Understanding Tariff Deficit and its Challenges

Regulators and market participants have become increasingly concerned about the Spanish electricity tariff deficit due to its size and the difficulties to control its growth. The deficit can be traced to inefficiencies in market organization and solutions should be designed to mitigate those inefficiencies. Tariff deficits have allowed for the transfer of part of the present costs of electricity services to future consumers, but this situation has reached a limit and a deep revision of regulation in this market cannot be postponed. In general, solutions that interfere with market prices and signals are not appropriate.

Environmental judgment in early childhood and its relationship with the understanding of the concept of living beings

The evidence collected concerning the biocentric judgment that young children express when evaluating human actions on the environment leads some scholars to suggest that an essential understanding of the notion of living beings should appear earlier than previously believed. This research project aims to study that assumption. To this end, young children’s choice when they are put in situation of having to compare and choose the most negative option between environmentally harmful actions and the breaking of social conventions are examined. Afterwards, the results are categorized in relation to those obtained from the study of children’s grasp of the distinction between living beings and inanimate entities. The data is analysed according to the individuals’ age and overall, it suggests a lack of relationship between environmental judgment and the understanding of the concept of living beings. The final results are discussed in keeping with recent research in the field of moral development that underscores the role that unconscious emotional processing plays in the individual’s normative judgment.

Telling stories, understanding lives, working toward change

Stories are helping us learn more about the livelihoods of the fishers and farmers with whom we work in eastern India. We are engaged with these communities in processes and activities aimed at improving their lives and promoting changes in government policy and service delivery in aquaculture and fisheries. Stories are told in several languages by women and men who fish and farm, about their lives, their livelihoods and significant changes they have experienced. We also record stories as narrated to us by colleague-informants. The written and spoken word, photographs, drawings and films – all are used to document the stories of people’s lives, sometimes prompted by questions as simple as “What do people talk about in the village?” Through the power of language, stories can be an entry point into livelihoods programming, monitoring and evaluation, conflict transformation and ultimately a way of giving life to a rights-based approach to development. (PDF contains 10 pages).

Integration of technologies for understanding the functional relationship between reef habitat and fish growth and production

Functional linkage between reef habitat quality and fish growth and production has remained elusive. Most current research is focused on correlative relationships between a general habitat type and presence/absence of a species, an index of species abundance, or species diversity. Such descriptive information largely ignores how reef attributes regulate reef fish abundance (density-dependent habitat selection), trophic interactions, and physiological performance (growth and condition). To determine the functional relationship between habitat quality, fish abundance, trophic interactions, and physiological performance, we are using an experimental reef system in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico where we apply advanced sensor and biochemical technologies. Our study site controls for reef attributes (size, cavity space, and reef mosaics) and focuses on the processes that regulate gag grouper (Mycteroperca microlepis) abundance, behavior and performance (growth and condition), and the availability of their pelagic prey. We combine mobile and fixed-active (fisheries) acoustics, passive acoustics, video cameras, and advanced biochemical techniques. Fisheries acoustics quantifies the abundance of pelagic prey fishes associated with the reefs and their behavior. Passive acoustics and video allow direct observation of gag and prey fish behavior and the acoustic environment, and provide a direct visual for the interpretation of fixed fisheries acoustics measurements. New application of biochemical techniques, such as Electron Transport System (ETS) assay, allow the in situ measurement of metabolic expenditure of gag and relates this back to reef attributes, gag behavior, and prey fish availability. Here, we provide an overview of our integrated technological approach for understanding and quantifying the functional relationship between reef habitat quality and one element of production – gag grouper growth on shallow coastal reefs.

Framework for a pro-poor regional strategy on sustainable aquatic resources management in Asia-Pacific: a statement of understanding and recommendations

This statement was prepared by the participants of the FAO/NACA-STREAM Workshop on Aquatic Resources and Livelihoods: Connecting Policy and People, 17-19 March 2005, in Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines. This was the concluding event of the FAO Technical Cooperation Program (TCP) project entitled “Assistance in Poverty Alleviation through Improved Aquatic Resources Management in Asia-Pacific.” The purpose of the workshop was to review and share experiences of the NACA-STREAM Initiative, build consensus on the value of livelihoods approaches in aquatic resources management and poverty alleviation, and identify ways of promoting livelihoods approaches throughout the region. (Pdf contains 2 pages).

Relating thermodynamics to information theory : the equality of free energy and mutual information

In this thesis we uncover a new relation which links thermodynamics and information theory. We consider time as a channel and the detailed state of a physical system as a message. As the system evolves with time, ever present noise insures that the "message" is corrupted. Thermodynamic free energy measures the approach of the system toward equilibrium. Information theoretical mutual information measures the loss of memory of initial state. We regard the free energy and the mutual information as operators which map probability distributions over state space to real numbers. In the limit of long times, we show how the free energy operator and the mutual information operator asymptotically attain a very simple relationship to one another. This relationship is founded on the common appearance of entropy in the two operators and on an identity between internal energy and conditional entropy. The use of conditional entropy is what distinguishes our approach from previous efforts to relate thermodynamics and information theory.

Integrating climate change impacts to improve understanding of coastal climate change: heavy rains, strong winds, and high seas in coastal Hawaii, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest

Coastal storms, and the strong winds, heavy rains, and high seas that accompany them pose a serious threat to the lives and livelihoods of the peoples of the Pacific basin, from the tropics to the high latitudes. To reduce their vulnerability to the economic, social, and environmental risks associated with these phenomena (and correspondingly enhance their resiliency), decision-makers in coastal communities require timely access to accurate information that affords them an opportunity to plan and respond accordingly. This includes information about the potential for coastal flooding, inundation and erosion at time scales ranging from hours to years, as well as the longterm climatological context of this information. The Pacific Storms Climatology Project (PSCP) was formed in 2006 with the intent of improving scientific understanding of patterns and trends of storm frequency and intensity - “storminess”- and related impacts of these extreme events. The project is currently developing a suite of integrated information products that can be used by emergency managers, mitigation planners, government agencies and decision-makers in key sectors, including: water and natural resource management, agriculture and fisheries, transportation and communication, and recreation and tourism. The PSCP is exploring how the climate-related processes that govern extreme storm events are expressed within and between three primary thematic areas: heavy rains, strong winds, and high seas. To address these thematic areas, PSCP has focused on developing analyses of historical climate records collected throughout the Pacific region, and the integration of these climatological analyses with near-real time observations to put recent weather and climate events into a longer-term perspective.(PDF contains 4 pages)