Correction to: Allocation of risk and benefits—distributional justices in mountain hazard management

As financing protection against mountain hazards becomes increasingly challenging and therefore investments have to be prioritized, dilemmas of justice emerge: some local governments and individuals benefit from natural hazard protection schemes, whereas others loose. Decisions on whom to protect often caused contradicting concepts of political understanding, which differ in interpretations of fair resource allocation and distribution. This paper analyses the impact of different philosophical schools of social justice on mountain hazard management in Austria. We used data from a spatially explicit, object-based assessment of elements at risk and compared potential distributional effects of three political jurisdictions. We found that—depending on the respective political direction—various local governments gain and others loose within the actual distributional system of mitigation strategies. The implementation of a utilitarian policy approach would cause that high income communities in hazard-prone areas would mainly benefit. Consequently, this policy direction would encourage the public administration to ignore their own failure in the past natural hazards management and prevention. On the other hand, following a Rawlsians approach mainly peripheral communities would gain from new policy direction who often show besides natural hazards problem mainly large socio-economic challenges. Finally, the most radical change would include the implementation of a liberalism policy, whereabouts the state only provides hazard information, but no further mitigation measures. These findings highlight the distributional consequences of future mountain hazard management strategies and point to the crucial selection of policy direction in navigating the selection of various adaptation schemes.

     

A time-saving method for higher plant tests in hydroculture

For higher plant tests in hydroculture we developed a method to unify the usually separately performed germination and growth testing. This method renders unnecessary the time-consuming and laborious installation of the germinated plants into the growth system.     

Debris removal by head-pushing in A. florea Fabr. honeybees

 The nest of the dwarf honeybee A. florea Fabr. consists of a single comb attached to a tree branch. Recruitment dances take place on the upper surface of the comb that must therefore be kept clear of debris. We report here, for the first time, a behaviour that serves for removing leaves and other foreign objects from the surface of the comb. Individual workers crawl under the object and lift it with their heads, pushing it towards the rim where it eventually slides off the comb. Objects that are heavier or fixed at one end such as leaves are nevertheless lifted and kept away from the surface for up to several minutes. This "head-pushing" is frequently performed without the aid of mandibles, and individuals performing it maintain a distinctive posture, holding the forelegs at an angle without touching the object. Repeated involvement of particular individuals indicate that head-pushers might form a distinct task group. Received: 24 November 1999 / Accepted in revised form: 10 March 2000     

Developing consistent scenarios to assess flood hazards in mountain streams

The characterizing feature of extreme events in steep mountain streams is the multiplicity of possible tipping process patterns such as those involving sudden morphological changes due to intense local erosion, aggradation as well as clogging of critical flow sections due to wood accumulations. Resolving a substantial part of the uncertainties underlying these hydrological cause-effect chains is a major challenge for flood risk management. Our contribution is from a methodological perspective based on an expert-based methodology to unfold natural hazard process scenarios in mountain streams to retrace their probabilistic structure. As a first step we set up a convenient system representation for natural hazard process routing. In this setting, as a second step, we proceed deriving the possible and thus consistent natural hazard process patterns by means of Formative Scenario Analysis. In a last step, hazard assessment is refined by providing, through expert elicitation, the spatial probabilistic structure of individual scenario trajectories. As complement to the theory the applicability of the method is shown through embedded examples. To conclude we discuss the major advantages of the presented methodological approach for hazard assessment compared to traditional approaches, and with respect to the risk governance process.     

Molecular Mechanisms of Bacterial Pathogenicity

Vibrio cholerae   or Shigella dysenteriae kill about 3 million persons every year, most of them young children: Another 4 million die of tuberculosis or tetanus. Outbreaks of diphtheria in Eastern Europe threatens the population with a disease that had previously seemed to be overcome. Efforts to control infectious diseases more comprehensively are undermined not only by socioeconomic conditions but also by the nature of the pathogenic organisms itself; some isolates of Staphylococcus aureus and Enterobacter have become so resistant to drugs by horizontal gene transfer that they are almost untreatable. In addition, the mechanism of genetic variability helps pathogens to evade the human immune system, thus compromising the development of powerful vaccines. Therefore detailed knowledge of the molecular mechanisms of microbial pathogenicity is absolutely necessary to develop new strategies against infectious diseases and thus to lower their impact on human health and social development.