All Hands on Deck! Mobilizing Climate Change Action Beyond the UNFCCC

While taking notable incremental steps forward, Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have so far, in aggregate, been unable to scale up their ambition to mitigate climate change so as to hold a rise in global average temperature below 2°Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In this introduction to the special issue, it is posited that the UNFCCC has played and should continue to play an essential role in instigating and coordinating a global response to climate change. However, in the face of continuing difficulty in stabilizing the global climate at safe levels, it is argued here that the UNFCCC is by no means alone in addressing this challenge and that wider international cooperation is possible in a way that complements the international climate negotiations. This article shows how a variety of international institutions outside of the UNFCCC have sought - albeit with modest results to date - to address climate change, and indicates how these institutions could be enhanced to deliver greater climate change mitigation benefits. It then illustrates how these institutions may interact with the UNFCCC process, and examines the role of the UNFCCC in ensuring that the various institutions work in a complementary fashion. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

consequences, causes and policy options

Seeking to contribute to the governance stream of this year’s Berlin Conference, the paper addresses an emerging phenomenon of global environmental governance: the increasing overlap and interplay among institutions that touch upon related subject matters. Presenting one of the first outcomes of the Earth System Governance project, the paper focuses on one specific case of institutional interplay, namely the overlap between the United Nations climate regime and the World Trade Organization (WTO). While parties of the UN climate regime discuss trade-related measures for a post-2012 agreement, WTO parties debate climate-related trade measures. This duplication of debates entails a lack of legal clarity, which may have detrimental implications for the further negotiation and implementation of both regimes. Drawing on neoliberal institutionalism and cognitivism, we identify two reasons for these interplay effects: the constellation of preferences and the lack of consensual knowledge on overlapping issues. Based on a workshop organized jointly with the UN Environment Programme, we developed suggestions to tackle these reasons. Policies could accommodate the lack of knowledge by means of flexible approaches, e.g. default values for border cost adjustments and ‘living lists’ of sustainability criteria for lifting trade barriers. With regard to the constellation of country preferences, a careful linkage of debates across arenas can produce additional trade-offs and break some of the deadlocks in which these discussions have ended up. On the other hand, the paper attends to the caveats and limits of such linkages

A path following algorithm for mobile robots

This paper considers path following control for a robotic platform. The vehicle used for the experiments is a specially designed robotic platform for performing autonomous weed control. The platform is four-wheel steered and four-wheel driven. A diesel engine powers the wheels via a hydraulic transmission. The robot uses a Real Time Kinematic Differential Global Positioning System to determine both position and orientation relative to the path. The deviation of the robot to the desired path is supplied to two high level controllers minimizing the orthogonal distance and orientation to the path. Wheel angle setpoints are determined from inversion of the kinematic model. At low level each wheel angle is controlled by a proportional controller combined with a Smith predictor. Results show the controller performance following different paths shapes including a step, a ramp, and a typical headland path. A refined tuning method calculates controller settings that let the robot drive as much as possible along the same path to its setpoint, but also limit the gains at higher speeds to prevent the closed loop system to become unstable due to the time delay in the system. Mean, minimum and maximum orthogonal distance errors while following a straight path on a paving at a speed of 0.5 m/s are 0.0, -2.4 and 3.0 cm respectively and the standard deviation is 1.2 cm. The control method for four wheel steered vehicles presented in this paper has the unique feature that it enables control of a user definable position relative to the robot frame and can deal with limitations on the wheel angles. The method is very well practical applicable for a manufacturer: all parameters needed are known by the manufacturer or can be determined easily, user settings have an easy interpretation and the only complex part can be supplied as a generic software modul

Transnational Climate Change Governance and the Global South

Alongside intergovernmental climate change negotiations, a groundswell of climate actions by cities, regions, businesses, investors, and civil society groups has emerged. These transnational actors seek to address mitigation and adaptation to climate change; independently, with each other and with governments and international organizations. Many have welcomed transnational climate initiatives as a crucial addition to the formal climate regime, contributing to a growing momentum to act on climate change. However, critics have raised concerns about whether transnational actors are genuinely interested in mitigation and adaptation, or whether they are they are representing business-as-usual as clean and green. Moreover, are transnational climate initiatives appropriately targeted to address needs of both developed and developing countries; do they exacerbate imbalances in global climate governance between the global North and South? This paper explores the multifaceted relation between developing countries and transnational climate governance. It discusses developing country engagement on the basis of their political support for transnational initiatives, their leadership of, and participation in transnational climate initiatives, and the implementation and performance of such initiatives from the perspective of the global South

Low Temperature Drying With Air Dehumidified by Zeolite for Food Products: Energy Efficiency Aspect Analysis

Developments in low temperature drying of food products are still an interesting issue; especially with respect to the energy efficiency. This research studies the energy efficiency that can be achieved by a dryer using air which is dehumidified by zeolite. Experimental results are fitted to a dynamic model to find important variables for the drying operation. The results show that ambient air temperature as well as the ratio between air flow for drying and air flow for regeneration, affect the energy efficiency significantly. Relative humidity of used air, and shift time have a minor effect on the dryer performance. From the total work, it can be noted that the dryer efficiency operated at 50-60°C achieves 75 percent, which is attractive for drying of food products

Accelerated X-ray Structure Elucidation of a 36 kDa Muramidase/Transglycosylase Using wARP

The X-ray structure of the 36kDa soluble lytic transglycosylase from Escherichia coli has been determined starting with the multiple isomorphous replacement method with inclusion of anomalous scattering at 2.7 Å resolution. Subsequently, before any model building was carried out, phases were extended to 1.7 Å, resolution with the weighted automated refinement procedure wARP, which gave a dramatic improvement in the phases. The electron-density maps from wARP were of outstanding quality for both the main chain and the side chains of the protein, which allowed the time spent on the tracing, interpretation and building of the X-ray structure to be substantially shortened. The structure of the soluble lyric transglycosylase was refined at 1.7 Å, resolution with X-PLOR to a final crystallographic R factor of 18.9%. Analysis of the wARP procedure revealed that the use of the maximum-likelihood refinement in wARP gave much better phases than least-squares refinement, provided that the ratio of reflections to protein atom parameters was approximately 1.8 or higher. Furthermore, setting aside 5% of the data for an Rfree test set had a negative effect on the phase improvement. The mean WwARP, a weight determined at the end of the wARP procedure and based on the variance of structure factors from six individually refined wARP models, proved to be a better indicator than the Rfree factor to judge different phase improvement protocols. The elongated Slt35 structure has three domains named the alpha, beta and core domains. The alpha domain contains mainly α-helices, while the beta domain consists of a five-stranded antiparallel β-sheet flanked by a short α-helix. Sandwiched between the alpha and beta domains is the core domain, which bears some resemblance to the fold of the catalytic domain of the previously elucidated 70 kDa soluble lytic transglycosylase from E. coli. The putative active site is at the bottom of a large deep groove in the core domain.

A Graphical Overview of the Architecture of Global Forest Governance

E