This new title in the World Economies series charts and explains the development of the Indian economy since independence and partition and provides a unique up-to-date overview of the contemporary ...Indian economy and the reasons it has assumed its current form.
Degradation of freshwater ecosystems and the services they provide is a primary cause of increasing water insecurity, raising the need for integrated solutions to freshwater management. While methods ...for characterizing the multi-faceted challenges of managing freshwater ecosystems abound, they tend to emphasize either social or ecological dimensions and fall short of being truly integrative. This paper suggests that management for sustainability of freshwater systems needs to consider the linkages between human water uses, freshwater ecosystems and governance. We present a conceptualization of freshwater resources as part of an integrated social-ecological system and propose a set of corresponding indicators to monitor freshwater ecosystem health and to highlight priorities for management. We demonstrate an application of this new framework —the Freshwater Health Index (FHI) — in the Dongjiang River Basin in southern China, where stakeholders are addressing multiple and conflicting freshwater demands. By combining empirical and modeled datasets with surveys to gauge stakeholders' preferences and elicit expert information about governance mechanisms, the FHI helps stakeholders understand the status of freshwater ecosystems in their basin, how ecosystems are being manipulated to enhance or decrease water-related services, and how well the existing water resource management regime is equipped to govern these dynamics over time. This framework helps to operationalize a truly integrated approach to water resource management by recognizing the interplay between governance, stakeholders, freshwater ecosystems and the services they provide.
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•A social-ecological framework is developed to assess freshwater health.•The framework links ecological, hydrological, and social parameters.•A set of indicators, the Freshwater Health Index, guides quantitative assessments.•The Index can be used to monitor changes or compare modeled scenarios to a baseline.
The impact of large dams on malaria has received widespread attention. However, understanding how dam topography and transmission endemicity influence malaria incidences is limited.
Data from the ...European Commission's Joint Research Center and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission were used to determine reservoir perimeters and shoreline slope of African dams. Georeferenced data from the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP) were used to estimate malaria incidence rates in communities near reservoir shorelines. Population data from the WorldPop database were used to estimate the population at risk of malaria around dams in stable and unstable areas.
The data showed that people living near (< 5 km) large dams in sub-Saharan Africa grew from 14.4 million in 2000 to 18.7 million in 2015. Overall, across sub-Saharan Africa between 0.7 and 1.6 million malaria cases per year are attributable to large dams. Whilst annual malaria incidence declined markedly in both stable and unstable areas between 2000 and 2015, the malaria impact of dams appeared to increase in unstable areas, but decreased in stable areas. Shoreline slope was found to be the most important malaria risk factor in dam-affected geographies, explaining 41-82% (P < 0.001) of the variation in malaria incidence around reservoirs.
Gentler, more gradual shoreline slopes were associated with much greater malaria risk. Dam-related environmental variables such as dam topography and shoreline slopes are an important factor that should be considered in efforts to predict and control malaria around dams.
Abstract
Expansion of various types of water infrastructure is critical to water security in Africa. To date, analysis of adverse disease impacts has focused mainly on large dams. The aim of this ...study was to examine the effect of both small and large dams on malaria in four river basins in sub-Saharan Africa (i.e., the Limpopo, Omo-Turkana, Volta and Zambezi river basins). The European Commission’s Joint Research Center (JRC) Yearly Water Classification History v1.0 data set was used to identify water bodies in each of the basins. Annual malaria incidence data were obtained from the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP) database for the years 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015. A total of 4907 small dams and 258 large dams in the four basins, with 14.7million people living close (< 5 km) to their reservoirs in 2015, were analysed. The annual number of malaria cases attributable to dams of either size across the four basins was 0.9–1.7 million depending on the year, of which between 77 and 85% was due to small dams. The majority of these cases occur in areas of stable transmission. Malaria incidence per kilometre of reservoir shoreline varied between years but for small dams was typically 2–7 times greater than that for large dams in the same basin. Between 2000 and 2015, the annual malaria incidence showed a broadly declining trend for both large and small dam reservoirs in areas of stable transmission in all four basins. In conclusion, the malaria impact of dams is far greater than previously recognized. Small and large dams represent hotspots of malaria transmission and, as such, should be a critical focus of future disease control efforts.
This paper is about a package of infrastructure investment, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). This paper uses a range of theoretical perspectives (buttressed by historical and contemporary ...evidence) to think about the likely impact of CPEC on economic (especially industrial) growth in Pakistan. The theory includes crowding in of private by public investment, social savings, spillovers and the leading sector, and industrial policy. Theory points to some likely growth promoting effects of CPEC, on corporate logistics, shorter transport routes to China, and greater local production of cement. The impact of CPEC is unlikely to be transformative. There is little evidence that CPEC has improved corporate logistics in Pakistan. CPEC may reduce physical distances for overland trade with China but trade is likely to remain seaborne. CPEC construction activity has generated positive spillovers in local construction employment and cement production but no spillovers in either bitumen or steel production. Pakistan lacks a capable state and commitment to an industrial policy that historically have proved important in leveraging transport infrastructure into domestic industrialisation. The most important reason is that Pakistan is a middle-income country and CPEC is too small to create more than modest economic growth benefits for Pakistan.
Microinvasive glaucoma surgery and its associated devices remain a field of continued interest and innovation in the management of patients with glaucoma. While a range of outflow optimisation ...devices have been designed, the efficacy and safety and these devices remains to be proven, particularly in the long term.
The authors present the first reported case to our knowledge of bilateral hypertensive crisis associated with CyPass® Micro-stent insertion two months post-operation and its resultant management.
Despite the recall of the CyPass Micro-stent (Alcon, Fort Worth, Texas, USA), further clinical experience in the use of these and similar stents is required. Possible hypotheses explaining this phenomenon are also presented, the most likely being sudden closure of the suprachoroidal space.
This paper looks in detail at an innovative idea for new city governance promulgated by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer, that of charter cities. The main methodological conundrum in ...evaluating Romer's model is that there is no existing charter city to which he or others can use to demonstrate the developmental success or otherwise of the concept. This paper uses two innovative case studies to test Romer's idea. These case studies are the Suez Canal Company and the Panama Canal Company. These two companies received charters, were tasked with building cities (and infrastructure), were given long-term leases over land, and had sovereign guarantors – the two canals were in effect Romer-esque Charter City projects. This paper uses these case studies to examine issues related to the operation of a sovereign guarantee, financing new city construction, and the distributional consequences of new cities. The global renaissance in big infrastructure construction, much of which is being done under charter-like rules, gives the idea of charter cities a striking contemporary relevance.
•2.6billion people are set to move into cities in the next thirty years.•Much of this new urbanization will occur in newly constructed cities•The Suez and Panama Canals were charter companies and offer useful lessons for infrastructure and city construction today•The charter city model is a useful lesson for constructing and managing big infrastructure and cities today
This book provides a comprehensive reassessment of the development of the economy of Pakistan since independence to the present. It employs a rigorous statistical methodology, which has applicability ...to other developing economies, to define and measure episodes of growth and stagnation, and to examine how the state has contributed to each. Contesting the orthodox view that liberalisation has been an important driver of growth in Pakistan, the book places the state at the centre of economic development, rather than the market. It examines the state in relation to its economic roles in mobilising resources and promoting a productive allocation of those resources, and its political roles in managing the conflict inherent in economic development. The big conclusions for economic growth in Pakistan are that liberalisation, the market and the external world economy in fact have less influence than that of the state and conflict. Overall, the book offers analyses of the different successive approaches to promoting economic growth and development in Pakistan, relates these to medium-term economic outcomes - periods of growth and stagnation - and thereby explains how the mechanisms by which the state can better promote growth and development.
Ethiopia's policy of large dam construction in the Blue Nile River basin is evaluated by simulating the impact of one downscaled midrange climate change scenario (A1B) on the performance of existing ...and planned irrigation and hydropower schemes. The simulation finds that by 2100: 1) average basin-wide irrigation demand will increase; 2) annual hydroelectricity generation will be just 60% of potential; and 3) flow at the Ethiopia-Sudan border will be reduced from 1661 m³/s to 1301 m³/s as a consequence of climate change in combination with upstream water resource development. Adaptation to climate change and development must be considered together.
Promising environmental mechanisms to control malaria are presently underutilized. Water level fluctuations to interrupt larval development have recently been studied and proposed as a low-impact ...malaria intervention in Ethiopia. One impediment to implementing such new environmental policies is the uncertain impact of climate change on water resources, which could upend reservoir operation policies. Here we quantified the potential impact of the malaria management under future climate states. Simulated time-series were constructed by resampling historical precipitation, temperature, and evaporation data (1994–2002), imposing a 2 °C temperature increase and precipitation changes with a range of ±20 %. Runoff was generated for each climate scenario using the model GR4J. The runoff was used as input into a calibrated HEC ResSim model of reservoir operations. The malaria operation management increased the baseline scenario median energy generation by 18.2 GWh y
−1
and decreased the energy generation at the 0.5 percentile (during dry conditions) by 7.3 GWh y
−1
. In scenarios with −20 % precipitation, malaria control increased average annual energy generation by 1.3 GWh y
−1
but only decreased the lowest 0.5 percentile of energy by 0.2 GWh y
−1
; the irrigation demand was not met on 8.5 more days, on average, per year. Applying the malaria control rule to scenarios with +20 % precipitation decreased the likelihood of flooding by an average of 1.0 day per year. While the malaria control would divert some water away from other reservoir operational goals, the intervention requires 3.3–3.7 % of the annual precipitation budget, which is much less than reduction from potential droughts.
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