Mutually assured destruction or co-dependence? The G20 and the UN

The G20 forum has acted to crystallise important changes in the architecture of global governance emerging since the 1970s. This has seen the locus of power shift away from the United Nations (UN) System as smaller and poorer states become increasingly adept at exercising their power within UN structures. Yet it is too simple to set the G20 against the UN, for example as minilateralism versus multilateralism. While the UN seems increasingly constrained and less relevant, it is not about to disappear. Moreover, we argue there are two significant obstacles to the G20 claiming the mantle of dominant global governance institution. First, that minilateralism is still a form of multilateralism, and ultimately subject to the same problems with the generation of consensus if extended, as in the G20, to include sufficiently diverse state members for a claim of legitimacy. Second, its emergence from the Global Financial Crisis and historical focus on financial governance means its agenda is excessively narrow at a time when food and environmental crises command similar global political significance. We conclude by considering some of the different elements of the emerging G20/UN dynamic, and whether this emerging dialectic can enhance prospects for wide ranging reforms to global trade, finance and economic structures that are currently incapable of functioning sustainably or preventing wide scale famine.

Estuary environmental flows assessment methodology for Victoria

This report sets out a method to determine the environmental water requirements of estuaries in Victoria. The estuary environmental flows assessment method (EEFAM) is a standard methodology which can be applied consistently across Victorian estuaries.
The primary objective of EEFAM is to define a flow regime to maintain or enhance the ecological health of an estuary. The method is used to inform Victorian water resource planning processes.
The output of EEFAM is a recommended flow regime for estuaries. This recommendation is developed from the known dependence of the estuary’s flora, fauna, biogeochemical and geomorphological features on the flow regime. EEFAM is an evidence-based methodology. This bottom-up or ‘building block’ approach conforms to the asset-based approach of the Victorian River Health Strategy and regional river health strategies.
EEFAM is based on and expands on FLOWS, the Victorian method for determining environmental water requirements in rivers. The list of tasks has been modified and re-ordered in EEFAM to reflect environmental and management issues specific to estuaries. EEFAM and FLOWS can be applied
simultaneously to a river and its estuary as part of a whole-of-system approach to environmental flow requirements. Like the FLOWS method, EEFAM is modular, and additional components can be readily incorporated.

Multiscale evaluation of thermal dependence in the glucocorticoid response of vertebrates

Environmental temperature has profound effects on animal physiology, ecology, and evolution. Glucocorticoid (GC) hormones, through effects on phenotypic performance and life history, provide fundamental vertebrate physiological adaptations to environmental variation, yet we lack a comprehensive understanding of how temperature influences GC regulation in vertebrates. Using field studies and metaand comparative phylogenetic analyses, we investigated how acute change and broadscale variation in temperature correlated with baseline and stress-induced GC levels. Glucocorticoid levels were found to be temperature and taxon dependent, but generally, vertebrates exhibited strong positive correlations with acute changes in temperature. Furthermore, reptile baseline, bird baseline, and capture stressinduced GC levels to some extent covaried with broadscale environmental temperature. Thus, vertebrate GC function appears clearly thermally influenced. However, we caution that lack of detailed knowledge of thermal plasticity, heritability, and the basis for strong phylogenetic signal in GC responses limits our current understanding of the role of GC hormones in species’ responses to current and future climate variation.