Purpose
This paper aims to examine the impact of global warming and climate change on skiing by assessing the costs that ski resorts would have to bear to address the lack of snow. In this way, new ...development models can be hypothesized for the regional economy in the Aosta Valley, territory located in the West Alps, whose economy is largely based on winter tourism.
Design/methodology/approach
Starting with a literature review regarding global warming and its effects on the Alps, a methodology of analysis has been implemented to assess the relative weaknesses of ski resorts. Additional costs in adaptation strategies have been considered in the light of a major choice ski resorts must face: investing or not. For this analysis, four scenarios of global warming have been taken into consideration.
Findings
The lack of snow due to a rise in temperatures will have a big impact on regional ski resorts and will seriously threaten the economy of small lateral valleys. In this scenario, it is important to think about reorganizing the regional ski supply by focusing on stations with better economic results and those strategically well located. In this way, we can safeguard winter tourism in the region and preserve skiing by concentrating costs only in those resorts that are also able to bear new cost adaptation strategies.
Originality/value
The value of this paper is its estimation of the future impact of a rise in the average temperature in regional ski resorts. This impact is assessed in relation to concerns about the reduction of the skiing area and the new costs that ski companies will need to bear. The paper also proposes a new model for the reorganization of the ski supply in the Aosta Valley.
Summary Although in some parts of the world acute and chronic kidney diseases are preventable or treatable disorders, in many other regions these diseases are left without any care. The nephrology ...community needs to commit itself to reduction of this divide between high-income and low-income regions. Moreover, new and exciting developments in fields such as pharmacology, genetic, or bioengineering, can give a boost, in the next decade, to a new era of diagnosis and treatment of kidney diseases, which should be made available to more patients.
A practical method is proposed for complete gain measurement in distributed feedback (DFB) laser diodes. It is non-destructive and does not require any reference device. It includes the whole range ...of continuous gain values, from its minimum to threshold, passing through the transparency condition. The method requires a single absolute gain measurement for calibration. An example is reported for a DFB preserving Fabry-Perot multi-modes in the sub-threshold regime.
The revision of the classic Hakki-Paoli method shows that the a priori knowledge of facet reflectivity and confinement factor is not required for measuring optical gain in semiconductor laser and LED ...emitters. Moreover, a recently proposed new formula for gain as a function of the applied voltage, combined with that method, allows for calculating the relevant parameters of the gain function by the sole sub-threshold spectral data. This avoids the known critical problems issued by instrument resolution on spectral data from the above-threshold domain. Moreover, this last chance allows for complete gain measurement also in degraded devices, when they do no more display any laser threshold, and then for including optical gain among the relevant parameters for monitoring device degradation.
•Gain measurement in laser diodes is simplified by two new steps•The first step introduces a practical measurement of a theoretical quantity•The second step revises the Hakki-Paoli method and points out the removal of some of its constraints•The new method provides gain at any frequency and at any injection level•It also defines upper and lower limits for spectral gain, and indicate whether or not a device can achieve laser threshold
Need for uniqueness represents the need for people to feel different and distinguish themselves from others. Two major scales exist that measure this need: the Need for Uniqueness scale (NfU; Snyder ...& Fromkin,
1977
) and the Self-Attributed Need for Uniqueness scale (SANU; Lynn & Harris,
1997b
). We propose here a French version of both scales. Through a dual approach of exploratory and confirmatory factorial analyses, we investigated the scales' structure in student samples from two French-speaking countries (France and Switzerland, N = 1,348) as well as measures of internal and external validity. Both scales presented good psychometric properties in French. Additionally, we investigated differences between the scales, as literature suggests that the NfU relies mostly on public and risky displays of uniqueness, whereas the SANU focuses on private and more socially acceptable means to acquire a feeling of uniqueness. Differences arose in the links with several personality characteristics (emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, sensation seeking, and self-consciousness), suggesting that the NfU corresponds rather to a need to demonstrate uniqueness through public displays and the SANU to a need to feel unique through more private means. We discuss implications for research and provide advice on choosing by the scale most appropriate to the researcher's aims.
Fisheries products are globally traded commodities, which have led to varying degrees of social and economic dependency for producing regions. These dependencies become more evident at times of major ...demand or supply shocks. Resilience to such shocks is intertwined with, and rooted in, the intra-sectoral structure and governance frameworks. This work analyses two large-scale, capital-intensive and export-oriented seafood sectors: Atlantic salmon and North-east Atlantic mackerel, responded to the environmental, economic and geopolitical shocks accompanying their development, from a UK perspective. Intra-firm controls are identified as elements, which have delivered resilience and strength in these two sectors. This work highlights the central, yet different role of the UK government in increasing their resilience and underlying producing regions. Our work contributes to the broader context of regional development and changing global food demand identifying both domestic and external threats to sustainability. Our approach aims to expand the debate around seafood production from ‘food security’ to a transdisciplinary analysis, which incorporates wider economic, social, and ecological sustainability aspects.
•Regional/sectoral resilience of two export-oriented seafood sectors are analysed.•Transdisciplinary approach for comprehensively understanding of paths of shocks.•Inter-firm controls are identified as a major source of resilience.•No regional-level resilience mechanisms have been found, leaving.•Five research questions for transdisciplinary research are formulated.
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