A review of climate change and the implementation of marine biodiversity legislation in the United Kingdom

1. Marine legislation, the key means by which the conservation of marine biodiversity is achieved, has been developing since the 1960s. In recent decades, an increasing focus on ‘holistic’ policy development is evident, compared with earlier ‘piecemeal’ sectoral approaches. Important marine legislative tools being used in the United Kingdom, and internationally, include the designation of marine protected areas and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) with its aim of meeting ‘Good Environmental Status’ (GES) for European seas by 2020. 2. There is growing evidence of climate change impacts on marine biodiversity, which may compromise the effectiveness of any legislation intended to promote sustainable marine resource management. 3. A review of key marine biodiversity legislation relevant to the UK shows climate change was not considered in the drafting of much early legislation. Despite the huge increase in knowledge of climate change impacts in recent decades, legislation is still limited in how it takes these impacts into account. There is scope, however, to account for climate change in implementing much of the legislation through (a) existing references to environmental variability; (b) review cycles; and (c) secondary legislation and complementary policy development. 4. For legislation relating to marine protected areas (e.g. the EC Habitats and Birds Directives), climate change has generally not been considered in the site-designation process, or for ongoing management, with the exception of the Marine (Scotland) Act. Given that changing environmental conditions (e.g. rising temperatures and ocean acidification) directly affect the habitats and species that sites are designated for, how this legislation is used to protect marine biodiversity in a changing climate requires further consideration. 5. Accounting for climate change impacts on marine biodiversity in the development and implementation of legislation is vital to enable timely, adaptive management responses. Marine modelling can play an important role in informing management decisions

Coal in the 21st Century: a climate of change and uncertainty

Coal presents a particular set of challenges when balancing energy policy goals. Despite presenting viable solutions to the problems of energy security and global energy poverty, coal struggles, given its greenhouse-gas drawbacks, in a world of increasingly harmful climate change. Notwithstanding the harm caused to the environment, coal remains an expanding low-price route to meeting local energy needs. It is forecasted to remain a major global resource for the foreseeable future. In the short term it is predicted to have a 26% share of the global energy mix. Recent years have witnessed severe deviations from previously stable trends in coal markets and policy dynamics. According to the predictions by the International Energy Agency (IEA), a variety of factors ranging from the planned phase-out of coal in countries such as Denmark, France and the UK, to changes in policy in China and import-dependency in India, and demand drop in the US have together resulted in the largest decline in coal production in 2015 since 1971 (IEA, Coal Information, 2016). This paper seeks to outline basic coal facts, recent market trends and directions globally and provides an overview of issues shaping the future of coal in the twenty-first century. This paper seeks to outline basic coal facts, recent market trends and directions globally and provide an overview of issues shaping the future of coal in the 21st century

Memory for expectation-violating concepts:The effects of agents and cultural familiarity

Previous research has shown that ideas which violate our expectations, such as schema-inconsistent concepts, enjoy privileged status in terms of memorability. In our study, memory for concepts that violate cultural (cultural schema-level) expectations (e.g., "illiterate teacher", "wooden bottle", or "thorny grass") versus domain-level (ontological) expectations (e.g., "speaking cat", "jumping maple", or "melting teacher") was examined. Concepts that violate cultural expectations, or counter-schematic, were remembered to a greater extent compared with concepts that violate ontological expectations and with intuitive concepts (e.g., "galloping pony", "drying orchid", or "convertible car"), in both immediate recall, and delayed recognition tests. Importantly, concepts related to agents showed a memory advantage over concepts not pertaining to agents, but this was true only for expectation-violating concepts. Our results imply that intuitive, everyday concepts are equally attractive and memorable regardless of the presence or absence of agents. However, concepts that violate our expectations (cultural-schema or domain-level) are more memorable when pertaining to agents (humans and animals) than to non-agents (plants or objects/artifacts). We conclude that due to their evolutionary salience, cultural ideas which combine expectancy violations and the involvement of an agent are especially memorable and thus have an enhanced probability of being successfully propagated. © 2014 Porubanova et al

Resilience Management for Healthy Cities in a Changing Climate

Cities are experiencing multiple impacts from global environmental change, and the degree to which they will need to cope with and adapt to these challenges will continue to increase. We argue that a ‘complex systems and resilience management’ view may significantly help guide future urban development through innovative integration of, for example, grey, blue and green infrastructure embedded in flexible institutions (both formal and informal) for multi-functionality and improved health. For instance, the urban heat island effect will further increase city-centre temperatures during projected more frequent and intense heat waves. The elderly and people with chronic cardiovascular and respiratory diseases are particularly vulnerable to heat. Integrating vegetation and especially trees in the urban infrastructure helps reduce temperatures by shading and evapotranspiration. Great complexity and uncertainty of urban social-ecological systems are behind this heatwave-health nexus, and they need to be addressed in a more comprehensive manner. We argue that a systems perspective can lead to innovative designs of new urban infrastructure and the redesign of existing structures. Particularly to promoting the integration of grey, green and blue infrastructure in urban planning through institutional innovation and structural reorganization of knowledge-action systems may significantly enhance prospects for improved urban health and greater resilience under various scenarios of climate change.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Review of the Mental Health and Well-being Benefits of Biodiversity

Little is known about the contribution that biodiversity has on mental health and well-being. To date, only one systematic review has investigated the health and well-being benefits from contact with biodiversity (Lovell et al. J Toxicol Environ Health B Crit Rev 17(1):1–20, 2014). The number of research studies investigating the health and well-being effects of biodiversity has increased since this publication. Here, we provide an update, focusing on the impact of biodiversity on mental health and well-being. Our objectives are to: (i) identify and describe the literature published after 2012; and (ii) synthesise all results from Lovell et al. (J Toxicol Environ Health B Crit Rev 17(1):1–20, 2014) and the more recently published literature to assess whether biodiversity influences mental health and well-being. Sixteen recently published studies met the inclusion criteria. The literature is varied with different study designs, measures of biodiversity, mental health and well-being. The synthesis of results was drawn from 24 studies: nine from Lovell et al. (J Toxicol Environ Health B Crit Rev 17(1):1–20, 2014) and 15 identified by this chapter. There is some evidence to suggest that biodiversity promotes better mental health and well-being. However, more studies reported non-significant results. The evidence is not yet of the extent necessary to characterise the role of biodiversity in relation to mental health or well-being. Future interdisciplinary research directions are discussed

Beyond ‘just’ flood risk management: the potential for—and limits to—alleviating flood disadvantage

The threat of flooding poses a considerable challenge for justice. Not only are more citizens becoming exposed to risk, but they are expected to play increasingly active roles in flood risk management. However, until recently, few efforts have charted broader understandings of disadvantage relating to flood risk exposure. Drawing upon social science scholarship that has long been sensitive to concerns related to justice, we deploy and develop the notion of flood disadvantage as a means to assess the challenges to more ‘just’ flood risk management. We contend that the concept of flood disadvantage offers a useful lens to appreciate the constraints of technical approaches to flood risk management, in particular, its limited ability to incorporate complex social elements such as how individuals have differing vulnerabilities and sensitivities to flooding and uneven abilities to engage with risk agendas. The notion highlights the compounding interactions between flooding and other social disadvantages across multiple public policy areas and scales. We argue a fuller acknowledgement of the socio-spatial-temporal dimensions of intersecting disadvantages can help sensitise technical risk analyses that tend to see people and communities as homogeneous entities in a given spatiality. In doing so we can better reveal why some individuals or communities are more vulnerable to disasters or are slower to recover than others. Finally, we outline the challenges in turning more ‘just’ flood risk management from an abstract notion into one that could inform future practice