In recent years, through the availability of remotely sensed data and other national datasets, it has become possible to conduct national-scale flood risk assessment in the England and Wales. The results of this type of risk analysis can be used to inform policy-making and prioritisation of resources for flood management. It can form the starting point for more detailed strategic and local-scal...

The Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development represents a crucial opportunity to place environmental health at the forefront of the sustainable development agenda. Billions of people living in low- and middle-income countries continue to be afflicted by preventable diseases due to modifiable environmental exposures, causing needless suffering and perpetuating a cycle of pover...

Most current cost-benefit analyses of climate change policies suggest an optimal global climate policy that is significantly less stringent than the level required to meet the internationally agreed 2 °C target. This is partly because the sum of estimated economic damage of climate change across various sectors, such as energy use and changes in agricultural production, results in only a small ...

The Pearl River Delta in the People’s Republic of China is experiencing rapid rates of economic growth. Government directives in the late 1970s and early 1980s spurred economic development that has led to widespread land conversion. In this study, we monitor land-use through a nested hierarchy of land-cover. Change vectors of Tasseled Cap brightness, greenness and wetness of Landsat Thematic Ma...

Climate change is likely to have significant implications for human health, particularly through alterations of the incidence, prevalence, and distribution of infectious diseases. In the context of these risks, governments in high income nations have begun developing strategies to reduce potential climate change impacts and increase health system resilience (i.e., adaptation). In this paper, we...

In September, 2007, the IPCC convened a workshop to discuss how a new set of scenarios to support climate model runs, mitigation analyses, and impact, adaptation and vulnerability research might be developed. The first phase of the suggested new approach is now approaching completion. This article discusses some of the issues raised by scenario relevant research and analysis since the last set ...

BACKGROUND Forests occur across diverse biomes, each of which shows a specific composition of plant communities associated with the particular climate regimes. Predicted future climate change will have impacts on the vulnerability and productivity of forests; in some regions higher temperatures will extend the growing season and thus improve forest productivity, while changed annual precipitati...

Negotiations in the real world have many features which tend to be ignored in policy modeling. They are often multilateral, involving many negotiating parties with preferences over outcomes that can differ substantially. They are also often multidimensional, in the sense that several policies are negotiated over simultaneously. Trade negotiations are a prime example, as are negotiations over en...

Globally, natural resources are increasingly under pressure, especially due to population growth, economic growth and transformation as well as climate change. As a result, the water, energy, and food (WEF) nexus approach has emerged to understand interdependencies and commonly manage resources within a multi-scale and multi-level framework. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the high and growing consumpti...

© 2012. The Authors. Licensee: AOSIS OpenJournals. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. The genesis of the Southern African Centre for Infectious Disease Surveillance (SACIDS) is rooted in the realisation that infectious diseases are and will continue to be a formidable challenge to human welfare and economic development in Africa over the horizon of 30 years fr...