, some potential partners may be smaller, distributed, and relatively unknown or untested as data providers. The data these partners will provide are valuable and can be used to fill in many data gaps, but can also be variable in quality or supplied in nonstandardized formats. They may also reflect the smaller partners' variable budgets and missions, be intermittent, or of unknown provenance. A challenge for the OWDI will be to convey the quality and the contextual “fitness” of data from providers other than the most trusted brands. This article reviews past and current methods for documenting data quality. Three case studies are provided that describe processes and pathways for effective data‐sharing and publication initiatives. They also illustrate how partners may work together to find a metadata reporting threshold that encourages participation while maintaining high data integrity. And lastly, potential governance is proposed that may assist smaller partners with short‐ and long‐term participation in the OWDI.     

Plant blindness and the implications for plant conservation

Plant conservation initiatives lag behind and receive considerably less funding than animal conservation projects. We explored a potential reason for this bias: a tendency among humans to neither notice nor value plants in the environment. Experimental research and surveys have demonstrated higher preference for, superior recall of, and better visual detection of animals compared with plants. This bias has been attributed to perceptual factors such as lack of motion by plants and the tendency of plants to visually blend together but also to cultural factors such as a greater focus on animals in formal biological education. In contrast, ethnographic research reveals that many social groups have strong bonds with plants, including nonhierarchical kinship relationships. We argue that plant blindness is common, but not inevitable. If immersed in a plant‐affiliated culture, the individual will experience language and practices that enhance capacity to detect, recall, and value plants, something less likely to occur in zoocentric societies. Therefore, conservation programs can contribute to reducing this bias. We considered strategies that might reduce this bias and encourage plant conservation behavior. Psychological research demonstrates that people are more likely to support conservation of species that have human‐like characteristics and that support for conservation can be increased by encouraging people to practice empathy and anthropomorphism of nonhuman species. We argue that support for plant conservation may be garnered through strategies that promote identification and empathy with plants.     

Bourdieu,environmental NGOs,and Australian climate politics

Environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Australia have struggled to generate and sustain public concern about climate change. If debates about climate policy can be viewed as sites of contestation between competing actors, Australia’s environmental NGOs have found it difficult to compete against countervailing forces that have sought to shape public attitudes to climate action and the contours of policy responses. While to a significant degree this reflects the power of those forces and the sentiments of the government of the day, there is also a case to be made that some of Australia’s most prominent environmental NGOs have appeared wedded to strategies inconsistent with building or sustaining public support for action or guiding policy responses. How have Australia’s largest environmental NGOs engaged climate politics, and why has this engagement taken that form? Pierre Bourdieu’s political sociology provides unique insight for coming to terms with the multifaceted nature of the constraints, opportunities, and drivers of political action, from the context of climate politics to the forces behind Australian NGOs’ engagement with that politics, and the limits of that engagement. Bourdieu’s work also suggests possible avenues for more effective forms of political communication on climate change in the Australian context.     

The role of digital data entry in participatory environmental monitoring

Many argue that monitoring conducted exclusively by scientists is insufficient to address ongoing environmental challenges. One solution entails the use of mobile digital devices in participatory monitoring (PM) programs. But how digital data entry affects programs with varying levels of stakeholder participation, from nonscientists collecting field data to nonscientists administering every step of a monitoring program, remains unclear. We reviewed the successes, in terms of management interventions and sustainability, of 107 monitoring programs described in the literature (hereafter programs) and compared these with case studies from our PM experiences in Australia, Canada, Ethiopia, Ghana, Greenland, and Vietnam (hereafter cases). Our literature review showed that participatory programs were less likely to use digital devices, and 2 of our 3 more participatory cases were also slow to adopt digital data entry. Programs that were participatory and used digital devices were more likely to report management actions, which was consistent with cases in Ethiopia, Greenland, and Australia. Programs engaging volunteers were more frequently reported as ongoing, but those involving digital data entry were less often sustained when data collectors were volunteers. For the Vietnamese and Canadian cases, sustainability was undermined by a mismatch in stakeholder objectives. In the Ghanaian case, complex field protocols diminished monitoring sustainability. Innovative technologies attract interest, but the foundation of effective participatory adaptive monitoring depends more on collaboratively defined questions, objectives, conceptual models, and monitoring approaches. When this foundation is built through effective partnerships, digital data entry can enable the collection of more data of higher quality. Without this foundation, or when implemented ineffectively or unnecessarily, digital data entry can be an additional expense that distracts from core monitoring objectives and undermines project sustainability. The appropriate role of digital data entry in PM likely depends more on the context in which it is used and less on the technology itself.     

Infrastructure development through PPPs in India: criteria for sustainability assessment

Public private partnerships (PPPs) allow the Indian Government to leverage private capital for meeting the widening demand-supply gap in the provision of infrastructure services. The private sector, however, prefers to limit the participation to financially attractive projects only, thereby resulting in patterns of infrastructure creation impeding the progress towards sustainable development. In order to promote sustainable development, the PPP procurement process should focus on incentivising the private sector for sustainable infrastructure development rather than concentrating on ensuring financial sustainability only. This paper discusses the principles-based PPP-specific framework that has been developed to facilitate assessment of PPP projects' progress towards sustainable development. The framework development was based on a holistic approach to sustainability assessment and subsequently validated through questionnaire survey with key stakeholders in the Indian PPP programme. This framework will provide the decision makers with appropriate decision aid for integration of sustainable development principles in the PPP procurement process.     

城市重点公共区域人群聚集风险的实时定量技术

城市公共区域人群高度聚集且流动性大,紧急状态时易发生群死群伤的拥挤踩踏事故,造成大量人员伤亡和社会负面影响。在FIST模型的基础上,提出以人员密度（D）、人员特性（C）、人与人的相互作用（I）以及人群聚集环境（E）作为表征公共场所人群聚集风险的基本参数,接下来对四个参数进行了相应的技术分析。第一,利用人群监控技术估计人群密度;第二,通过现场监测网络得到的人群压力值来表征人与人相互作用的强度;第三,忽略了个体差异对人群整体的影响;第四,把公共场所中导致事故发生的影响因子归结为综合扰动强度,并建立了相应的数学模型表征了这种强度的大小。最终建立了描述人群聚集风险的DICE模型。同时,给出了人群密度阈值、人群压力阈值以及人群聚集风险的总阈值及其判断标准,整个工作将人群聚集风险实时定量及管理技术推向了实用化的道路。     

公共部门危机学习动态过程及其知识管理研究

当前国内外对企业组织学习和危机管理的研究都已经较为成熟,在经历了几次大的危机之后,公共危机管理引起了我国许多学者的重视,但是关于高校危机学习的研究开展并不多,而国外的学者已经先一步提出了危机学习的概念并取得一些进展。随着危机种类越来越多,发生频率越来越高,高校必须要学习掌握应对危机的方法,并以此来教育学生。然而,无论是在危机管理中还是在组织学习中,知识管理都是不可或缺的一部分。因此本文以理论研究的方式,借鉴国内外学者对危机学习中知识管理的研究,希望能对高校危机学习的更深一步探索提供思路。