Networking emergency teams in Jerusalem

With the recent upsurge in terrorism, more and more attention is being directed at examining the effectiveness and efficiency of emergency teams. These teams tend to focus on their areas of expertise without necessarily communicating, cooperating or coordinating their operations. Research suggests that improved interpersonal communication and coordination enhances the overall work of each emergency team, and that their combined effort is far in excess of the sum of their individual endeavours. This paper outlines attempts made in Jerusalem to improve the performance of emergency teams and to help the helpers by holding training workshops, setting up a forum of co‐workers and encouraging dialogue among various emergency teams in the city. A planned intervention programme was designed to enable informal networking between team leaders. The programme had an impact on team workers and resulted in a more coordinated and effective service delivery during emergencies.     

Estimating the marginal cost of nature conservation: evidence from Israel

Contrary to many studies regarding the efficient use of resources that measure the marginal cost of nature conservation by looking at a specific objective and asks about efficient way to achieve it, this article tries to estimate the (marginal) cost of nature conservation in a more flexible way. Instead of looking at a specific objective and then not being able to compare different objectives, we take an approach that is based on experts’ valuation of increased satisfaction from nature conservation. We trace the marginal cost of conservation from their answers and use official cost statistics. Officials in the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority (NPA) were surveyed to determine the activities required to increase the level of nature conservation in two districts of the NPA as well as nationwide. We determined the costs of these proposed activities, and subsequently were able to calculate the total cost and marginal cost of conservation efforts. When operating on a limited budget, conservation authorities can use these schedules as an additional tool to help determine the efficiency of different proposed activities both on a regional scale and nationwide, and to ensure the sustainability of the resulting conservation. In addition, our results demonstrate the existence of economies of scale in nature conservation, and the benefit of both bottom-up and top-down decision processes in nature conservation.