Download or read book Resource Efficiency Complexity and the Commons written by Bruce Lankford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The efficient use of natural resources is key to a sustainable economy, and yet the complexities of the physical aspects of resource efficiency are poorly understood. In this challenging book, the author proposes a major advance in our understanding of this topic by analysing resource efficiency and efficiency gains from the perspective of common pool resources, applying this idea particularly to water resources and its use in irrigated agriculture. The author proposes a novel concept of "the paracommons", through which the savings of increased resource efficiency can be viewed. In effect he asks; "who gets the gain of an efficiency gain?" By reusing, economising and avoiding losses, wastes and wastages, freed up resources are available for further use by four ‘destinations’; the same user, parties directly connected to that user, the wider economy or returned to the common pool. The paracommons is thus a commons of – and competition for – resources salvaged by changes to the efficiency of natural resource systems. The idea can be applied to a range of resources such as water, energy, forests and high-seas fisheries. Five issues are explored: the complexity of resource use efficiency; the uncertainty of efficiency interventions and outcomes; destinations of freed up losses, wastes and wastages; implications for resource conservation; and the interconnectedness of users and systems brought about by efficiency changes. The book shows how these ideas put efficiency on a par with other dimensions of resource governance and sustainability such as equity, justice, resilience and access.
Download or read book Resource Efficiency Complexity and the Commons written by Bruce Lankford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The efficient use of natural resources is key to a sustainable economy, and yet the complexities of the physical aspects of resource efficiency are poorly understood. In this challenging book, the author proposes a major advance in our understanding of this topic by analysing resource efficiency and efficiency gains from the perspective of common pool resources, applying this idea particularly to water resources and its use in irrigated agriculture. The author proposes a novel concept of "the paracommons", through which the savings of increased resource efficiency can be viewed. In effect he asks; "who gets the gain of an efficiency gain?" By reusing, economising and avoiding losses, wastes and wastages, freed up resources are available for further use by four ‘destinations’; the same user, parties directly connected to that user, the wider economy or returned to the common pool. The paracommons is thus a commons of – and competition for – resources salvaged by changes to the efficiency of natural resource systems. The idea can be applied to a range of resources such as water, energy, forests and high-seas fisheries. Five issues are explored: the complexity of resource use efficiency; the uncertainty of efficiency interventions and outcomes; destinations of freed up losses, wastes and wastages; implications for resource conservation; and the interconnectedness of users and systems brought about by efficiency changes. The book shows how these ideas put efficiency on a par with other dimensions of resource governance and sustainability such as equity, justice, resilience and access.
Download or read book Governing the Nexus written by Mathew Kurian and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-11-08 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global trends such as urbanization, demographic and climate change that are currently underway pose serious challenges to sustainable development and integrated resources management. The complex relations between demands, resource availability and quality and financial and physical constraints can be addressed by knowledge based policies and reform of professional practice. The nexus approach recognizes the urgent need for this knowledge and its interpretation in a policy- relevant setting that is guided by the understanding that there is a lack of blueprints for development based on integrated management of water, soil and waste resources in the Member States. Generation and application of knowledge is both a priority for individual but also institutional capacity development.
Download or read book Water Markets written by Wheeler, Sarah A. and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring water scarcity issues in light of the growing crisis in global water management, this book examines the applicability of water markets. It provides an overview and understanding of the presence of water markets across the globe, analysing the ways in which different countries and regions are grappling with water scarcity.
Download or read book Water accounting auditing guidelines written by Batchelor, C and published by Food & Agriculture Org.. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many regions of the world, sustainable and reliable delivery of water services has become increasingly complex and problematic. Complexities that are very likely to increase, considering the unprecedented confluence of pressures linked to demographic, economic, dietary trends, and climate change. Particularly if overall demand for freshwater exceeds supply, the delivery of water services is often less about engineering, although engineering is still required, and more about politics, governa nce, managing and protecting sources, resolving conflicts about water, ensuring rights to water are respected, and so on. It is also about understanding and monitoring the hydrological cycle at the appropriate scale of analysis. This is where water accounting and auditing can play a crucial role. The rationale behind this water accounting and auditing sourcebook is that scope exists worldwide to improve water-related sectoral and inter-sectoral decision-making at local, regional and national le vels. Water accounting and auditing are recommended by FAO and others as being fundamental to initiatives that aim to cope with water scarcity. This sourcebook aims to provide practical advice on the application and use of water accounting and auditing, helping users planning and implementing processes that best fit their needs.
Download or read book Handbook of Irrigation Hydrology and Management written by Saeid Eslamian and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever-increasing population growth has caused a proportional increased demand for water, and existing water sources are depleting day by day. Moreover, with the impact of climate change, the rates of rainfall in many regions have experienced a higher degree of variability. In many cities, government utilities have been struggling to maintain sufficient water for the residents and other users. The Handbook of Irrigation Hydrology and Management examines and analyzes irrigated ecosystems in which water storage, applications, or drainage volumes are artificially controlled in the landscape and the spatial domain of processes varies from micrometers to tens of kilometers, while the temporal domain spans from seconds to centuries. The continuum science of irrigation hydrology includes the surface, subsurface (unsaturated and groundwater systems), atmospheric, and plant subsystems. Further, the book includes coverage of environmental and economic impacts, water quality issues, water harvesting, satellite measurements for irrigation, and more. Features: Offers water-saving strategies to increase the judicious use of scarce water resources Presents strategies to maximize agricultural yield per unit of water used for different regions Compares irrigation methods to offset changing weather patterns and impacts of climate change
Download or read book Governing the Commons written by Elinor Ostrom and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-23 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tackles one of the most enduring and contentious issues of positive political economy: common pool resource management.
Download or read book Legal Rights for Rivers written by Erin O'Donnell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-17 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2017 four rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, India, and Colombia were given the status of legal persons, and there was a recent attempt to extend these rights to the Colorado River in the USA. Understanding the implications of creating legal rights for rivers is an urgent challenge for both water resource management and environmental law. Giving rivers legal rights means the law can see rivers as legal persons, thus creating new legal rights which can then be enforced. When rivers are legally people, does that encourage collaboration and partnership between humans and rivers, or establish rivers as another competitor for scarce resources? To assess what it means to give rivers legal rights and legal personality, this book examines the form and function of environmental water managers (EWMs). These organisations have legal personality, and have been active in water resource management for over two decades. EWMs operate by acquiring water rights from irrigators in rivers where there is insufficient water to maintain ecological health. EWMs can compete with farmers for access to water, but they can also strengthen collaboration between traditionally divergent users of the aquatic environment, such as environmentalists, recreational fishers, hunters, farmers, and hydropower. This book explores how EWMs use the opportunities created by giving nature legal rights, such as the ability to participate in markets, enter contracts, hold property, and enforce those rights in court. However, examination of the EWMs unearths a crucial and unexpected paradox: giving legal rights to nature may increase its legal power, but in doing so it can weaken community support for protecting the environment in the first place. The book develops a new conceptual framework to identify the multiple constructions of the environment in law, and how these constructions can interact to generate these unexpected outcomes. It explores EWMs in the USA and Australia as examples, and assesses the implications of creating legal rights for rivers for water governance. Lessons from the EWMs, as well as early lessons from the new ‘river persons,’ show how to use the law to improve river protection and how to begin to mitigate the problems of the paradox.
Download or read book Water Conflicts written by Mark Zeitoun and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Water Conflicts applies cutting-edge thinking to identify pathways that can transform complex water conflicts. It challenges existing power-blind and politics-lite analysis that is very deeply-held and recurring in debates that suggest causal links between scarcity and violence-or peace. This book presents a much needed revision of transboundary water analysis, leading to a rethink on the way water is used and contested, with a focus on harm experienced both by the most vulnerable water users and the environment. Recognizing that conflicts are never static, Mark Zeitoun, Naho Mirumachi, and Jeroen Warner's "transformative analysis" provides multi-disciplinary tools and perspectives to understand and address the complexities involved. The approach is stress-tested through dozens of examples around the globe, and it incorporates collective evidence and knowledge of the London Water Research Group. The insights on water diplomacy will be most welcome by analysts, activists, diplomats, and all others tackling water conflicts. Seeking to motivate improvement of transboundary water arrangements towards further equity and sustainability as a practical agenda, the book is a fresh antidote to the detached role that researchers and policymakers often play.
Download or read book The Handbook of Global Security Policy written by Mary Kaldor and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-03-20 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook brings together 30 state-of-the-art essays covering the essential aspects of global security research and practice for the 21st century. Embraces a broad definition of security that extends beyond the threat of foreign military attack to cover new risks for violence Offers comprehensive coverage framed around key security concepts, risks, policy tools, and global security actors Discusses pressing contemporary issues including terrorism, disarmament, genocide, sustainability, international peacekeeping, state-building, natural disasters, energy and food security, climate change, and cyber warfare Includes insightful and accessible contributions from around the world aimed at a broad base of scholars, students, practitioners, and policymakers
Download or read book Water is for Fighting Over written by John Fleck and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2016-09 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Illuminating." --New York Times WIRED's Required Science Reading 2016 When we think of water in the West, we think of conflict and crisis. Yet despite decades of headlines warning of mega-droughts, the death of agriculture, and the collapse of cities, the Colorado River basin has thrived in the face of water scarcity. John Fleck shows how western communities, whether farmers and city-dwellers or U.S. environmentalists and Mexican water managers, actually have a promising record of conservation and cooperation. Rather than perpetuate the myth "Whiskey's for drinkin', water's for fightin' over," Fleck urges readers to embrace a new, more optimistic narrative--a future where the Colorado continues to flow.
Download or read book What is the Future written by John Urry and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thinking about the future is essential for almost all organizations and societies. States, corporations, universities, cities, NGOs and individuals believe they cannot miss the future. But what exactly is the future? It remains a mystery – perhaps the greatest mystery, especially because futures are unpredictable and often unknowable, the outcome of many factors, known and unknown. The future is rarely a simple extrapolation from the present. In this important book, John Urry seeks to capture the many efforts that have been made to anticipate, visualize and elaborate the future. This includes examining the methods used to model the future, from those of the RAND Corporation to imagined future worlds in philosophy, literature, art, film, TV and computer games. He shows that futures are often contested and saturated with different interests, especially in relation to future generations. He also shows how analyses of social institutions, practices and lives should be central to examining potential futures, and issues such as who owns the future. The future seems to be characterized by 'wicked problems'. There are multiple 'causes' and 'solutions', long-term lock-ins and complex interdependencies, and different social groups have radically different frames for understanding what is at stake. Urry explores these issues through case-studies of 3D printing and the future of manufacturing, mobilities in the city, and the futures of energy and climate change.
Download or read book Corporations as Custodians of the Public Good written by Thérèse Rudebeck and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-03-20 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive assessment of how local corporate water strategies influence global water governance objectives. In various geographies, companies spearhead a quest for more sustainable water management within and beyond their own operations. This book critically examines such strategies and provides an overarching analysis of the effects that mounting corporate involvement has had on the global water discourse. More specifically, it explains why companies from the food, beverage, textile, and mining sectors have started to incorporate water management objectives into their business strategies, how companies work in partnerships with other stakeholders to realize these objectives, and how these actions acquire wider political legitimacy. It presents insightful interview material from business leaders and other high-level stakeholders. Readers will gain the necessary knowledge to develop a critical view and respond appropriately.
Download or read book Resource Efficiency and Climate Change written by United Nations and published by UN. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The International Resource Panel (IRP) was established to provide independent, coherent and authoritative scientific assessments on the use of natural resources and their environmental impacts over the full life cycle. The Panel aims to contribute to a better understanding of how to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation while enhancing well-being. The Secretariat is hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme. IRP assessments demonstrate the opportunities for governments, businesses and wider society to work together to create and implement policies that ultimately lead to sustainable resource management, including through better planning, technological innovation and strategic incentives and investments. Materials are vital to modern society, but their production is an important source of greenhouse gases. Emissions from material production are now comparable to those from agriculture, forestry, and land use change combined, yet they have received much less attention from the climate policy community. The IPR authors propose looking beyond energy efficiency to reduce global carbon footprint. This report was developed by the IRP in response to a request from the Group of 7. It conducts a rigorous assessment of the contribution of material efficiency to GHG abatement strategies. More concretely, it assesses the potential reduction of GHG emissions from material efficiency strategies applied in residential buildings and light duty vehicles, and reviews policies that address these strategies. The IRP modelling results show that increasing material efficiency can help enhance efforts in moving towards the 1.5° C target set by the Paris Agreement." -- Page 4 of cover
Download or read book Releasing the Commons written by Ash Amin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book moves beyond seeing the commons in the past tense, an entity passed over from the public into the private, to reimagine the commons as a process, a contest of force, a reconstitution, and a site of convening practices. It highlights new spaces of gathering opening up, such as the digital commons, and new practices of being in common, such as community economies and solidarity networks. The commons is seen as a contested domain of the collective and as a changing way of being in common, with the balance poised in the tensile play between political economy and social innovation. The book focuses on the possibility of recovering a future in which more can be held by the many, focusing on three concepts: nation and nature as a commons, publics and rights, and bodies, concerning the management of lives and livelihoods. Across these three passage points, the book finds evidence of a commons under attack but also defended in fragile though promising ways. With contributions from leading scholars, this thought provoking book will be of great interest to students and scholars in geography, environmental studies, politics, anthropology, and cultural studies.
Download or read book Fundamentals written by Katharina Morik and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Machine learning is part of Artificial Intelligence since its beginning. Certainly, not learning would only allow the perfect being to show intelligent behavior. All others, be it humans or machines, need to learn in order to enhance their capabilities. In the eighties of the last century, learning from examples and modeling human learning strategies have been investigated in concert. The formal statistical basis of many learning methods has been put forward later on and is still an integral part of machine learning. Neural networks have always been in the toolbox of methods. Integrating all the pre-processing, exploitation of kernel functions, and transformation steps of a machine learning process into the architecture of a deep neural network increased the performance of this model type considerably. Modern machine learning is challenged on the one hand by the amount of data and on the other hand by the demand of real-time inference. This leads to an interest in computing architectures and modern processors. For a long time, the machine learning research could take the von-Neumann architecture for granted. All algorithms were designed for the classical CPU. Issues of implementation on a particular architecture have been ignored. This is no longer possible. The time for independently investigating machine learning and computational architecture is over. Computing architecture has experienced a similarly rampant development from mainframe or personal computers in the last century to now very large compute clusters on the one hand and ubiquitous computing of embedded systems in the Internet of Things on the other hand. Cyber-physical systems’ sensors produce a huge amount of streaming data which need to be stored and analyzed. Their actuators need to react in real-time. This clearly establishes a close connection with machine learning. Cyber-physical systems and systems in the Internet of Things consist of diverse components, heterogeneous both in hard- and software. Modern multi-core systems, graphic processors, memory technologies and hardware-software codesign offer opportunities for better implementations of machine learning models. Machine learning and embedded systems together now form a field of research which tackles leading edge problems in machine learning, algorithm engineering, and embedded systems. Machine learning today needs to make the resource demands of learning and inference meet the resource constraints of used computer architecture and platforms. A large variety of algorithms for the same learning method and, moreover, diverse implementations of an algorithm for particular computing architectures optimize learning with respect to resource efficiency while keeping some guarantees of accuracy. The trade-off between a decreased energy consumption and an increased error rate, to just give an example, needs to be theoretically shown for training a model and the model inference. Pruning and quantization are ways of reducing the resource requirements by either compressing or approximating the model. In addition to memory and energy consumption, timeliness is an important issue, since many embedded systems are integrated into large products that interact with the physical world. If the results are delivered too late, they may have become useless. As a result, real-time guarantees are needed for such systems. To efficiently utilize the available resources, e.g., processing power, memory, and accelerators, with respect to response time, energy consumption, and power dissipation, different scheduling algorithms and resource management strategies need to be developed. This book series addresses machine learning under resource constraints as well as the application of the described methods in various domains of science and engineering. Turning big data into smart data requires many steps of data analysis: methods for extracting and selecting features, filtering and cleaning the data, joining heterogeneous sources, aggregating the data, and learning predictions need to scale up. The algorithms are challenged on the one hand by high-throughput data, gigantic data sets like in astrophysics, on the other hand by high dimensions like in genetic data. Resource constraints are given by the relation between the demands for processing the data and the capacity of the computing machinery. The resources are runtime, memory, communication, and energy. Novel machine learning algorithms are optimized with regard to minimal resource consumption. Moreover, learned predictions are applied to program executions in order to save resources. The three books will have the following subtopics: Volume 1: Machine Learning under Resource Constraints - Fundamentals Volume 2: Machine Learning and Physics under Resource Constraints - Discovery Volume 3: Machine Learning under Resource Constraints - Applications Volume 1 establishes the foundations of this new field (Machine Learning under Resource Constraints). It goes through all the steps from data collection, their summary and clustering, to the different aspects of resource-aware learning, i.e., hardware, memory, energy, and communication awareness. Several machine learning methods are inspected with respect to their resource requirements and how to enhance their scalability on diverse computing architectures ranging from embedded systems to large computing clusters.
