Wildfires pose an immense and escalating threat to national forests. In addition to rising temperatures and accumulating fuels, rapid development of the wildland-urban interface (WUI) has exacerbated ...wildfire risk by putting more people and property in harm's way and increasing the likelihood of human-caused fires. While restrictions on WUI development would reduce wildfire risk, varying political and economic pressures have caused substantial variation in how local governments regulate the WUI. Some governments have implemented stringent regulations, while others have permitted unbridled expansion. Such disjointed regulation acutely impacts national forests because WUI homes and communities are often clustered around them. Thus, to effectively protect the nation's forests from wildfire, a more uniform approach to WUI regulation is necessary. This Comment contends that the Property Clause provides Congress authority to take such an approach. Specifically, this Comment argues the Property Clause grants Congress authority to regulate WUI development on state and private land adjacent to national forests because-by increasing wildfire risk-such development interferes with the purposes for which Congress established those forests. Most importantly, WUI development and the concurrent rise in wildfire risk interfere with national forests' timber supply and watershed protection functions-the forests ' original and primary purposes. While the Property Clause grants Congress immense authority to regulate federal land-and in some cases, nonfederal land-how far that power goes is an open question. The Supreme Court has yet to define the "furthest reaches " of the Property Clause, but its cases suggest useful principles that may help discern those limits. Building on these cases, this Comment proposes a rule to clarify the limits of the Property Clause as it relates to Congress 's ability to regulate activities on nonfederal land. Specifically, the rule proposed here provides that Congress may use its Property Clause authority to regulate activities on state and private land if the regulated land is adjacent to the federal land Congress seeks to protect, and the regulated activity substantially interferes with the federal land's primary purpose. If so, then the regulation should be considered a "needful rule respecting public lands" and therefore a lawful exercise of Congress's Property Clause power.
Hurricanes and flood-related events cause more direct economic damage than any other type of natural disaster. In the United States, that damage totals more than USD 1 trillion in damages since 1980. ...On average, direct flood losses have risen from USD 4 billion annually in the 1980s to roughly USD 17 billion annually from 2010 to 2018. Despite flooding’s tremendous economic impact on US properties and communities, current estimates of expected damages are lacking due to the fact that flood risk in many parts of the US is unidentified, underestimated, or available models associated with high quality assessment tools are proprietary. This study introduces an economic-focused Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) approach that builds upon an our existing understanding of prior assessment methods by taking advantage of a newly available, climate adjusted, parcel-level flood risk assessment model (First Street Foundation, 2020a and 2020b) in order to quantify property level economic impacts today, and into the climate adjusted future, using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and NASA’s Global Climate Model ensemble (CMIP5). This approach represents a first of its kind—a publicly available high precision flood risk assessment tool at the property level developed completely with open data sources and open methods. The economic impact assessment presented here has been carried out using residential buildings in New Jersey as a testbed; however, the environmental assessment tool on which it is based is a national scale property level flood assessment model at a 3 m resolution. As evidence of the reliability of the EIA tool, the 2020 estimated economic impact (USD 5481 annual expectation) was compared to actual average per claim-year NFIP payouts from flooding and found an average of USD 5540 over the life of the program (difference of less than USD 100). Additionally, the tool finds a 41.4% increase in average economic flood damage through the year 2050 when environmental change is included in the model.
Return on investment (ROI) analysis is a tool traditionally used in the private sector to evaluate and compare projects and investments. Over the past several decades, the use of ROI analysis has ...expanded to include a broader array of social and environmental benefits; this is termed social return on investment, or SROI. This paper examines the use of SROI analysis to evaluate investments in disaster preparedness. The paper outlines the basic methods and then discusses several challenges to using SROI in this context: the difficulty identifying all returns, especially spillover benefits; the challenge of separating attribution from contribution; the resources required to value nonmarket inputs and outcomes; the need to adequately address uncertainty; and the limitation of addressing distributional issues in SROI analysis. We explore these issues and the possibility of conducting an SROI of disaster preparedness activities in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
► Developed a new industrial method to clarify sweet sorghum juice for manufacture of fermentation end-products. ► Preheating the sweet sorghum juice produced clarified juices of low turbidity. ► ...Sugars, macro and micronutrients within the juice are examined and discussed. ► There was a strong effect of cultivar on clarification and clarified juice quality.
In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in interest of sweet sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L. Moench) for small to large-scale manufacture of renewable, biobased fuels and chemicals. New fermentation organisms hold tremendous potential for the production of biobased fuels, chemicals, and materials from industrial sugar feedstocks, in particular syrups. Clarification of sweet sorghum juice will be critical to the production of stable, intermediate syrup feedstocks for efficient transport, storage, and year-round supply. Juices extracted from mature sweet sorghum hybrids and immature cultivar Topper 76-6 (Topper), were clarified using heat, heat-milk of lime, and heat-milk of lime-polyanionic flocculant at various temperatures and target limed pHs, and compared to the clarification of sugarcane (Saccharum spp. hybrids) juice. There was no significant loss of fermentable sugars (sucrose+glucose+fructose) across clarification by temperature and only a slight decrease in fermentable sugars when clarified by pH. Preheating the sweet sorghum juice from 85 to 100°C not only produced clarified juices of low turbidity, but also with excellent turbidity control. For the cultivars studied, a minimum limed juice pH of ∼6.3–6.5 was optimum for the clarification of sweet sorghum juice preheated to ∼80–85°C with 5ppm polyanionic flocculant addition with respect to clarified juice turbidity, protein, calcium, starch, and to a lesser extent phosphate levels. There was a strong effect of cultivar on juice quality, clarification performance, and clarified juice quality, which warrants further research.
PDF
