Category Archives: Peer Reviewed Article Review

value of learning curves in climate change planning

This article gives an example of how to put an economic value on climate change adaptation incorporated in a larger planning framework.

The Economic Value of Climate Information in Adaptation Decisions: Learning in the Sea-level Rise and Coastal Infrastructure Context

Traditional methods of investment appraisal have been criticized in the context of climate change adaptation. Economic assessment of adaptation options needs to explicitly incorporate the uncertainty of future climate conditions and should recognise that uncertainties may diminish over time as a result of improved understanding and learning. Real options analysis (ROA) is an appraisal tool developed to incorporate concepts of flexibility and learning that relies on probabilistic data to characterise uncertainties. It is also a relatively resource-intensive decision support tool. We test whether, and to what extent, learning can result from the use of successive generations of real life climate scenarios, and how non-probabilistic uncertainties can be handled through adapting the principles of ROA in coastal economic adaptation decisions. Using a relatively simple form of ROA on a vulnerable piece of coastal rail infrastructure in the United Kingdom, and two successive UK climate assessments, we estimate the values associated with utilising up-dated information on sea-level rise. The value of learning can be compared to the capital cost of adaptation investment, and may be used to illustrate the potential scale of the value of learning in coastal protection, and other adaptation contexts.

envisioning a water-energy utility with smart metering

This article envisions a single utility that provides water, electricity, and natural gas service, meters all three at the household level, and is able to integrate them using smart grid concepts. To me it illustrates some concepts of how multiple utilities and government agencies, each making cost effective operating and capital investment decisions within their narrowly defined missions, do not necessarily add up to an efficient whole.

Integrated intelligent water-energy metering systems and informatics: Visioning a digital multi-utility service provider

Advanced metering technologies coupled with informatics creates an opportunity to form digital multi-utility service providers. These providers will be able to concurrently collect a customers’ medium-high resolution water, electricity and gas demand data and provide user-friendly platforms to feed this information back to customers and supply/distribution utility organisations. Providers that can install low-cost integrative systems will reap the benefits of derived operational synergies and access to mass markets not bounded by historical city, state or country limits. This paper provides a vision of the required transformative process and features of an integrated multi-utility service provider covering the system architecture, opportunities and benefits, impediments and strategies, and business opportunities. The heart of the paper is focused on demonstrating data modelling processes and informatics opportunities for contemporaneously collected demand data, through illustrative examples and four informative water-energy nexus case studies. Finally, the paper provides an overview of the transformative R&D priorities to realise the vision.

gamification and water planning

This article is about gamification and water planning.

A review of water-related serious games to specify use in environmental Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

Serious games and gamification are nowadays pervasive. They are used to communicate about science and sometimes to involve citizens in science (e.g. citizen science). Concurrently, environmental decision analysis is challenged by the high cognitive load of the decision-making process and the possible biases threatening the rationality assumptions. Difficult decision-making processes can result in incomplete preference construction, and are generally limited to few participants. We reviewed 43 serious games and gamified applications related to water. We covered the broad diversity of serious games, which could be explained by the still unsettled terminology in the research area of gamification and serious gaming. We discuss how existing games could benefit early steps of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), including problem structuring, stakeholder analysis, defining objectives, and exploring alternatives. We argue that no existing game allows for preference elicitation; one of the most challenging steps of MCDA. We propose many research opportunities for behavioral operational research.

ecosystem value of urban soil

Soil is a critical part of a functional ecosystem, and yet most engineers and architects who work with soil in urban areas are not trained to really understand how soil works as part of an ecosystem. Soil scientists and agricultural engineers are, but they are not working in cities for the most part. Anyway, I like the premise of this article.

Towards an operational methodology to optimize ecosystem services provided by urban soils

Urban soils need to be taken into account by city managers to tackle the major urban environmental issues. As other soils in forest or agricultural environments, urban soils provide a wide range of ecosystem services. However, their contribution remains poorly assessed up to now, and as a result there is a strong lack of consideration by urban planning of the services they provide. Indeed, urban soils are mostly seen as a land surface (land area, two-dimensional system) and if they are characterized, it is almost exclusively for their potential contamination and their geotechnical properties. So, policy makers and planning operators rarely consider soils as a living resource, capable to fulfill essential functions. From the conclusions of previous studies, a selection of ecosystem services provided by soil and adapted to the specificity of urban context is proposed. This paper also aims at proposing the concept of the DESTISOL decision support system for urban planning projects upstream of the planning decisions, illustrated by an application example. It is based on an integrative approach linking soil quality indicators (e.g. physico-chemical and biological characteristics, fertility, pollution), soil functions and soil ecosystem services. The method leads to the semi-quantitative assessment of the level of ecosystem services that are either provided by urban soils or required to fit with the urban design.

X-Prize for turning carbon emissions into useful products

There are a number of ideas for turning carbon dioxide into concrete, carbon nanotubes, or other useful products:

Four teams are working on ways to use carbon dioxide in concrete: CarbonCure Technologies Inc. of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia; Carbon Upcycling UCLA, which is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles; Montreal-based Carbicrete; and Carbon Capture Machine Ltd. of Aberdeen, Scotland…

Another four teams are making fuel, plastics or chemical feedstocks: India-based Breathe; C4X of Suzhou, China; CERT, from the University of Toronto; and Huntington Beach, California-based Newlight Technologies.

Two teams are making carbon nanotubes and nanoparticles, which are used in a broad range of products: C2CNT of Ashburn, Virginia, and Carbon Upcycling Technologies of Calgary.

why propaganda works

Here’s an article from the Journal of Experimental Psychology explaining (at least one reason) why propaganda is effective. When we hear things repeated, we are more likely to believe them, and this is true even if we have prior knowledge to the contrary. The reason is simply that it takes more mental effort for your brain to process new information than to access information it already has in storage.

Fazio, L. K., Brashier, N. M., Payne, B. K., & Marsh, E. J. (2015). Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(5), 993-1002.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000098

In daily life, we frequently encounter false claims in the form of consumer advertisements, political propaganda, and rumors. Repetition may be one way that insidious misconceptions, such as the belief that vitamin C prevents the common cold, enter our knowledge base. Research on the illusory truth effect demonstrates that repeated statements are easier to process, and subsequently perceived to be more truthful, than new statements. The prevailing assumption in the literature has been that knowledge constrains this effect (i.e., repeating the statement “The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth” will not make you believe it). We tested this assumption using both normed estimates of knowledge and individuals’ demonstrated knowledge on a postexperimental knowledge check (Experiment 1). Contrary to prior suppositions, illusory truth effects occurred even when participants knew better. Multinomial modeling demonstrated that participants sometimes rely on fluency even if knowledge is also available to them (Experiment 2). Thus, participants demonstrated knowledge neglect, or the failure to rely on stored knowledge, in the face of fluent processing experiences.

agent-based wildlife modeling in cities

This is an agent-based model of wild boars coming from wild lands into a city. We don’t have wild boar issues where I live, but raccoons and deer occasionally show up. I’ve lived places where black bears show up unexpectedly in urban areas, and that can cause a stir.

Pigs in space: An agent-based model of wild boar (Sus scrofa) movement into cities

Last decades saw a dramatic increase in wildlife populations within urban areas. Policymakers seek to minimize human-wildlife conflicts resulting from overabundance of species, such as wild boars (Sus scrofa). To this end, there is a need to understand the drivers governing infiltration of wildlife into cities. In this paper we study the availability and distribution of food resources in urban areas as driver of wild boar movement patterns. Based on the optimal foraging theory, we utilize an agent-based simulation model to investigate the ever-growing infiltration of wild boars into some cities. We apply the model to an artificial city that mimics the landscape of the city of Haifa. Manipulating food availability and relative resistance costs of different land-covers we demonstrate that infiltration of boars depends on population size of wild boars and on the amount and spatial distribution of attractors (e.g., food). Model outputs for likely sets of parameters demonstrate good correspondence to the reports of boar observations within the city of Haifa, Israel, where the porosity of the urban fabric and the connectivity of open space patches provide a trail network that makes food throughout the city accessible at a relatively low search-cost. Our results indicate that land cover and food patterns determine critically boars’ foraging movement and infiltration into the city. The proposed modeling framework provides a tool to investigate wildlife management policies that aim at reducing people-wildlife conflicts in cities.

one large or many smaller cities for maximum productivity

This paper looks at data from 306 cities in China to identify trends in how different sizes and densities of cities relative to each other affect economic productivity. The interesting finding is that it is best to have either one big low-density city or many smaller high-density ones.

How did urban polycentricity and dispersion affect economic productivity? A case study of 306 Chinese cities

This article aims to assess the impacts of urban spatial structure on economic productivity. Drawing upon detailed gridded population data of 306 Chinese cities at the prefecture level and above, we identify their urban (sub)centers through exploratory spatial data analysis, construct indicators to measure their degrees of polycentricity and dispersion, and model the impacts of spatial structure on urban productivity. A regression analysis reveals that economic productivity is significantly associated with urban spatial structure. Conditioning on other factors, higher degrees of dispersion are associated with lower level of urban productivity whereas the effects of polycentricity depend on urban population density. Less densely populated cities are likely to have higher productivity levels when they are more monocentric, while urban productivity of cities with high population density tend to benefit from a more polycentric structure. The paper concludes with spatial planning implications.

mapping urban vegetation on a fine scale

This is an interesting paper about mapping urban vegetation on a fine scale based on photos.

Mapping vegetation functional types in urban areas with WorldView-2 imagery: Integrating object-based classification with phenology

Mapping urban vegetation is a prerequisite to accurately understanding landscape patterns and ecological services provided by urban vegetation. However, the uncertainties in fine-scale vegetation biodiversity mapping still exist in capturing vegetation functional types efficiently at fine scale. To facilitate the application of fine-scale vegetation spatial configuration used for urban landscape planning and ecosystem service valuation, we present an approach integrating object-based classification with vegetation phenology for fine-scale vegetation functional type mapping in compact city of Beijing, China. The phenological information derived from two WorldView-2 imagery scenes, acquired on 14 September 2012 and 26 November 2012, was used to aid in the classification of tree functional types and grass. Then we further compared the approach to that of using only one WorldView imagery. We found WorldView-2 imagery can be successfully applied to map functional types of urban vegetation with its high spatial resolution and relatively high spectral resolution. The application of the vegetation phenology into classification greatly improved the overall accuracy of classification from 82.3% to 91.1%. In particular, the accuracies of vegetation types was improved by from 10% to 13.26%. The approach integrating vegetation phenology with high-resolution remote sensed images provides an efficient tool to incorporate multi-temporal data into fine-scale urban classification.