Making parks make a difference: poor alignment of policy,planning and management with protected-area impact,and ways forward

Policy and practice around protected areas are poorly aligned with the basic purpose of protection, which is to make a difference. The difference made by protected areas is their impact, defined in program evaluation as the outcomes arising from protection relative to the counterfactual of no protection or a different form of protection. Although impact evaluation of programs is well established in fields such as medicine, education and development aid, it is rare in nature conservation. We show that the present weak alignment with impact of policy targets and operational objectives for protected areas involves a great risk: targets and objectives can be achieved while making little difference to the conservation of biodiversity. We also review potential ways of increasing the difference made by protected areas, finding a poor evidence base for the use of planning and management ‘levers’ to better achieve impact. We propose a dual strategy for making protected areas more effective in their basic role of saving nature, outlining ways of developing targets and objectives focused on impact while also improving the evidence for effective planning and management.     

“Second generation” refugees and multilingualism: identity,race and language transmission

This paper explores the language practices, attitudes to languages and the inter-generational transmission of heritage languages amongst the UK-born adult children of refugee parents. The paper draws on empirical data from a research project based on 45 qualitative interviews with three groups of “second generation” refugees, whose parents came as Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka, Kurdish refugees from Turkey and as refugees from Vietnam. The paper explores the ways in which language is central to political discussions and to national policies on race, cohesion, diversity, “Britishness” and citizenship. These debates and policies ignore and often silence the positive role of heritage languages. This paper highlights the importance of heritage languages as a signifier for a number of wider issues of identity, which intersect with race and refugee backgrounds in complex ways.     

What's History Got to Do with It? A Response to Seddon's Definition of Reintroduction

A recent article in Restoration Ecology by Philip Seddon aims at unraveling the definitions of various types of species translocations—from reintroductions to assisted colonization—and points out the slippery slope of misused words. I argue here that defining reintroduction is not as straightforward as Seddon presents it. Commonly used definitions of what constitutes a reintroduction all include some reference to “historical” conditions, but what exactly that encompasses is left open. I examine two parts of the reintroduction confusion: first, how the guidance documents and laws define reintroduction and second, how these definitions might be interpreted when reintroductions are presented in public forums. Rather than moving away from reintroductions toward interventions of other names, I encourage scientists to use a broad definition of reintroduction presented by the IUCN to open up reintroduction as a viable label for bringing a species back to an area regardless of when it was previously there or why it became extinct.     

ENVIRONMENTAL RISK ASSESSMENT: TASKS AND OBLIGATIONS

Synthesizing, characterizing, and communicating the risk science information used in environmental decision-making depends in the first instance on the nature and quality of the technical analysis. At the same time, other important features of the risk analysis, features that require special attention to provide context for the analysis as a whole, are frequently overlooked in practice or in presentation. Now, as the field expands to meet new challenges and to include new participants, all practitioners — government, academics, industry, and interest groups — must give renewed emphasis to certain hall marks of sound risk assessment: identifying incomplete information and its influence on the risk assessment process, articulating alternative assumptions and the scientific or policy reasons for choices made among alternatives, describing process considerations and limitations as well as numerical results, and fully informing decision makers, the press, and the interested public. The resulting greater clarity and transparency in the scientific analyses that under lie environmental decision making can enhance credibility and public confidence in the scientific foundation for those decisions.     

Trends in the Development of Ecological Risk Assessment and Management Frameworks

Ecological risk assessment and management have grown from a long history of assessment and management activities aimed at improving the everyday lives of humans. The background against which ecological risk assessment and management has developed is discussed and recent trends in the development of risk assessment and management frameworks documented. Seven frameworks from five different countries are examined. All maintain an important role for science, suggest adaptive approaches to decision-making and have well-defined analytical steps. Differences in approaches toward the separation of policy and science, the preference for management over assessment, the inclusion of stakeholders, the iterative nature of the analytical cycle, the use of decision criteria and economic information suggest considerable evolution in framework design over time. Despite the changes, no consensus on the design of a framework is apparent and work remains to be done on refining an integrative framework that effectively incorporates both policy and science considerations for environmental management purposes.     

A strategic road map for conserving the Endangered dhole Cuon alpinus in India

1. Large carnivores face high extinction risks, often exacerbated by the absence of adequate information on their ecological requirements, and the high economic and socio-political commitments that their conservation warrants. Country-scale conservation plans can serve as effective frameworks to prioritise areas, actions, and conservation investments.
2. We explore conservation tenets of retention, recovery, and restoration for the Endangered dhole Cuon alpinus in India – a global stronghold for the species. Specifically, we: 1) examine the current status of dholes in India’s states using a recent distribution assessment; 2) identify areas for directing management interventions – zones to be targeted for population recovery and for habitat recovery; 3) identify potential areas for range expansion; 4) use eco-socio-political criteria to determine state-wise conservation priority scores and likelihood of conservation action; and 5) conduct an exhaustive review of all published literature on dholes.
3. Dholes occupy ~49% of potential habitats in 685 of mainland India’s 2342 sub-districts. We identified 143 sub-districts with potential for dhole population recovery, 145 for habitat recovery, and 404 for range expansion. Of the 34 mainland states/union territories, 17 were identified as high priority for dhole conservation. Of these, nine are adequately equipped to implement management actions to conserve dholes, while eight need to improve capacity towards increasing likelihood of conservation success.
4. Literature on dholes (from 1874 to 2019; n=237) was dominated by natural history notes, followed by distribution records and studies of population ecology. A majority of the reviewed studies were from India (55% of 215 country-specific papers). The number of studies showed an exponential increase over time: 43% were published in the last decade.
5. Our review of published literature revealed significant knowledge gaps in terms of quantitative ecological assessments across all dhole range-countries. Given this context, our results provide a comprehensive, multi-dimensional, and administratively feasible road map for dhole conservation in India, with potential applicability in other dhole range-countries and also for other threatened species.

     

Spain: an extreme case of successful integration of second-generation immigrants with transfers of best practices applicable to other European countries?

This volume presents cutting-edge research on integration and adaptation processes of second-generation immigrant adolescents in Spain that no doubt constitutes an important and timely contribution to the migration-integration debate. Principal findings of the Investigación Longitudinal de la Segunda Generación study indicate a comparatively smooth integration of second-generation immigrant adolescents, arguably best explained by the theoretical hypotheses of neo-assimilationism and segmented assimilation. The major strengths of the study pertain to research design and methodology, and theoretical grounding that enables it to have far-reaching implications for future research on migrant youth in Spain and beyond. The focus here is primarily on questions of transferability of major findings to other European countries, such as Sweden. In essence, the authors’ findings raise a number of important questions regarding the feasibility (or infeasibility) of Spain’s laissez-a-faire approach to integration in countries with contrasting modes of incorporation.     

各国孤儿药政策对比分析

据统计，医学上明确诊断的罕见病有5 000~8 000 种。虽然因患病人数少而得名罕见病，但考虑到疾病种类之多，罕见病仍是 各国不可忽视的公共卫生挑战。协助和激励医疗行业开发治疗罕见病的孤儿药，是各国政府一项重要的公共卫生政策。重点介绍了美国、 日本和欧盟的孤儿药立法，激励政策以及对病患、医药行业的积极影响。     

Quantifying the drivers of long-term prices in materials supply chains

Raw materials costs form an increasingly significant proportion of the total costs of renewable energy technologies that must be adopted at unprecedented rates to combat climate change. As the affordable deployment of these technologies grows vulnerable to materials price changes, effective strategies must be identified to mitigate the risk of higher input costs faced by manufacturers. To better understand potential threats to deployment, a market modeling approach was developed to quantify economic risk factors including material demand, substitutability, recycling, mining productivity, resource quality, and discovery. Results demonstrate that price changes are determined by interactions between demand growth, mining productivity, and resource quality. In the worst cases with high demand and low productivity, development of material substitutes and large recycling rates help reduce the prevalence of price risk from over 90% to under 10%. Investing in these strategies yields significant benefits for manufacturers and governments concerned about costs of materials critical to decarbonization and other advanced technologies.