Application of geographic information system and modelling in health impact assessment for urban road mobility in Vietnam

Transport is an essential sector in modern societies. It connects economic sectors and industries. Next to its contribution to economic development and social interconnection, it also causes adverse impacts on the environment and results in health hazards. Transport is a major source of ground air pollution, especially in urban areas, and therefore contributing to the health problems, such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, cancer, and physical injuries. This thesis presents the results of a health risk assessment that quantifies the mortality and the diseases associated with particulate matter pollution resulting from urban road transport in Hai Phong City, Vietnam. The focus is on the integration of modelling and GIS approaches in the exposure analysis to increase the accuracy of the assessment and to produce timely and consistent assessment results. The modelling was done to estimate traffic conditions and concentrations of particulate matters based on geo-references data. A simplified health risk assessment was also done for Ha Noi based on monitoring data that allows a comparison of the results between the two cases. The results of the case studies show that health risk assessment based on modelling data can provide a much more detail results and allows assessing health impacts of different mobility development options at micro level. The use of modeling and GIS as a common platform for the integration of different assessments (environmental, health, socio-economic, etc.) provides various strengths, especially in capitalising on the available data stored in different units and forms and allows handling large amount of data. The use of models and GIS in a health risk assessment, from a decision making point of view, can reduce the processing/waiting time while providing a view at different scales: from micro scale (sections of a city) to a macro scale. It also helps visualising the links between air quality and health outcomes which is useful discussing different development options. However, a number of improvements can be made to further advance the integration. An improved integration programme of the data will facilitate the application of integrated models in policy-making. Data on mobility survey, environmental monitoring and measuring must be standardised and legalised. Various traffic models, together with emission and dispersion models, should be tested and more attention should be given to their uncertainty and sensitivity

Direito da religião

This dissertation stands out the religious and social role of Christian religious minorities in Portuguese society, where the vast majority of the believers profess the Catholic faith. This work serves to demystify the widespread prejudice against minorities and clarify its place in the religious phenomenon in Portugal. We intend to define the concept of Religion, missing in the Portuguese legislation, framing it in Portuguese constitutional history, which allows us to evaluate the relations State/Catholic Church and State/religious minorities, since Liberalism. We attempt to measure how the legal system accepts the religious phenomenon and how to deal with religious diversity, according to the principle of religious freedom postulated in the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic. It is also our intention to relate the concepts of sect and religious minority, which tendentiously are misunderstood. In order to understand the underlying dynamics of religious minorities, we take the example of the Portuguese Evangelical Alliance, which we monitored closely throughout the investigation. We will give some space for a small analysis of the state and social discrimination experienced by the minorities. With this work we can conclude in general that Portugal, despite its weak religious diversity, has a good advance on the religious freedom. The Portuguese State has made a remarkable effort to cooperate with the churches, an effort that must be continued in order to fill some gaps found, particularly in the absence of legislation regarding the criminalization of religious discrimination and competence of the Committee on Religious Freedom in case of a possible complaint. We prove similarly that there is also a special attention to the Catholic Church in the composition of the Committee on Religious Freedom and the Committee Broadcast Time of Religious Confessions. In the end, we prove that the society is the major source of discrimination against minorities.