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9 - Rapid Vulnerability Assessments of exposures, sensitivities, and adaptive capacities of the HERO study sites
- from Part IV
- Edited by Brent Yarnal, Pennsylvania State University, Colin Polsky, Clark University, Massachusetts, James O'Brien, Kingston University, London
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- Book:
- Sustainable Communities on a Sustainable Planet
- Published online:
- 06 January 2010
- Print publication:
- 24 September 2009, pp 175-208
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Summary
Introduction
Vulnerability is a concept that captures the dynamic interactions between complex human systems and complex environmental systems. Thus, a vulnerability assessment that produces a static view of human–environment interactions (i.e., by examining one place at one time) will likely provide only limited – and potentially misleading – insight into how the coupled system works. Of course, such static pictures are common in this research domain because it is challenging to establish the temporal evolution of vulnerability (i.e., one place or many places over time). Especially in the context of having limited resources to conduct a vulnerability assessment, a solution to this challenge is to ignore variations over time in favor of examining variations over geographic space (i.e., many places at one time; see Mendelsohn et al. 1994; Carbone 1995; Polsky 2004). We argue that executing a many-places-at-one-time approach requires that all the places adopt a common research protocol; to our knowledge such a networked vulnerability assessment has yet to be reported in the literature. In this chapter, we report results from our effort to examine vulnerabilities – using a rapidly executable and commonly executed methodology – in four distinct study sites in the United States.
As explained in Chapter 1, the HERO project sought to develop infrastructure for studying and monitoring human–environment interactions at individual sites and to enable cross-site comparisons and generalizations. To test how well these concepts and tools work in practice, the project addressed the question, “How does land-use change influence vulnerability to droughts and floods?
1 - Infrastructure for observing local human–environment interactions
- from Part I
- Edited by Brent Yarnal, Pennsylvania State University, Colin Polsky, Clark University, Massachusetts, James O'Brien, Kingston University, London
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- Book:
- Sustainable Communities on a Sustainable Planet
- Published online:
- 06 January 2010
- Print publication:
- 24 September 2009, pp 1-12
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Summary
The vision: sustainable communities on a sustainable planet
Imagine a world where nature and society coexist in a healthy symbiosis, where human impacts on the environment are minimal, and where communities are safe from natural and technological hazards. Imagine a time when scientists can monitor such sustainable human–environment interactions, when they can interactively share and compare data, analyses, and ideas about those interactions from their homes and offices, and when they can collaborate with local, regional, and international colleagues and stakeholders in a global network devoted to the environmental sustainability of their communities and of the planet.
We contend that to build the sustainable world portrayed above, it is necessary to develop an infrastructure that will support such an edifice. Consequently, this chapter introduces our ideas about the infrastructure needed to realize this vision and how the Human–Environment Regional Observatory project (HERO) attempted to take the initial steps to develop that infrastructure. The chapter also demonstrates that HERO addressed several major growth areas of twenty-first-century science – complex systems, interdisciplinary research, usable knowledge/usable science, and transdisciplinarity – as integral parts of its infrastructure development. The chapter ends by laying out the rationale behind and structure of this book.
Achieving the vision: infrastructure development and HERO
Infrastructure for monitoring global change in local places
To paraphrase the American politician Tip O'Neill, “all global change is local.” On the one hand, anthropogenic global environmental change is the accumulated result of billions of individual actions occurring at billions of specific locations.
14 - Urbanization and hydroclimatic challenges in the Sonoran Desert Border Region
- from Part V
- Edited by Brent Yarnal, Pennsylvania State University, Colin Polsky, Clark University, Massachusetts, James O'Brien, Kingston University, London
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- Book:
- Sustainable Communities on a Sustainable Planet
- Published online:
- 06 January 2010
- Print publication:
- 24 September 2009, pp 292-316
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Summary
Introduction
The Sonoran Desert Border Region HERO consists of two watersheds, the Santa Cruz River and the San Pedro River, as well as the counties and municipalities predominantly situated in these watersheds. Both watersheds straddle the United States–Mexico border with their rivers flowing north from Sonora, Mexico into Arizona, United States. On the Arizona side, Santa Cruz and Cochise Counties reside mainly in these basins and rely on the groundwater sources within the basins. On the Sonoran side, there are five municipalities: Nogales and Santa Cruz in the Santa Cruz Basin, and Cananea, Naco, and Agua Prieta in the San Pedro Basin. Most of the population in this border region lives in two urban transborder communities: Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora, situated on the western side of the study area and together referred to as Ambos Nogales; and Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora situated on the eastern side. A third transborder community, Naco, Arizona and Naco, Sonora, located just west of Douglas/Agua Prieta, is very small. Other settlements of significant size dot the region, including Sierra Vista, Rio Rico, Douglas, and Benson on the Arizona side, and Santa Cruz and Cananea on the Sonoran side (Figure 14.1).
The Sonoran Desert Border Region is semi-arid to arid, with summer temperatures frequently reaching over 104°F (40°C). The region experiences bimodal winter/summer precipitation patterns resulting from midlatitude frontal systems in winter and from thunderstorms within the regional North American monsoon circulation in summer (Adams and Comrie 1997; Sheppard et al. 2002).
15 - Lessons learned from the HERO project
- from Part VI
- Edited by Brent Yarnal, Pennsylvania State University, Colin Polsky, Clark University, Massachusetts, James O'Brien, Kingston University, London
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- Book:
- Sustainable Communities on a Sustainable Planet
- Published online:
- 06 January 2010
- Print publication:
- 24 September 2009, pp 317-338
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Summary
The HERO vision revisited
This book started with the premise that to develop sustainable communities on a sustainable planet, an infrastructure should exist that enables scientists to monitor local human–environment interactions, to share and compare data, analyses, and ideas with scientists at other locales, and to participate with colleagues and stakeholders in a global network dedicated to community-level sustainability.
The book recounted the Human–Environment Regional Observatory (HERO) project's attempt to take first steps in developing such an infrastructure and the concepts and research behind that infrastructure. As such, the project did not produce – and never intended to produce – definitive research results about, for example, vulnerability or the causes and consequences of land-use and land-cover change. Consequently, this book has concentrated on conceptualizing the elements needed to make human–environment infrastructure work, and on exploring those elements by proof-of-concept testing.
This chapter summarizes HERO's efforts (and therefore the book) by revisiting a set of questions posed in Chapter 1. The most important part of the chapter is the discussion of lessons learned during the HERO team's attempts to answer those questions. The chapter concludes by trying to support the project's (and book's) claim that there is a need for HEROs.
Answers to and lessons learned from HERO's guiding questions
Chapter 1 reported two fundamental questions that were central to the HERO effort. One overarching question guided the research and addressed infrastructure development via three less-encompassing questions (Table 15.1).
24 - X4L: Exchange for Learning
- from THEME 5 - THE CREATION OF DIGITAL RESOURCES BY USER COMMUNITIES
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- By Susan Eales, Programme Manager X4L, JISC Executive, King's College London, UK, Andrew Comrie, Assistant Principal, Lauder College, Scotland, UK
- Edited by Peter Brophy, Shelagh Fisher, Jenny Craven
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- Book:
- Libraries Without Walls 5
- Published by:
- Facet
- Published online:
- 08 June 2018
- Print publication:
- 15 June 2004, pp 248-258
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Summary
Introduction
This paper introduces the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC, www.jisc.ac.uk) funded Exchange for Learning (X4L, www.jisc.ac.uk/index. cfm?name=programme_x4l) programme and highlights the approach of one particular project within the programme: Learning for a Healthier Nation.
JISC is a strategic advisory body, funded by all the UK post-16 funding councils, which provides the network infrastructure for learning, teaching and research, offers support and guidance in the use of information and communication technology (ICT), and acts as a national and international leadership body for collaboration across education and research.
The JISC Information Environment Development vision has evolved from an earlier initiative known as the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) and aims to enable seamless access to a diverse range of quality resources for learning, teaching and research in a secure way. Funding has been allocated to a number of development programmes that will contribute to the realization of this vision including:
• authentication and middleware tools to bring together distributed collections of resources
• demonstrator portals, subject portals and a learning and teaching portal to allow cross-searching of these collections
• work with commercial publishers to explore the challenges and benefits to them of engaging with the information environment
• influencing the development of common standards to allow resources to be shared
• interoperability and communication with international education bodies.
X4L
X4L is part of the JISC Information Environment Development since, for the evolving information environment to be more directly useful for learning and teaching as well as research, it must be populated with suitable learning materials and case studies.
The motivation for X4L is the imperative to make the most of the considerable investment that has taken place in a range of content that has high potential value for use in learning, but needs a pedagogical framework and robust tools to ensure that it can be more easily slotted into programmes of study by the teacher or lecturer. The programme is led by 25 projects from across the UK and involves more than 100 institutions and teams from colleges, universities, libraries, JISC services, local authorities and commercial companies. X4L is a three-year programme, running from June 2002 to July 2005 with a funding allocation of around £4 million.