20 Years of pacifying responses to environmental management

Using a state, pressure, response framework, we provide an evidence-based reflection on environmental outcomes in Australia and New Zealand across the domains of climate change, biodiversity, freshwater and marine management, emphasising the role of Indigenous and business perspectives. Significant developments have occurred in the past 20 years through affirmation of Indigenous rights and responsibilities. Responses to climate change have tended to emphasise passive risk management with unclear outcomes. Despite meeting biodiversity protection targets, outcomes are worsening, suggesting a need to challenge the dualistic preservation/production land categorisations. In freshwater and marine management, a mix of collaborative and market-based responses has emerged, although their efficacy remains untested. A reliance on voluntary approaches by business makes critical assessment of progress difficult. Thus, despite strong progress in some areas, the adaptiveness of environmental management remains limited, and many indicators suggest continuing decline in environmental condition. Our responses have been largely pacifying in nature, leading to perverse outcomes and failure to acknowledge alternatives that might address deteriorating environmental conditions. A shift is needed towards deliberative policy experimentation that truly values the application of novel and diversified approaches and facilitates integrated learning across environmental domains.

Age, physical inactivity, obesity, health conditions, and health-related quality of life among patients receiving conservative management for musculoskeletal disorders

Background Musculoskeletal conditions and insufficient physical activity have substantial personal and economic costs among contemporary aging societies. This study examined the age distribution, comorbid health conditions, body mass index (BMI), self-reported physical activity levels, and health-related quality of life of patients accessing ambulatory hospital clinics for musculoskeletal disorders. The study also investigated whether comorbidity, BMI, and self-reported physical activity were associated with patients’ health-related quality of life after adjusting for age as a potential confounder. Methods A cross-sectional survey was undertaken in three ambulatory hospital clinics for musculoskeletal disorders. Participants (n=224) reported their reason for referral, age, comorbid health conditions, BMI, physical activity levels (Active Australia Survey), and health-related quality of life (EQ-5D). Descriptive statistics and linear modeling were used to examine the associations between age, comorbidity, BMI, intensity and duration of physical activity, and health-related quality of life. Results The majority of patients (n=115, 51.3%) reported two or more comorbidities. In addition to other musculoskeletal conditions, common comorbidities included depression (n=41, 18.3%), hypertension (n=40, 17.9%), and diabetes (n=39, 17.4%). Approximately one-half of participants (n=110, 49.1%) self-reported insufficient physical activity to meet minimum recommended guidelines and 150 (67.0%) were overweight (n=56, 23.2%), obese (n=64, 28.6%), severely obese (n=16, 7.1%), or very severely obese (n=14, 6.3%), with a higher proportion of older patients affected. A generalized linear model indicated that, after adjusting for age, self-reported physical activity was positively associated (z=4.22, P<0.001), and comorbidities were negatively associated (z=-2.67, P<0.01) with patients’ health-related quality of life. Conclusion Older patients were more frequently affected by undesirable clinical attributes of comorbidity, obesity, and physical inactivity. However, findings from this investigation are compelling for the care of patients of all ages. Potential integration of physical activity behavior change or other effective lifestyle interventions into models of care for patients with musculoskeletal disorders is worthy of further investigation.

Organisational culture, change readiness and retention : a human services perspective

The Third Sector is experiencing unprecedented change as nonprofit organisations pursue their mission, organisational excellence and sustainability. This research collected data from employees of Australian nonprofit human service organisations. Instruments to measure organisational culture and change readiness were validated. The relationships between perceptions of organisational cultures, change readiness, job satisfaction and intentions to leave were explored. Findings indicate flexible organisational cultures influence employee attitudes more positively than control cultures. It identified that leaders have a significant role to play in developing and fostering change readiness and job satisfaction. This improves employees' adaptation to change, increases staff retention and organisational sustainability.

Regulating Workplace Risks: A Comparative Study of Inspection Regimes in Times of Change

Regulating Workplace Risks is a study of regulatory inspection of occupational health and safety (OHS) and its management in five countries – Australia, Canada (Québec), France, Sweden and the UK – during a time of major change. It examines the implications of the shift from specification to process based regulation, in which attention has been increasingly directed to the means of managing OHS more systematically at a time in which a major restructuring of work has occurred in response to the globalised economy. These changes provide both the context and material for a wider discussion of the nature of regulation and regulatory inspection and their role in protecting the health, safety and well-being of workers in advanced market economies.

Resilience of water supply systems in meeting the challenges posed by climate change and population growth

This research project provides a scientifically robust approach for assessing the resilience of water supply systems, which are critical infrastructure, to impacts of climate change and population growth. An approach for the identification of trigger points that allows timely and appropriate management actions to be taken to avoid catastrophic system failure is an important outcome of this project. In the current absence of a formal method to evaluate the resilience of a water supply system, the approach developed in this study was based on the characterisation of resilience of a water supply system to a range of surrogate measures. Accordingly, a set of indicators are proposed to evaluate system behaviour and logistic regression analysis was used to assess system behaviour under predicted rainfall, storage and demand conditions.

Managing impressions during institutional change – The role of organisational accounts in legitimation

Public relations literature has only recently drawn on institutional theory to provide insights into legitimacy that go beyond strategic organisational level processes. Many of the existing crisis management studies are approached from a strategic perspective, which have limitations in terms of how organizations manage their legitimacy in relation to broader and often changing social agendas. This study focuses on how impression management is used to deal with legitimacy gaps between organizations and public expectations that draw on an institutional theory perspective. This qualitative study examines the use of organizational accounts through a lens that marries institutional theory and impression management in order to understand how organizations manage their legitimacy. This study of accounts around legitimacy concerns of corporate social responsibility matters shows that organizations relied on their own tangible technical attributes rather than shared norms of what is considered responsible when there are no hard or institutionalised laws and regulations in place around corporate social responsibility concerns. This study offers insights into public relations concerns around impression management during institutional change and in doing so extends existing public relations approaches to crisis management.

Making climate change manageable : how accounting constructs new power-knowledge regimes

This paper examines the modern power of accounting to permeate new spheres and create new objects by examining how climate change becomes a new category for accounting’s attention. It outlines the socio-political problem space where accounting and climate change connect by tracing the emergence of the UK’s Climate Change Act (2008) to a specifically modern calculating attitude described here as ‘managing by the numbers’. It suggests the intersection of accounting and climate change was made possible by accounting’s role in tying disciplinary subjectivities and objectivities together whilst operating simultaneously at the level of individuals, organisations and government. Such that when faced with new unknowns we revert to previous ways of managing we have come to know and experienced throughout our formative years in schools, hospitals, firms and government departments. In this way, accounting’s emergence in the domain of managing climate change implies a transformation that cannot be explained merely as a practical response to a global warming problem, but rather as an example of a new power-knowledge regime that makes possible the management and control of a new organisational phenomenon called climate change.

Managing climate change ‘by the numbers’ in a UK energy company

This paper examines how ideas and practices of accounting come together in turning the abstract concept of climate change into a new non-financial performance measure in a large energy company in the UK. It develops the notion of ‘governmental management’ to explain how the firm’s carbon dioxide emissions were transformed into a new organisational object that could be made quantifiable, measureable and ultimately manageable because of the modern power of accounting in tying disciplinary subjectivities and objectivities together whilst operating simultaneously at the level of individual and the organisation. Examining these interrelations highlights the constitutive nature of accounting in creating not just new categories for accounting’s attention, but in turn new organisational knowledge and knowledge experts in the making up accounting for climate change. Significantly, it appears these new knowledge experts are no longer accountants: which may help explain accounting’s evolution into evermore spheres of influence as we increasingly choose to manage our world ‘by the numbers’.

Social network resilience following organisational change

This paper presents two key findings from a longitudinal study examining the dynamics of social networks during organisational change. One, the degree to which users seek new sources of information while adapting to the change. Two, the degree to which social networks display structural resilience when undergoing significant structural and technological change. Users reported an increase in advice ties post-implementation, however a proportionally higher increase in ties within their work group compared to the wider network was identified. The results also supported the supposition that while IT driven change may initially disrupt social networks some networks possess a high degree of resilience, with key players reasserting their original positions of influence following the initial phase of change related disruption.

Burden of decompensated cirrhosis and ascites on hospital services in a tertiary care facility: time for change?

Background Ascites, the most frequent complication of cirrhosis, is associated with poor prognosis and reduced quality of life. Recurrent hospital admissions are common and often unplanned, resulting in increased use of hospital services. Aims To examine use of hospital services by patients with cirrhosis and ascites requiring paracentesis, and to investigate factors associated with early unplanned readmission. Methods A retrospective review of the medical chart and clinical databases was performed for patients who underwent paracentesis between October 2011 and October 2012. Clinical parameters at index admission were compared between patients with and without early unplanned hospital readmissions. Results The 41 patients requiring paracentesis had 127 hospital admissions, 1164 occupied bed days and 733 medical imaging services. Most admissions (80.3%) were for management of ascites, of which 41.2% were unplanned. Of those eligible, 69.7% were readmitted and 42.4% had an early unplanned readmission. Twelve patients died and nine developed spontaneous bacterial peritonitis. Of those eligible for readmission, more patients died (P = 0.008) and/or developed spontaneous bacterial peritonitis (P = 0.027) if they had an early unplanned readmission during the study period. Markers of liver disease, as well as haemoglobin (P = 0.029), haematocrit (P = 0.024) and previous heavy alcohol use (P = 0.021) at index admission, were associated with early unplanned readmission. Conclusion Patients with cirrhosis and ascites comprise a small population who account for substantial use of hospital services. Markers of disease severity may identify patients at increased risk of early readmission. Alternative models of care should be considered to reduce unplanned hospital admissions, healthcare costs and pressure on emergency services.

Protecting World Heritage sites from the adverse impacts of climate change : obligations for States Parties to the World Heritage Convention

Through its mandate to protect and preserve places of ‘outstanding universal value’, the World Heritage Convention provides an unlikely yet effective tool in global efforts to mitigate climate change. The practical efficacy of the Strategy to Assist States Parties to Implement Appropriate Management Responses (‘the Strategy’), which represents the World Heritage Committee’s primary response to the threats posed by climate change to World Heritage sites, is undermined by its weak stance on mitigation. This paper argues that the World Heritage Convention imposes stronger obligations on States Parties than those contained in the Strategy, including a duty on States Parties to commit to ‘deep cuts’ in greenhouse gas emissions. In order to ensure the continuing success of the World Heritage Convention States Parties must engage in extensive mitigation strategies without delay.

Extinction risk in cloud forest fragments under climate change and habitat loss

Aim: To quantify the consequences of major threats to biodiversity, such as climate and land-use change, it is important to use explicit measures of species persistence, such as extinction risk. The extinction risk of metapopulations can be approximated through simple models, providing a regional snapshot of the extinction probability of a species. We evaluated the extinction risk of three species under different climate change scenarios in three different regions of the Mexican cloud forest, a highly fragmented habitat that is particularly vulnerable to climate change. Location: Cloud forests in Mexico. Methods: Using Maxent, we estimated the potential distribution of cloud forest for three different time horizons (2030, 2050 and 2080) and their overlap with protected areas. Then, we calculated the extinction risk of three contrasting vertebrate species for two scenarios: (1) climate change only (all suitable areas of cloud forest through time) and (2) climate and land-use change (only suitable areas within a currently protected area), using an explicit patch-occupancy approximation model and calculating the joint probability of all populations becoming extinct when the number of remaining patches was less than five. Results: Our results show that the extent of environmentally suitable areas for cloud forest in Mexico will sharply decline in the next 70 years. We discovered that if all habitat outside protected areas is transformed, then only species with small area requirements are likely to persist. With habitat loss through climate change only, high dispersal rates are sufficient for persistence, but this requires protection of all remaining cloud forest areas. Main conclusions: Even if high dispersal rates mitigate the extinction risk of species due to climate change, the synergistic impacts of changing climate and land use further threaten the persistence of species with higher area requirements. Our approach for assessing the impacts of threats on biodiversity is particularly useful when there is little time or data for detailed population viability analyses. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Road operation phase sustainability indicator as a response to the climate change phenomena

Road infrastructure is a major contributor of greenhouse gas (GHG) around the world. Once constructed, a road becomes a part of a road network and is subjected to recurrent maintenance/rehabilitation activities. Studies to date are mostly aimed at the development of sustainability indicators that deal with the material and construction phases of a road when it is constructed. The operation phase is infrequently studied and there is a need for sustainability indicators to be developed relating to this phase to better understand the GHG emissions as a proper response to the climate change phenomena. During the operation phase, maintenance/rehabilitation activities are undertaken based on certain agreed intervention criteria that do not include environmental implications relating to the climate change aspect properly. Availability of appropriate indicators may, therefore, assist in sustainable road asset maintenance management. This paper presents the findings of a literature based study and has proposed a way forward to develop a key “road operation phase” environmental indicator, which can contribute to road operation phase carbon footprint management based on a comprehensive road life cycle system boundary model. The proposed indicator can address multiple aspects of high impact road operation life environmental components such as: pavement rolling resistance, albedo, material, traffic congestion and lighting, based on availability of relevant scientific knowledge. Development of the indicator to appropriate level would offset the impacts of these components significantly and contribute to sustainable road operation management.