scholarly journals Challenges in sustaining resilience in the coastal settlements of south-eastern Bangladesh: Achieving self-sustenance through architectural synthesis

Author(s):  
Anika Imraana Sohaana ◽  
Md Arifur Rahman

Abstract The coastal settlements in Bangladesh experienced recurring tropical cyclones and tidal surges in recent history because of geographical influences and global climate change. Despite improved evacuation management and adequate cyclone shelters patronized by donors, lately resulting in a reduced mortality rate, the property and economic losses were still substantial due to vulnerability of the settlements. As the short-term adaptative approaches such as migrating to the closest cyclone shelters have failed to sustain resilience, comprehensive and inclusive mitigation planning should be implemented to achieve more resilience in the long term. The research aimed to revise the conventional culturally-void concept and propose a prolonged solution by planning a self-sustained model of the cyclone-resilient village for the south-western coastal communities of Bangladesh. Initially, it searched for the identification and analysis of socio-cultural, economic, and environmental challenges in sustaining community resilience and later synthesizing architectural interventions to achieve self-sustenance. The synthesis focused on reducing the vulnerability of the coastal communities by enhancing their preparedness, resistance, and recovery from the prolonged impacts of coastal disasters through designing structurally and environmentally resilient homesteads, defensive landscape plans, and socioeconomic-communal development. The ultimate proposal offers more flexibility in selecting homesteads according to suitable materials, affordability, and profession.

2011 ◽  
Vol 279 (1731) ◽  
pp. 1100-1107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony J. Bellantuono ◽  
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg ◽  
Mauricio Rodriguez-Lanetty

Discovering how corals can adjust their thermal sensitivity in the context of global climate change is important in understanding the long-term persistence of coral reefs. In this study, we showed that short-term preconditioning to higher temperatures, 3°C below the experimentally determined bleaching threshold, for a period of 10 days provides thermal tolerance for the symbiosis stability between the scleractinian coral, Acropora millepora and Symbiodinium . Based on genotypic analysis, our results indicate that the acclimatization of this coral species to thermal stress does not come down to simple changes in Symbiodinium and/or the bacterial communities that associate with reef-building corals. This suggests that the physiological plasticity of the host and/or symbiotic components appears to play an important role in responding to ocean warming. The further study of host and symbiont physiology, both of Symbiodinium and prokaryotes, is of paramount importance in the context of global climate change, as mechanisms for rapid holobiont acclimatization will become increasingly important to the long-standing persistence of coral reefs.


2019 ◽  
pp. 79-95
Author(s):  
N.E. Terentiev

Based on the latest data, paper investigates the dynamics of global climate change and its impact on economic growth in the long-term. The notion of climate risk is considered. The main directions of climate risk management policies are analyzed aimed, first, at reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions through technological innovation and structural economic shifts; secondly, at adaptation of population, territories and economic complexes to the irreparable effects of climate change. The problem of taking into account the phenomenon of climate change in the state economic policy is put in the context of the most urgent tasks of intensification of long-term socio-economic development and parrying strategic challenges to the development of Russia.


Author(s):  
Robert A. Berner

The cycle of carbon is essential to the maintenance of life, to climate, and to the composition of the atmosphere and oceans. What is normally thought of as the “carbon cycle” is the transfer of carbon between the atmosphere, the oceans, and life. This is not the subject of interest of this book. To understand this apparently confusing statement, it is necessary to separate the carbon cycle into two cycles: the short-term cycle and the long-term cycle. The “carbon cycle,” as most people understand it, is represented in figure 1.1. Carbon dioxide is taken up via photosynthesis by green plants on the continents or phytoplankton in the ocean. On land carbon is transferred to soils by the dropping of leaves, root growth, and respiration, the death of plants, and the development of soil biota. Land herbivores eat the plants, and carnivores eat the herbivores. In the oceans the phytoplankton are eaten by zooplankton that are in turn eaten by larger and larger organisms. The plants, plankton, and animals respire CO2. Upon death the plants and animals are decomposed by microorganisms with the ultimate production of CO2. Carbon dioxide is exchanged between the oceans and atmosphere, and dissolved organic matter is carried in solution by rivers from soils to the sea. This all constitutes the shortterm carbon cycle. The word “short-term” is used because the characteristic times for transferring carbon between reservoirs range from days to tens of thousands of years. Because the earth is more than four billion years old, this is short on a geological time scale. As the short-term cycle proceeds, concentrations of the two principal atmospheric gases, CO2 and CH4, can change as a result of perturbations of the cycle. Because these two are both greenhouse gases—in other words, they adsorb outgoing infrared radiation from the earth surface—changes in their concentrations can involve global warming and cooling over centuries and many millennia. Such changes have accompanied global climate change over the Quaternary period (past 2 million years), although other factors, such as variations in the receipt of solar radiation due to changes in characteristics of the earth’s orbit, have also contributed to climate change.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 271-281
Author(s):  
Yasuko Kameyama ◽  
Keishi Ono

AbstractAs the level of understanding about climate change has increased, the term “climate security” has been increasingly used in the rapidly growing literature on this subject. Although Japan has officially acknowledged the importance of tackling climate change, discussion of climate security has been almost nonexistent among Japanese governmental officials, politicians, and academics. Our aim was to trace discourses related to climate security in Japan to determine why so little exists in Japan and whether or not such discourse could suggest new areas for consideration to more comprehensively respond to the climate change problem. Because of different interpretations and uses of the term “climate security” in the existing literature, we first categorized existing approaches to climate security into four types and used this categorization to examine Japan’s discourse from these perspectives. Two of the approaches, namely “long-term irreversible planetary changes” and “short-term abrupt risks to individuals”, had been considered in Japan previously but without specific reference to the term climate security. The other two, “cause of conflict and violence” and “impacts to military and defense organizations”, however, had not been used and need to be included in discussions of climate change in Japan. Some of the topics not discussed in Japan include indirect economic losses of Japanese industries via supply chains, loss of Japan’s exclusive economic zone due to sea-level rise, and the potential inflow of refugees resulting from extreme weather patterns outside of Japan.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kensuke Kimura ◽  
Daisuke Yasutake ◽  
Takahiro Oki ◽  
Koichiro Yoshida ◽  
Masaharu Kitano

Abstract Background and Aims Most perennial plants memorize cold stress for a certain period and retrieve the memories for cold acclimation and deacclimation, which leads to seasonal changes in cold-hardiness. Therefore, a model for evaluating cold stress memories is required for predicting cold-hardiness and for future frost risk assessments under warming climates. In this study we develop a new dynamic model of cold-hardiness by introducing a function imitating past temperature memory in the processes of cold acclimation and deacclimation. Methods We formulated the past temperature memory for plants using thermal time weighted by a forgetting function, and thereby proposed a dynamic model of cold-hardiness. We used the buds of tea plants (Camellia sinensis) from two cultivars, ‘Yabukita’ and ‘Yutakamidori’, to calibrate and validate this model based on 10 years of observed cold-hardiness data. Key Results The model captured more than 90 % of the observed variation in cold-hardiness and predicted accurate values for both cultivars, with root mean square errors of ~1.0 °C. The optimized forgetting function indicated that the tea buds memorized both short-term (recent days) and long-term (previous months) temperatures. The memories can drive short-term processes such as increasing/decreasing the content of carbohydrates, proteins and antioxidants in the buds, as well as long-term processes such as determining the bud phenological stage, both of which vary with cold-hardiness. Conclusions The use of a forgetting function is an effective means of understanding temperature memories in plants and will aid in developing reliable predictions of cold-hardiness for various plant species under global climate warming.


2002 ◽  
Vol 50 (5) ◽  
pp. 497-514 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline E. Huntoon ◽  
Robert K. Ridky

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (24) ◽  
pp. 10051-10070 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meghan M. Dalton ◽  
Karen M. Shell

Abstract The climate sensitivity uncertainty of global climate models (GCMs) is partly due to the spread of individual feedbacks. One approach to constrain long-term climate sensitivity is to use the relatively short observational record, assuming there exists some relationship in feedbacks between short and long records. The present work tests this assumption by regressing short-term feedback metrics, characterized by the 20-yr feedback as well as interannual and intra-annual metrics, against long-term longwave water vapor, longwave atmospheric temperature, and shortwave surface albedo feedbacks calculated from 13 twentieth-century GCM simulations. Estimates of long-term feedbacks derived from reanalysis observations and statistically significant regressions are consistent with but no more constrained than earlier estimates. For the interannual metric, natural variability contributes to the feedback uncertainty, reducing the ability to estimate the interannual behavior from one 20-yr time slice. For both the interannual and intra-annual metrics, uncertainty in the intermodel relationships between 20-yr metrics and 100-yr feedbacks also contributes to the feedback uncertainty. Because of differences in time scales of feedback processes, relationships between the 20-yr interannual metric and 100-yr water vapor and atmospheric temperature feedbacks are significant for only one feedback calculation method. The intra-annual and surface albedo relationships show more complex behavior, though positive correspondence between Northern Hemisphere surface albedo intra-annual metrics and 100-yr feedbacks is consistent with previous studies. Many relationships between 20-yr metrics and 100-yr feedbacks are sensitive to the specific GCMs included, highlighting that care should be taken when inferring long-term feedbacks from short-term observations.


2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 777-780 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. J. Reading ◽  
L. M. Luiselli ◽  
G. C. Akani ◽  
X. Bonnet ◽  
G. Amori ◽  
...  

Long-term studies have revealed population declines in fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. In birds, and particularly amphibians, these declines are a global phenomenon whose causes are often unclear. Among reptiles, snakes are top predators and therefore a decline in their numbers may have serious consequences for the functioning of many ecosystems. Our results show that, of 17 snake populations (eight species) from the UK, France, Italy, Nigeria and Australia, 11 have declined sharply over the same relatively short period of time with five remaining stable and one showing signs of a marginal increase. Although the causes of these declines are currently unknown, we suspect that they are multi-faceted (such as habitat quality deterioration, prey availability), and with a common cause, e.g. global climate change, at their root.


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