New policies to deal with climate change and other drivers impacting on resilience to flooding in urban areas: the CORFU approach

In the context of urban flood management, resilience is equal to resisting, recovering, reflecting and responding. The variety of causes of flooding and their consequences underpin the need for increased and internationally coordinated efforts to enhance technologies and policies for dealing with floods. This paper addresses this issue and presents some novel research ideas related to resilience to flooding in urban areas, which are under development within the EU FP7 project ‘Collaborative research on flood resilience in urban areas’ (CORFU). The approach adopted in this project aims to quantify the cost-effectiveness of resilience measures and integrative and adaptable flood management plans for different scenarios of relevant drivers: urban development, socio-economic trends and climate changes. It is believed that the way in which the different models are being put together, combined with the variability of conditions in case study areas in Asia and in Europe, will ultimately enable more scientifically sound policies for the management of the consequences of urban flooding.     

Adapting to climate change: reducing water-related risks in Europe – EU policy and research considerations

Climate change impacts on the hydrological cycle, e.g. leading to changes of precipitation patterns, have been observed over several decades. Higher water temperatures and changes in extremes hydrometeorological events (including floods and droughts) are likely to exacerbate different types of pressures on water resources with possible negative impacts on ecosystems and human health. In addition, sea-level rise is expected to extend areas of salinisation of groundwater and estuaries, resulting in a decrease of freshwater availability for humans and ecosystems in coastal areas. Furthermore, climate-related changes in water quantity and quality are expected to affect food availability, water access and utilisation, especially in arid and semi-arid areas, as well as the operation of water infrastructure (e.g. hydropower, flood defences, and irrigation systems). This paper serves as an introduction to the special issue of Environment Science & Policy dealing with climate change impacts on water-related disasters. It provides a brief background about relevant EU water policies and examples of EU-funded research trends which illustrate on-going efforts to improve understanding and modelling of climate changes related to the hydrological cycles at scales that are relevant to decision making (possibly linked to policy).     

Gravitational Microlensing

   Gravitational lensing – i.e. light deflection by gravity – has become an important tool for exploring our Universe, in particular to determine its matter content. There are cases in which the deflection angles are tiny, of the order of milliarcseconds or smaller, such that the multiple images are not observable. However, lensing magnifies the affected source, and since the lens and the source are moving relative to each other, this can be detected as a time-variable brightness. This behaviour is referred to as gravitational microlensing, a very powerful method to search for dark matter in the halo of our own Galaxy, if it consists of massive astrophysical compact halo objects (MACHOs), and to study the content of low-mass stars in the galactic disk. Since the discovery of the first microlensing events in September 1993 by monitoring millions of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and in the direction of the galactic centre, more than 200 events have been found. Preliminary analysis of the events towards the LMC indicate that the halo dark-matter fraction in the form of MACHOs is of the order of 50%, assuming a standard spherical halo model. This article provides an overview of gravitational microlensing and of the main results achieved so far. Indeed, gravitational microlensing research has expanded very rapidly in the last few years, and many new applications have been suggested, including the detection of Earth-like planets around stars in our Galaxy.     

Carbon leakage and capacity-based allocations: Is the EU right?

Competitiveness and carbon leakage are major concerns for the design of CO₂ emissions permits markets. In the absence of a global carbon tax and of border carbon adjustments, output-based allocation is a third-best solution and is actually implemented (Australia, California, New Zealand). The EU has followed a different route; free allowances are allocated to existing or new capacities in proportion to a benchmark, independent of actual production. This paper compares these two schemes in a formal setting and shows that the optimal one is in fact a combination of both schemes, or output-based allocation alone if uncertainty is limited. A key assumption of our analysis is that the short-term import pressure depends both on the existing capacities and the level of demand, which is typical in capital intensive and internationally traded sectors. A calibration of the model is used to discuss the EU scheme for the cement sector in the third phase of the EU-ETS (2013–2020). This allows for a quantification of various policies in terms of welfare, investment, production, company profits, public revenues and leakage.     

Ecology of juvenile hawksbills (Eretmochelys imbricata) at Buck Island Reef National Monument, US Virgin Islands

Surveys of juvenile hawksbills around Buck Island Reef National Monument, US Virgin Islands from 1994 to 1999 revealed distributional patterns and resulted in a total of 75 individual hawksbill captures from all years; turtles ranged from 23.2 to 77.7 cm curved carapace length (CCL; mean 42.1 ± 12.3 cm SD). Juveniles concentrated where Zoanthid cover was highest. Length of time between recaptures, or presumed minimum site residency, ranged from 59 to 1,396 days (mean 620.8 ± 402.4 days SD). Growth rates for 23 juveniles ranged from 0.0 to 9.5 cm year^?1 (mean 4.1 ± 2.4 cm year^?1SD). Annual mean growth rates were non-monotonic, with the largest mean growth rate occurring in the 30–39 cm CCL size class. Gastric lavages indicated that Zoanthids were the primary food source for hawksbills. These results contribute to our understanding of juvenile hawksbill ecology and serve as a baseline for future studies or inventories of hawksbills in the Caribbean.