Towards the development of an integrated sustainability and resilience benefits assessment framework of urban green growth interventions

Considering the current emerging demographic, urbanization and climatic trends, integrating sustainability and resilience principles into urban development becomes a key priority for decision-makers worldwide. Local and national governments, project developers and other urban stakeholders dealing with the complexities of urban development need projects with clear structure and outcomes in order to inform decision-making and ensure sources of financing. The need for developing an integrated assessment methodology that would capture and quantify multiple urban sustainability and resilience benefits of projects in one common framework and eventually lead to verifiable sustainability and resilience outcomes is immense and challenging at the same time. The main objective of this paper is to present the development of a methodological approach that aims to integrate sustainability and resilience benefits, derived from the implementation of green growth urban projects, into a unified framework of criteria addressing environmental, social, economic and institutional perspectives. The proposed sustainability and resilience benefits assessment (SRBA) methodology is a combination of top down and bottom up approaches, including GIS-based scenario building. The different types of sustainability and resilience benefits of urban green growth projects are also identified at different levels (i.e., individual, neighborhood, city and global). Moreover, the proposed methodology creates scenarios that can be illustrated by a map-based approach to enable a better illustration and visualization of benefits. It demonstrates how a map-based approach can assess not only the extent of sustainability and resilience benefits accrued (how much is benefitted), but also their spatial distribution (who is benefitted). The main methodological challenges and issues on developing an integrated sustainability and resilience benefits assessment are identified and discussed

Assessment of adaptation measures against flooding in the city of Dhaka, Bangladesh

Dhaka is one of the world’s largest megacities with a high rate of urbanization. Due to the setting of greater Dhaka in a deltaic plain, it is extremely prone to detrimental flooding. Risks associated with flood are expected to increase in the coming years because of the global climate change impacts as well as the high rate of urbanization the city is facing. The low lying part of Dhaka (Dhaka East) faces most severe risk of flooding. Traditionally, this part has been efficiently storing the excess water caused by excessive rainfall and the canals connected to the rivers gradually drained the water to the rivers. But the alarmingly increasing population of Dhaka is leading towards the encroachment of these water retention areas because of the land scarcity. The natural drainage for the city is not performing well and the area is still unprotected from flooding, which causes major threats to its inhabitants. This situation increases the urgency to effectively adapt to current floods caused by climate variability and to the impacts of future climate changes. The government is planning several adaptive measures to protect the area whereas a systematic framework to analyze and assess them is lacking. The objective of the paper is to develop an integrated framework for the assessment of various (current and potential) adaptation measures aimed at protecting vulnerable areas from flooding. The study firstly assesses current and future risks from flooding in the most sensitive region of the city. Subsequently, the study identifies, analyses and assesses adaptive initiatives and measures to address flood risks in the Eastern fringe area. Adaptation assessment is conducted within the framework of Multi Criteria Analysis methodology which allows both normative judgment and technical expertise in the assessment process. Based on the assessment and analysis, adaptive measures are prioritized to enable more effective action. Such a participatory integrated assessment of adaptation options is a new approach in flood management in least developed countries and in Bangladesh in particular. A framework for prioritization of adaptation measures is lacking in the decision making process in Bangladesh which could immensely assist in informed and structured decisions while developing adaptation strategies

A quantitative central limit theorem for linear statistics of random matrix eigenvalues

It is known that the fluctuations of suitable linear statistics of Haar distributed elements of the compact classical groups satisfy a central limit theorem. We show that if the corresponding test functions are sufficiently smooth, a rate of convergence of order almost $1/n$ can be obtained using a quantitative multivariate CLT for traces of powers that was recently proven using Stein's method of exchangeable pairs.Comment: Title modified; main result stated under slightly weaker conditions; accepted for publication in the Journal of Theoretical Probabilit

\epsilon-regularity for systems involving non-local, antisymmetric operators

We prove an epsilon-regularity theorem for critical and super-critical systems with a non-local antisymmetric operator on the right-hand side. These systems contain as special cases, Euler-Lagrange equations of conformally invariant variational functionals as Rivi\`ere treated them, and also Euler-Lagrange equations of fractional harmonic maps introduced by Da Lio-Rivi\`ere. In particular, the arguments presented here give new and uniform proofs of the regularity results by Rivi\`ere, Rivi\`ere-Struwe, Da-Lio-Rivi\`ere, and also the integrability results by Sharp-Topping and Sharp, not discriminating between the classical local, and the non-local situations

Global well-posedness for a nonlocal Gross-Pitaevskii equation with non-zero condition at infinity

We study the Gross-Pitaevskii equation involving a nonlocal interaction potential. Our aim is to give sufficient conditions that cover a variety of nonlocal interactions such that the associated Cauchy problem is globally well-posed with non-zero boundary condition at infinity, in any dimension. We focus on even potentials that are positive definite or positive tempered distributions.Comment: Communications in Partial Differential Equations (2010

Dedicated versus mainstreaming approaches in local climate plans in Europe

Cities are gaining prominence committing to respond to the threat of climate change, e.g., by developing local climate plans or strategies. However, little is known regarding the approaches and processes of plan development and implementation, or the success and effectiveness of proposed measures. Mainstreaming is regarded as one approach associated with (implementation) success, but the extent of integration of local climate policies and plans in ongoing sectoral and/or development planning is unclear. This paper analyses 885 cities across the 28 European countries to create a first reference baseline on the degree of climate mainstreaming in local climate plans. This will help to compare the benefits of mainstreaming versus dedicated climate plans, looking at policy effectiveness and ultimately delivery of much needed climate change efforts at the city level. All core cities of the European Urban Audit sample were analyzed, and their local climate plans classified as dedicated or mainstreamed in other local policy initiatives. It was found that the degree of mainstreaming is low for mitigation (9% of reviewed cities; 12% of the identified plans) and somewhat higher for adaptation (10% of cities; 29% of plans). In particular horizontal mainstreaming is a major effort for local authorities; an effort that does not necessarily pay off in terms of success of action implementation. This study concludes that climate change issues in local municipalities are best tackled by either, developing a dedicated local climate plan in parallel to a mainstreamed plan or by subsequently developing first the dedicated and later a mainstreaming plan (joint or subsequent “dual track approach”). Cities that currently provide dedicated local climate plans (66% of cities for mitigation; 26% of cities for adaptation) may follow-up with a mainstreaming approach. This promises effective implementation of tangible climate actions as well as subsequent diffusion of climate issues into other local sector policies. The development of only broad sustainability or resilience strategies is seen as critical.We thank the many council representatives that supported the datacollection. Special thanks to Birgit Georgi who helped in setting up this large net work of researchers across the EU-28. We also thank the EU COST Action TU 0902 (ledbyRichardDawson) that established the core research network and the positive engagement and interaction of th emembers of this group. OH is Fellow of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and was funded by the UK EPSRC LC Transforms: Low Carbon Transitions of Fleet Operations in Metropolitan Sites Project (grant number EP/N010612/1). EKL was supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, Czechia, within the National Sustainability Program I (NPU I) (grant number LO1415). DG ac-knowledges support by the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR), Italy ("Departments of Excellence" grant L. 232/2016). HO was supported by the Ministry of Education and Research, Estonia (grantnumberIUT34-17). MO acknowledges funding from the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), Spain (grant number IJCI-2016-28835). SS acknowledges that CENSE's research is partially funded by the Science Foundation, Portugal (grant number UID/AMB/04085/2019). The paper reflects only the views of the authors. The European Union, the European Environment Agency or other supporting bodies are not liable for any use that may be made of the information that is provided in this manuscript

Radiating and non-radiating sources in elasticity

In this work, we study the inverse source problem of a fixed frequency for the Navier's equation. We investigate that nonradiating external forces. If the support of such a force has a convex or non-convex corner or edge on their boundary, the force must be vanishing there. The vanishing property at corners and edges holds also for sufficiently smooth transmission eigenfunctions in elasticity. The idea originates from the enclosure method: The energy identity and new type exponential solutions for the Navier's equation.Comment: 17 page

The ℓs\ell^s-boundedness of a family of integral operators on UMD Banach function spaces

We prove the $\ell^s$-boundedness of a family of integral operators with an operator-valued kernel on UMD Banach function spaces. This generalizes and simplifies earlier work by Gallarati, Veraar and the author, where the $\ell^s$-boundedness of this family of integral operators was shown on Lebesgue spaces. The proof is based on a characterization of $\ell^s$-boundedness as weighted boundedness by Rubio de Francia.Comment: 13 pages. Generalization of arXiv:1410.665

New distance measures for classifying X-ray astronomy data into stellar classes

The classification of the X-ray sources into classes (such as extragalactic sources, background stars, ...) is an essential task in astronomy. Typically, one of the classes corresponds to extragalactic radiation, whose photon emission behaviour is well characterized by a homogeneous Poisson process. We propose to use normalized versions of the Wasserstein and Zolotarev distances to quantify the deviation of the distribution of photon interarrival times from the exponential class. Our main motivation is the analysis of a massive dataset from X-ray astronomy obtained by the Chandra Orion Ultradeep Project (COUP). This project yielded a large catalog of 1616 X-ray cosmic sources in the Orion Nebula region, with their series of photon arrival times and associated energies. We consider the plug-in estimators of these metrics, determine their asymptotic distributions, and illustrate their finite-sample performance with a Monte Carlo study. We estimate these metrics for each COUP source from three different classes. We conclude that our proposal provides a striking amount of information on the nature of the photon emitting sources. Further, these variables have the ability to identify X-ray sources wrongly catalogued before. As an appealing conclusion, we show that some sources, previously classified as extragalactic emissions, have a much higher probability of being young stars in Orion Nebula.Comment: 29 page

Which are the factors influencing the integration of mitigation and adaptation in climate change plans in Latin American cities?

As cities are major contributors to GHG emissions and places where people face multiple climate change impacts, their critical role in responding to climate change is becoming increasingly evident. Cities are developing climate change action plans (CCAPs) focusing their efforts on reducing GHG emissions and adapting to climate change impacts. Despite having the highest urban population in the world, there are a few studies on urban CCAPs in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. This study assessed the level of integration of mitigation and adaptation (IMA) in urban climate change plans across 44 major LAC cities. The level of IMA was measured by the utilization of the IMA index, a comprehensive evaluation framework of indicators. The results showed that more than half of the examined LAC cities have a moderate level of IMA. The study further explored and statistically analyzed 42 institutional, socioeconomic and environmental factors to identify which ones potentially drive or constrain the level of IMA. Five out of 42 factors were found to have a significant impact (p-value < 0.05) on the IMA index. Of the five significant factors, memberships in regional networks FLACMA and UCCI respectively, and donor agencies' contribution to the development of urban policies had a positive impact on IMA index; while the national climate fund and membership in the global network Urban LEDS had a negative impact. This suggests that cities are most likely to integrate mitigation and adaptation when the development of their CCAPs are supported by donor agencies or collaborating with other cities. The results highlight the important role of donor agencies, international organizations and cities' networks on providing the necessary capacity to cities for addressing climate change in an integrated manner