1,721,033 research outputs found

    Cambio Climatico, Amenazas Naturales y Salud en México

    No full text
    [Climate Change, Natural Hazards and Health in Mexico

    Public participation and climate change adaptation: avoiding the illusion of inclusion

    No full text
    Public participation is commonly advocated in policy responses to climate change. Here we discuss prospects for inclusive approaches to adaptation, drawing particularly on studies of long-term coastal management in the UK and elsewhere. We affirm that public participation is an important normative goal in formulating response to climate change risks, but argue that its practice must learn from existing critiques of participatory processes in other contexts. Involving a wide range of stakeholders in decision-making presents fundamental challenges for climate policy, many of which are embedded in relations of power. In the case of anticipatory responses to climate change, these challenges are magnified because of the long-term and uncertain nature of the problem. Without due consideration of these issues, a tension between principles of public participation and anticipatory adaptation is likely to emerge and may result in an overly managed form of inclusion that is unlikely to satisfy either participatory or instrumental goals. Alternative, more narrowly instrumental, approaches to participation are more likely to succeed in this context, as long as the scope and limitations of public involvement are made explicit from the outset<br/

    Scenario-based stakeholder engagement: incorporating stakeholders preferences into coastal planning for climate change

    No full text
    Climate change poses many challenges for ecosystem and resource management. In particular. coastal planners are struggling to find ways to prepare for the potential impacts of future climate change while dealing with immediate pressures. Decisions on how to respond to future risks are complicated by the long lime horizons and the uncertainty associated with the distribution of impacts. Existing coastal zone management approaches in the UK either do not adequately incorporate changing stakeholder preferences, or effectively ensure that stakeholders are aware of the trade-offs inherent in any coastal management decision.Using a novel method, scenario-based stakeholder engagement which brings together stakeholder analysis, climate change management scenarios and deliberative techniques, file necessary trade-offs associated with long term coastal planning are explored. The method is applied to two case studies of coastal planning in Christchurch Bay on the south coast of England and the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland. A range of conflicting preferences exist on the ideal governance structure to manage the coast under different climate change scenarios. In addition, the results show that public understanding of the trade-offs that have to be made is critical in gaining some degree of public support for long term coastal decision-making. We conclude that scenario-based stakeholder engagement is a useful tool to facilitate coastal management planning that takes into account the complexities and challenges of climate change, and could be used in conjunction with existing approaches such as the Shoreline Management Planning process

    Climate change and coastal management decisions: insights from Christchurch Bay, UK

    No full text
    The integration of climate change adaptation considerations into management of the coast poses major challenges for decision makers. This article reports on a case study undertaken in Christchurch Bay, UK, examining local capacity for strategic response to climate risks, with a particular focus on issues surrounding coastal defense. Drawing primarily on qualitative research with local and regional stakeholders, the analysis identifies fundamental disjunctures between generic concerns over climate change and the adaptive capacity of local management institutions. Closely linked with issues of scale, the problems highlighted here are likely to have broad and continuing relevance for future coastal management elsewhere

    Contribution to Change: An approach to evaluating the role of intervention in disaster recovery

    No full text
    As the number of people affected by disasters has risen, so have the expectations placed on humanitarian agencies by donors, the public and the affected populations themselves. Agencies must now provide evidence of impact of their interventions. But applying conventional evaluation methods can pose problems. How can we assess the difference that intervention makes? Is it ethical to consign some disaster-affected communities to control groups? How feasible is it to collect baseline data among people who have just been traumatized? This guide provides a reliable and practical method for identifying the contribution an agency makes to changes to people's lives in the recovery period following disasters. It outlines 11 steps that take evaluators through designing quantitative and qualitative methods through to collecting field data and developing a narrative of evidence and change. The Contribution to Change tool encourages recognition of the efforts of the community itself, as well as the impact of other actors such as government or community-based groups. Contribution to Change should be read by humanitarian managers and field staff, as well as by researchers into humanitarian relief and international development

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

    Full text link
    The 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

    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 link
    We 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 link
    We 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
    corecore