Budget constrained tax policy under price uncertainty: implications for supply control

Tax policies that constrain net transfers between the farm sector and the fisc are modeled under price uncertainty. Increasing the level of tax on profits causes the firm to expand output. Implications are derived for supply control and the distributions of profits and net receipts at the fisc.

Benevolence, hegemony and nationalism: fifty years of the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act

This paper reviews the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 fifty years since its enactment. The Act is assessed in the light of fifty years of access policy and within the present context of political debates and manoeuvres over the ‘right to roam’. It is concluded that benevolence is still the prevailing attitude towards access provision, maintaining as it does the scope for alternative freedoms and opportunities to exploit land for consumptive practices such as leisure and recreation. As such, it is argued that the notion of the gift (Mauss, 1990) continues to dominate the provision of countryside access in England and Wales.

Rights, the environment and Part V of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994

Using figures derived from the UK Home Office, this paper analyses and reviews the impact and deployment of Part V of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 since its enactment. This is done with special reference to its impact on citizenship and the regulation of ‘the environment’ and associated rural spaces. It is argued that, notwithstanding the actual use of the public order clauses in Part V of the Act, its underlying meanings are largely of a symbolic nature. Such symbolism is, however, a powerful indication of the defence of particularist constructions of rural space. It can also open out new conditions of possibility, providing a useful ‘oppressed’ status and media spectacle for a range of protesters and activists.

The ocean's gravitational potential energy budget in a coupled climate model

This study examines, in a unified fashion, the budgets of ocean gravitational potential energy (GPE) and available gravitational potential energy (AGPE) in the control simulation of the coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model HadCM3. Only AGPE can be converted into kinetic energy by adiabatic processes. Diapycnal mixing supplies GPE, but not AGPE, whereas the reverse is true of the combined effect of surface buoyancy forcing and convection. Mixing and buoyancy forcing, thus, play complementary roles in sustaining the large scale circulation. However, the largest globally integrated source of GPE is resolved advection (+0.57 TW) and the largest sink is through parameterized eddy transports (-0.82 TW). The effect of these adiabatic processes on AGPE is identical to their effect on GPE, except for perturbations to both budgets due to numerical leakage exacerbated by non-linearities in the equation of state.

The influence of Antarctica on the momentum budget of the southern extratropics

The antarctic plateau acts as a strong heat sink for the global climate, cooling the atmosphere and radiating energy to space. A cold dense atmospheric boundary layer is formed. Strong surface winds are formed as the boundary layer drains off the plateau. These drainage winds and the eddy fluxes necessary to maintain them are analysed in a general circulation model (GCM). The drainage flow is well represented in the GCM. The associated mean meridional circulation is analysed in isentropic coordinates. The momentum budget over Antarctica reveals a balance between the Eliassen-Palm flux convergence and the Coriolis torque exerted by the mean meridional mass flux. Both vertical and horizontal components of the Eliassen-Palm flux contribute, the vertical component being the greater.

Up-gradient eddy fluxes of potential vorticity near the subtropical jet

The role of eddy fluxes in the general circulation is often approached by treating eddies as (macro)turbulence. In this approach, the eddies act to diffuse certain quasiconservative quantities, such as potential vorticity (PV), along isentropic surfaces in the free atmosphere. The eddy fluxes are determined primarily by the eddy diffusivities and are necessarily down-gradient of the basic state PV field. Support for the (macro)turbulence approach stems from the fact that the eddy fluxes of PV in the free atmosphere are generally down-gradient in the long-term mean. Here we call attention to a pronounced and significant region of upgradient eddy PV fluxes on the poleward flank of the jet core in both hemispheres. The region of up-gradient (i.e., notionally “antidiffusive”) eddy PV fluxes is most pronounced during the winter and spring seasons and partially contradicts the turbulence approach described above. Analyses of the PV variance (potential enstrophy) budget suggest that the up-gradient PV fluxes represent local wave decay and are maintained by poleward fluxes of PV variance. Finite-amplitude effects thus represent leading order contributions to the PV variance budget, whereas dissipation is only of secondary importance locally. The appearance of up-gradient PV fluxes in the long-term mean is associated with the poleward shift of the jet—and thus the region of wave decay relative to wave growth—following wave-breaking events.

Results of PMIP2 coupled simulations of the mid-Holocene and Last Glacial Maximum, Part 2: feedbacks with emphasis on the location of the ITCZ and mid- and high latitudes heat budget

A set of coupled ocean-atmosphere(-vegetation) simulations using state of the art climate models is now available for the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and the Mid-Holocene (MH) through the second phase of the Paleoclimate Modeling Intercomparison Project (PMIP2). Here we quantify the latitudinal shift of the location of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) in the tropical regions during boreal summer and the change in precipitation in the northern part of the ITCZ. For both periods the shift is more pronounced over the continents and East Asia. The maritime continent is the region where the largest spread is found between models. We also clearly establish that the larger the increase in the meridional temperature gradient in the tropical Atlantic during summer at the MH, the larger the change in precipitation over West Africa. The vegetation feedback is however not as large as found in previous studies, probably due to model differences in the control simulation. Finally, we show that the feedback from snow and sea-ice at mid and high latitudes contributes for half of the cooling in the Northern Hemisphere for the LGM, with the remaining being achieved by the reduced CO2 and water vapour in the atmosphere. For the MH the snow and albedo feedbacks strengthen the spring cooling and enhance the boreal summer warming, whereas water vapour reinforces the late summer warming. These feedbacks are modest in the Southern Hemisphere. For the LGM most of the surface cooling is due to CO2 and water vapour.

Efficient interactive budget planning and adjusting under financial stress

One of the most challenging tasks in financial management for large governmental and industrial organizations is Planning and Budgeting (P&B). The processes involved with P&B are cost and time intensive, especially when dealing with uncertainties and budget adjustments during the planning horizon. This work builds on our previous research in which we proposed and evaluated a fuzzy approach that allows optimizing the budget interactively beyond the initial planning stage. In this research we propose an extension that handles financial stress (i.e. drastic budget cuts) occurred during the budget period. This is done by introducing fuzzy stress parameters which are used to re-distribute the budget in order to minimize the negative impact of the financial stress. The benefits and possible issues of this approach are analyzed critically using a real world case study from the Nuremberg Institute of Technology (NIT). Additionally, ongoing and future research directions are presented.

Transitional justice in Nepal: the Commission on Investigation of Disappeared Persons, Truth and Reconciliation Act 2014

The Commission on Investigation of Disappeared Persons, Truth and Reconciliation Act 2014 is Nepal’s latest attempt to establish a transitional programme to respond to conflict era abuses. In part, the Act remedies the inadequacies of the 2013 Ordinance. It creates two commissions, on truth and reconciliation and enforced disappearances, makes provision for the establishment of a Special Court to try past abuses and incorporates systems to enable vulnerable witnesses to participate in truth seeking. Yet in a number of respects it continues to fall short of international legal standards, not least in the possibility of amnesty for international crimes and gross violations of human rights. In addition, the relationship between the three mechanisms – truth seeking, amnesty and prosecution – remains unclear and safeguards for individual rights are lacking. This paper explores these recent developments, highlighting issues that must be remedied if transitional justice objectives are to be achieved in Nepal.

An energy budget agent-based model of earthworm populations and its application to study the effects of pesticides

Earthworms are important organisms in soil communities and so are used as model organisms in environmental risk assessments of chemicals. However current risk assessments of soil invertebrates are based on short-term laboratory studies, of limited ecological relevance, supplemented if necessary by site-specific field trials, which sometimes are challenging to apply across the whole agricultural landscape. Here, we investigate whether population responses to environmental stressors and pesticide exposure can be accurately predicted by combining energy budget and agent-based models (ABMs), based on knowledge of how individuals respond to their local circumstances. A simple energy budget model was implemented within each earthworm Eisenia fetida in the ABM, based on a priori parameter estimates. From broadly accepted physiological principles, simple algorithms specify how energy acquisition and expenditure drive life cycle processes. Each individual allocates energy between maintenance, growth and/or reproduction under varying conditions of food density, soil temperature and soil moisture. When simulating published experiments, good model fits were obtained to experimental data on individual growth, reproduction and starvation. Using the energy budget model as a platform we developed methods to identify which of the physiological parameters in the energy budget model (rates of ingestion, maintenance, growth or reproduction) are primarily affected by pesticide applications, producing four hypotheses about how toxicity acts. We tested these hypotheses by comparing model outputs with published toxicity data on the effects of copper oxychloride and chlorpyrifos on E. fetida. Both growth and reproduction were directly affected in experiments in which sufficient food was provided, whilst maintenance was targeted under food limitation. Although we only incorporate toxic effects at the individual level we show how ABMs can readily extrapolate to larger scales by providing good model fits to field population data. The ability of the presented model to fit the available field and laboratory data for E. fetida demonstrates the promise of the agent-based approach in ecology, by showing how biological knowledge can be used to make ecological inferences. Further work is required to extend the approach to populations of more ecologically relevant species studied at the field scale. Such a model could help extrapolate from laboratory to field conditions and from one set of field conditions to another or from species to species.