Incorporating on-farm water storage safety into catchment policy frameworks: International best practice policy for private dam safety accountability and assurance

ABSTRACTFinancial institutions typically avoid projects that will have a significant adverse effect on cultural heritage because it creates unwelcome risk and can affect their reputation. For bank clients, adverse project effects on cultural heritage can result in reputation risk, impede access to finance and insurance, increase operational costs, and jeopardize on-time and on-budget delivery of projects. To address this risk, financial institutions implement environmental and social policy frameworks that include specific requirements for the consideration of cultural heritage. This article examines the place of cultural heritage in the lending practices of 25 of the world's largest private-sector banks and its relevance for heritage practitioners who may be retained to provide advice, review or undertake fieldwork, and prepare studies in keeping with the private-sector bank policies and external standards described. The article concludes with a recommended best practice for private-sector financial institutions, a call to action for heritage practitioners to advocate for robust safeguards, and a call for support of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals by both heritage practitioners and private-sector financial institutions.

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Solar power set for expansion in the Gulf

Emerald Expert Briefings ◽

10.1108/oxan-db206285 ◽

2015 ◽

Keyword(s):

Government Policy ◽

Best Practice ◽

Solar Power ◽

Oil Prices ◽

Gulf Cooperation Council ◽

Natural Conditions ◽

Content Type ◽

Power Set ◽

Policy Frameworks ◽

The World

Subject Solar power in the Gulf. Significance Favourable natural conditions and growing gas shortages make the Gulf Cooperation Council bloc one of the most attractive and lowest-cost solar markets in the world. Impacts Lower oil prices will reduce funding and incentives for solar projects, but recent reductions in costs make solar power economically viable. To win future bids, solar firms will require a combination of local knowledge and global best practice. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have strong prospects of evolving into a regional hub for solar business and installations. Due to low capacity and a small starting base solar power may displace only 1-3% of the power sector's fuel consumption by the early 2020s. Another barrier to growth will be the lack of coherent government policy frameworks, and ongoing electricity subsidies.

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Helping farmers and regulators manage and assure the cumulative flood safety of agricultural dams: a cost-effective regionalised review/design tool from Australia

Hydrology Research ◽

10.2166/nh.2015.230 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 47 (5) ◽

pp. 996-1013 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

John D. Pisaniello

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Best Practice ◽

Low Cost ◽

Cost Effective ◽

Design Tool ◽

Community Safety ◽

Dam Failure ◽

Future Research ◽

Dam Safety ◽

Safety Assurance

In Australia and other countries, small private dams in agricultural catchments pose both disastrous individual and cumulative dam failure flood threats to downstream communities; threats that can be exacerbated by increased rainfall intensities caused by climate change. This paper addresses the need for a low cost, scientifically acceptable mechanism and policy guidance to help dam owners and governments better understand and manage these risks and assure community safety. To this end an innovative, cost-effective farm dam flood safety review/design tool is developed and tested in Australia, including hydrology-diverse Tasmania, to complement best practice dam safety assurance policy. The tool's development involved generating complex catchment data to represent hydrologically homogenous regions using best practice water engineering methods, to derive simple regionalised dam flood capability prediction relationships of acceptable accuracy. Results demonstrate the tool's successful development and potential transferability to different hydrological regions; how the relationships can be refined by future research and potentially made to account for climate change; and how the tool can be applied within a best practice dam safety assurance policy which includes additional farmer-friendly elements. The findings are potentially transferable to any region to assure communities that cumulative safety threats posed by rural catchment dams are minimised.

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Developing soil health indicators for improved soil management on farm

Advances in measuring soil health - Burleigh Dodds Series in Agricultural Science ◽

10.19103/as.2020.0079.22 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 289-328

Author(s):

Elizabeth Stockdale ◽

◽

Paul Hargreaves ◽

Anne Bhogal ◽

◽

...

Keyword(s):

Soil Health ◽

Water Storage ◽

Soil Management ◽

Health Indicators ◽

Traffic Light ◽

Essential Step ◽

The World ◽

On Farm ◽

Water Catchment ◽

Structure Water

A range of chemical, physical and biological processes are important for sustained productivity and environmental quality in agricultural systems. Farmers and scientists share a concern with soil health, and this leads to questions for both measurement and management. An essential step is to define the context and the key functions required of a soil at the scale of interest (e.g. farm, drinking water catchment, region). Only then can appropriate indicator measurements be selected. Current soil health frameworks across the world commonly use organic matter (carbon), pH, extractable phosphorus, and various indicators of soil structure/water storage. A framework of interpretation shows whether the measured values are acceptable or whether one or more soil functions are constrained. A number of the soil health frameworks in practical use present the soil health indicators in a scorecard using traffic light coding to direct users towards guidance for improved soil management on-farm.

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Evaluating the nutrient reduction and water supply benefits of an on-farm water storage (OFWS) system in East Mississippi

Agriculture Ecosystems & Environment ◽

10.1016/j.agee.2018.06.024 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 265 ◽

pp. 476-487 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Ritesh Karki ◽

Mary Love M. Tagert ◽

Joel O. Paz

Keyword(s):

Water Supply ◽

Water Storage ◽

Nutrient Reduction ◽

On Farm

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Panacea or diagnosis? Imaginaries of innovation and the ‘MIT model’ in three political cultures

Social Studies of Science ◽

10.1177/0306312717706110 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 47 (6) ◽

pp. 783-810 ◽

Cited By ~ 38

Author(s):

Sebastian Pfotenhauer ◽

Sheila Jasanoff

Keyword(s):

Best Practice ◽

Innovation Policy ◽

Innovation Studies ◽

Sociotechnical Imaginaries ◽

Policy Frameworks ◽

Innovation Model ◽

Practice Transfer ◽

Cross Country ◽

And Performance ◽

The Uk

Innovation studies continue to struggle with an apparent disconnect between innovation’s supposedly universal dynamics and a sense that policy frameworks and associated instruments of innovation are often ineffectual or even harmful when transported across regions or countries. Using a cross-country comparative analysis of three implementations of the ‘MIT model’ of innovation in the UK, Portugal and Singapore, we show how key features in the design, implementation and performance of the model cannot be explained as mere variations on an identical solution to the same underlying problem. We draw on the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to show how implementations of the ‘same’ innovation model – and with it the notion of ‘innovation’ itself – are co-produced with locally specific diagnoses of a societal deficiency and equally specific understandings of acceptable remedies. Our analysis thus flips the conventional notion of ‘best-practice transfer’ on its head: Instead of asking ‘how well’ an innovation model has been implemented, we analyze the differences among the three importations to reveal the idiosyncratic ways in which each country imagines the purpose of innovation. We replace the notion of innovation as a ‘panacea’ – a universal fix for all social woes – with that of innovation-as-diagnosis in which a particular ‘cure’ is ‘prescribed’ for a ‘diagnosed’ societal ‘pathology,’ which may in turn trigger ‘reactions’ within the receiving body. This approach offers new possibilities for theorizing how and where culture matters in innovation policy. It suggests that the ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ of innovation models are not a matter of how well societies are able to implement a sound, universal model, but more about how effectively they articulate their imaginaries of innovation and tailor their strategies accordingly.

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