Urban land and property ownership patterns in the UK: trends and forces for change

The first part of this review examines what is meant by ‘urban land and property’ (ULP) and looks at the background of ULP in the light of trends in UK urban areas over the past 50 years. Key conceptual approaches to the ULP ‘ownership issue’ are identified, together with the constraints to empirical analysis, which include a lack of data and patchy and inconsistent datasets. Three main components of ULP ownership in the UK are then examined using published data on commercial property, residential property and urban land, including ‘previously developed land’ (PDL) and ‘development land, covering both the private and public sectors. The review examines past trends in ULP ownership patterns in these sectors within the UK, and the key drivers which have created the present day patterns of ULP ownership. It concludes by identifying possible future trends in ULP ownership over the next 50 years to 2060 in the three main ULP sectors.

Comment on “Multiyear prediction of monthly mean Atlantic meridional overturning circulation at 26.5°N”

Matei et al. (Reports, 6 January 2012, p. 76) claim to show skillful multiyear predictions of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). However, these claims are not justified, primarily because the predictions of AMOC transport do not outperform simple reference forecasts based on climatological annual cycles. Accordingly, there is no justification for the “confident” prediction of a stable AMOC through 2014.

Stock measurement and regeneration policy approaches to ‘hardcore’ brownfield sites: England and Japan compared

This paper discusses key contextual differences and similarities in a comparative study on brownfield regeneration in England and Japan. Over the last decade, the regeneration of large-scale ‘flagship’ projects has been a primary focus in England, and previous research has discussed policy issues and key barriers at these sites. However, further research is required to explore specific barriers associated with problematic ‘hardcore’ sites suffering from long-term dereliction due to site-specific obstacles such as contamination and fragmented ownership. In comparison with England, brownfield regeneration is a relatively new urban agenda in Japan. Japan has less experience in terms of promoting redevelopment of brownfield sites at national level and the specific issues of ‘hardcore’ sites have been under-researched. The paper reviews and highlights important issues in comparing the definitions, national policy frameworks and the current stock of brownfields.

Who adopts Green Revolution (GR) technology in Ghana?

Sub-Saharan Africa in general and Ghana in particular, missed out on the Green revolution. Efforts are being made to re-introduce the revolution, and this calls for more socio-economic research into the factors influencing the adoption of new technologies, hence, this study. The study sought to find out how socio-economic factors contribute to adoption of Green revolution technology in Ghana. The method of analysis involved a maximum likelihood estimation of a probit model. The proportion of Green revolution inputs was found to be greater for the following: households whose heads had formal education, households with higher levels of non-farm income, credit and labor supply as well as those living in urban centers. It is recommended that levels of complementary inputs such as credit, extension services and infrastructure are increased. Also, households must be encouraged to form farmer-groups as an important source of farm labor. Furthermore, the fundamental problems of illiteracy must be addressed through increasing the levels of formal and non-formal education; and the gap between the rural and urban centers must be bridged through infrastructural and rural development. However, care must be taken to ensure that small-scale farmers are not marginalized, in terms of access to these complementary inputs that go with effective adoption of new technology. With these policies well implemented, Ghana can catch up with her Asian counterparts in this re-introduction of the revolution.

Characteristics of high-resolution versions of the Met Office unified model for forecasting convection over the United Kingdom

With many operational centers moving toward order 1-km-gridlength models for routine weather forecasting, this paper presents a systematic investigation of the properties of high-resolution versions of the Met Office Unified Model for short-range forecasting of convective rainfall events. The authors describe a suite of configurations of the Met Office Unified Model running with grid lengths of 12, 4, and 1 km and analyze results from these models for a number of convective cases from the summers of 2003, 2004, and 2005. The analysis includes subjective evaluation of the rainfall fields and comparisons of rainfall amounts, initiation, cell statistics, and a scale-selective verification technique. It is shown that the 4- and 1-km-gridlength models often give more realistic-looking precipitation fields because convection is represented explicitly rather than parameterized. However, the 4-km model representation suffers from large convective cells and delayed initiation because the grid length is too long to correctly reproduce the convection explicitly. These problems are not as evident in the 1-km model, although it does suffer from too numerous small cells in some situations. Both the 4- and 1-km models suffer from poor representation at the start of the forecast in the period when the high-resolution detail is spinning up from the lower-resolution (12 km) starting data used. A scale-selective precipitation verification technique implies that for later times in the forecasts (after the spinup period) the 1-km model performs better than the 12- and 4-km models for lower rainfall thresholds. For higher thresholds the 4-km model scores almost as well as the 1-km model, and both do better than the 12-km model.