Navigating the dilemmas of climate policy in Europe: evidence from policy evaluation studies

Climate change is widely recognised as a ‘wicked’ policy problem. Agreeing and implementing governance responses is proving extremely difficult. Policy makers in many jurisdictions now emphasise their ambition to govern using the best available evidence. One obvious source of such evidence is the evaluations of the performance of existing policies. But to what extent do these evaluations provide insights into the difficult dilemmas that governors typically encounter? We address this question by reviewing the content of 262 evaluation studies of European climate policies in the light of six kinds of dilemma found in the governance literature. We are interested in what these studies say about the performance of European climate policies and in their capacity to inform evidence-based policy-making. We find that the evaluations do arrive at common findings: that climate change is framed as a problem of market and/or state failure; that voluntary measures tend to be ineffective; that market-based instruments tend to be regressive; that EU-level policies have driven climate policies in the latecomer EU Member States; and that lack of monitoring and weak enforcement are major obstacles to effective policy implementation. However, we also conclude that the evidence base these studies represent is surprisingly weak for such a high profile area. There is too little systematic climate policy evaluation work in the EU to support systematic evidence-based policy making. This reduces the scope for sound policy making in the short run and is a constraint to policy learning in the longer term.     

Distribution and burial of organic carbon in sediments from the Indian Ocean upwelling region off Java and Sumatra,Indonesia

Sediments were sampled and oxygen profiles of the water column were determined in the Indian Ocean off west and south Indonesia in order to obtain information on the production, transformation, and accumulation of organic matter (OM). The stable carbon isotope composition (δ¹³C_org) in combination with C/N ratios depicts the almost exclusively marine origin of sedimentary organic matter in the entire study area. Maximum concentrations of organic carbon (C_org) and nitrogen (N) of 3.0% and 0.31%, respectively, were observed in the northern Mentawai Basin and in the Savu and Lombok basins. Minimum δ¹⁵N values of 3.7‰ were measured in the northern Mentawai Basin, whereas they varied around 5.4‰ at stations outside this region. Minimum bottom water oxygen concentrations of 1.1 mL L^?1, corresponding to an oxygen saturation of 16.1%, indicate reduced ventilation of bottom water in the northern Mentawai Basin. This low bottom water oxygen reduces organic matter decomposition, which is demonstrated by the almost unaltered isotopic composition of nitrogen during early diagenesis. Maximum C_org accumulation rates (CARs) were measured in the Lombok (10.4 g C m^?2 yr^?1) and northern Mentawai basins (5.2 g C m^?2 yr^?1). Upwelling-induced high productivity is responsible for the high CAR off East Java, Lombok, and Savu Basins, while a better OM preservation caused by reduced ventilation contributes to the high CAR observed in the northern Mentawai Basin. The interplay between primary production, remineralisation, and organic carbon burial determines the regional heterogeneity. CAR in the Indian Ocean upwelling region off Indonesia is lower than in the Peru and Chile upwellings, but in the same order of magnitude as in the Arabian Sea, the Benguela, and Gulf of California upwellings, and corresponds to 0.1–7.1% of the global ocean carbon burial. This demonstrates the relevance of the Indian Ocean margin off Indonesia for the global OM burial.     

Deconvolution of overcritical P-wave reflections from the top of D″

We have developed a method to retrieve overcritical PdP reflections from the top of D″ from the data. The differential travel-time, amplitude ratio and phase advance of the reflected PdP waveform relative to the direct P waveform are accurately obtained. Kirchhoff synthetics have been used to model the reflected waveforms for a set of different incidence angles i and velocity contrasts δα at the reflector which were then used as reference wavelets for the deconvolution.The results from a Gräfenberg data set differ markedly from the values predicted by the one-dimensional PWDK model derived from the same data. However, there are large uncertainties in i and δα. This could be caused by the presence of significant lateral heterogeneity in D″ or the need to model other phases which may exist such as the diving waves PDP and PDDP. The method is also applied to two other data examples. The trade-offs between different model parameters are examined.     

Oil pollution on Israeli coasts

Israel has long experienced the effects of oil discharged offshore into the Eastern Mediterranean. A 7-week survey discovered that the country now faces an additional inshore problem resulting from the changing regional pattern of oil transportation.     

Re-viewing the Entrapment controversy: Megaprojection, (mis)representation and postcolonial performance

Becoming the tallest building in the world in the mid-1990s, the Petronas Towers was the centre piece of an image of national progress and development that Malaysian authorities sought to project internationally. The release of Fox Movies' Entrapment in Malaysia in May 1999 provoked political outrage and popular disappointment at the way in which the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur had been spliced alongside riverside ‘slums’ filmed in the town of Malacca some 150 km away. This paper provides a critical reading of the spliced scene in the movie. At one level, the angry response of the Malaysian Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, to the scene diagnoses a geopolitics of asymmetrical representational power. However, I show how Mahathir's criticism of Entrapment in Malaysia was as much a defence of domestic political legitimacy (and national economic investibility) as it was ‘opposition’ or ‘resistance’ to hegemonic ‘Western’ (mis)representation. In addition, while the material and symbolic work of reimaging Kuala Lumpur had sought to negate (neo)orientalist imaginings of ‘Asian’ cities, the controversial scene rendered visible environmental ‘underdevelopment’ that has no place in a modern (vision of) Malaysia. Entrapment thus performed something in inducing Malaysian cities and citizens to ‘clean up’ their act, to practice ‘fully developed’ ways of seeing, being and being seen. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Assessment of downstream trends in channel gradient, total and specific stream power: a GIS approach

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analyses of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) coupled with catchment area based discharge estimation techniques provide a relatively simple means of modelling contiguous downstream trends in channel gradient, total stream power, and in riverscapes conducive to regime analysis, also specific stream power. For a small, high relief, coastal catchment in SE Australia, good agreement was obtained between channel gradients derived from a 25 m cell-size DEM and field survey equivalents over distances of several kilometres, indicating that channel gradients derived from DEMs can have a reasonable degree of absolute as well as relative accuracy over multi-kilometre reach scales. Assessment of downstream rates of change in channel gradient and specific stream power across four river systems suggests that some of the river reaches most responsive to high magnitude floods occur in zones where these variables rapidly decrease downstream. Modelling of downstream trends in channel gradient, total and specific stream power from catchment-wide DEMs has potential to provide a framework with which to investigate conceptual and empirical models between channel gradient, stream power and the form and dynamics of river systems.     

DFT study of the cation arrangements in the octahedral and tetrahedral sheets of dioctahedral 2:1 phyllosilicates

Quantum mechanical calculations based on the density functional theory (DFT) are used to study the crystal structures of dioctahedral 2:1 phyllosilicates. The isomorphous cation substitution is investigated by exploring different substitutions of octahedral Al³⁺ by Mg²⁺ or Fe³⁺, tetrahedral substitution of Si⁴⁺ by Al³⁺, and different interlayer cations (IC) (Na⁺, K⁺, Ca²⁺, and Mg²⁺). Samples with different kinds of layer charges are studied: only tetrahedrally charged, only octahedrally charged, or mixed octahedral/tetrahedral charged. The effect of the relative arrangements of these substitutions on the lattice parameters and total energy is studied. The experimental observation of segregation tendency of Fe³⁺ and dispersion tendency of Mg²⁺ in the octahedral sheet is reproduced and explained with reference to the relative energies of the octahedral cation arrangements. These energies are higher than those due to the IC/tetrahedral and IC/octahedral relative arrangements. The tetrahedral and octahedral substitutions that generate charged layers also tend to be dispersed. The octahedral cation exchange potentials change with the IC-charge/ionic radius value.     

用ANUDEM建立水文地貌关系正确DEM的方法研究

针对区域尺度的径流、水土流失定量评价和植被适宜性评价等研究工作需要,利用1∶25万数字地形图和ANUDEM软件,对黄土丘陵区中等分辨率水文地貌关系正确DEM建立方法进行了研究。结果表明该方法所建立的DEM,可以正确反映地貌梁、沟结构及其与流水线网络的关系,对地形描述的能力优于TIN方法建立的DEM;利用ANUDEM和1∶25万地形图插值建立黄土丘陵区DEM的三个主要参数分别为分辨率50或100,计算迭代次数40,第二糙率系数0.8。