1,721,087 research outputs found
Adaptation to climate change in international river basins in Africa: a review
No full textThis paper reviews current knowledge of the potential impacts of climate change on water resources in Africa and the possible limits, barriers or opportunities for adaptation to climate change in internationally shared river basins. Africa faces significant challenges to water resources management in the form of high variability and regional scarcity, set within the context of generally weak institutional capacity. Management is further challenged by the transboundary nature of many of its river basins. Climate change, despite uncertainty about the detail of its impacts on water resources, is likely to exacerbate many of these challenges. River basins and the riparian states that share them differ in their capacities to adapt. Without appropriate cooperation adaptation may be limited and uneven. Further research to examine the factors and processes that are important for cooperation to lead to positive adaptation outcomes and the increased adaptive capacity of water management institutions is suggested
High stakes decisions under uncertainty:dams, development and climate change in the Rufiji River Basin
No full textThe need to stress test designs and decisions about major infrastructure under climate change conditions is increasingly being recognised. This chapter explores new ways to understand and—if possible—reduce the uncertainty in climate information to enable its use in assessing decisions that have consequences across the water, energy, food and environment sectors. It outlines an approach, applied in the Rufiji River Basin in Tanzania, that addresses uncertainty in climate model projections by weighting them according to different skill metrics; how well the models simulate important climate features. The impact of different weighting approaches on two river basin performance indicators (hydropower generation and environmental flows) is assessed, providing an indication of the reliability of infrastructure investments, including a major proposed dam under different climate model projections. The chapter ends with a reflection on the operational context for applying such approaches and some of the steps taken to address challenges and to engage stakeholders
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Co-production: learning from contexts
Full text linkGiven that climate change is a complex, systemic risk, addressing it requires new knowledge. One way of generating such new knowledge is through co-production, or collaborative development by a range of stakeholders with diverse backgrounds embedded in trans-disciplinary processes. This chapter reflects on emerging experiences of co-producing decision-relevant climate information to enable climate-resilient planning and adaptation to climate change in Africa. It outlines principles that have emerged and evolved through experiential learning from a wide range of co-production processes in Africa. It also uses case study experience from various contexts to highlight some of the more contextual challenges to co-production such as trust, power and knowledge systems and institutional factors (mandates, roles and incentives) and illustrates ways that trans-disciplinary co-production has addressed these challenges to mainstream a response to the climate challenge
Decision-making heuristics for managing climate-related risks: introducing equity to the FREE framework
Full text linkManaging climate-related risks is clouded in differing levels of uncertainty that are magnified when trying to understand their potential impacts on socio-ecological systems. The ‘cascade of uncertainty’ is particularly apparent in Africa where socio-ecological data are sparse, and the development and validation of impact models are at varying stages. In this context, using heuristics may serve as an effective way for policy makers to incorporate climate change knowledge into decision-making. Previous scholarship has identified the principles of Flexibility, Robustness and Economic low/no regrets in decision-making under uncertainty. In this chapter, we first make the case for adding Equity to these heuristics, where equity involves ensuring that reducing the climate change risk for one cohort of society does not result in its increase for another. Second, we describe how these principles have been applied under two DFID/NERC funded projects: ForPAc and AMMA-2050 through the use of Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis tools
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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