The effects of the Syrian civil war on atmospheric NH3 as seen from IASI

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rimal Abeed ◽  
Sarah Safieddine ◽  
Lieven Clarisse ◽  
Martin Van Damme ◽  
Pierre-François Coheur ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Satellite Imagery ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Land Use Changes ◽  
Environmental Consequences ◽  
Syrian Civil War ◽  
Agricultural Emissions ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Ammonia Plant ◽  
Political Economic

<p>The Syrian civil war started in 2011, with dramatic social, political, economic, and environmental consequences over the whole area of Syria and nearby countries. Agriculture, in particular, suffered massively. Several studies used satellite-retrieved data and imagery to examine the spatio-temporal changes in the region, due to the civil war. For instance, open-source satellite imagery could show the damage in urban areas, and provide an estimate of the number of people affected by the crisis.</p><p>In this study, we investigate the impacts of the Syrian civil war on atmospheric ammonia (NH<sub>3</sub>) emitted from industrial and agricultural activities during the 2008-2019 period. Our analyses are based on the NH<sub>3</sub> measurements from the IASI instruments onboard the Metop satellites. Firstly, land-use changes and a decrease in agricultural emissions are explored over the country. We also investigate the changes in atmospheric NH<sub>3</sub> over an ammonia plant, which activities have been suspended due to several conflict-related events. We show that the NH<sub>3</sub> columns retrieved from IASI are directly affected by the war, and those periods of intense conflict and siege are reflected in lower NH<sub>3</sub> concentrations, which are not driven by meteorology. The interpretation of the identified changes in atmospheric NH<sub>3</sub> is supported by the analyses of NO<sub>2</sub> columns from GOME-2 as well as satellite imagery and land cover data. The latter is used to highlight the change in croplands’ area over the years, and the satellite images are used to show the activity of the ammonia plant.</p>

China’s diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East: the quest for a great-power role in the region

2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoram Evron
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Political Involvement ◽  
Future Role ◽  
Unique Pattern ◽  
Syrian Civil War ◽  
Power Role ◽  
Political Economic

Since the early 2010s, there have been mounting calls in China to intensify its role in the Middle East. But seeing the region as highly turbulent, Beijing seems to restrain its political involvement there. So what role does China actually strive for in the Middle East? To answer this question, the article first presents China’s discourse on its future role in the region; next, it analyzes China’s involvement in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the Syrian civil war, focusing on three diplomatic initiatives it has made concerning these issues. The argument here is that China strives to be part of major processes in the Middle East and attempts to advance its values and interests there, but in a unique pattern of big-power involvement in the region, it tries to achieve this without intensive investment of political, economic, and military resources.

scholarly journals Michael Walzer’s Humanitarian Intervention Theory Applied to Multisided Conflicts: A Discussion of Intervention and Self-Determination in the Syrian Civil War

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Miguel Paradela-López ◽  
Alexandra Jima-González
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
Stable Solution ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Intervention Theory ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Internal Conflicts ◽  
Syrian Civil War ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
Political Economic

Humanitarian interventions have often been employed to promote the intervener’s political and economic interests. Given the issues around intervention’s morality, this article explores Michael Walzer’s humanitarian intervention theory in order to unravel the practical difficulties of legitimating humanitarian interventions in multisided conflicts. After exploring Walzer’s arguments as they relate to unilateral and multilateral interventions, this article explains why, according to the self-determination principle, intervening countries must share the victim’s cause. Later, the article uses the Syrian Civil War to exemplify the conundrum of crafting a legitimate humanitarian intervention in multisided conflicts where the victims are internally divided and have opposing political, economic, and/or religious views. This case study evidences how, in such contexts, humanitarian interventions simultaneously protect the population and promote the group that best represents the intervening state’s interests, thus turning internal conflicts into foreign proxy wars. Finally, the article argues that, despite Walzer’s proposal for a consistent theory of unilateral and multilateral humanitarian interventions, unilateral interventions should be replaced in multisided conflicts by multilateral interventions able to halt atrocities and provide a stable solution for internal conflicts.

Language Movement and Civil War in West Africa

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ericka A. Albaugh
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Language Spread ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines how civil war can influence the spread of language. Specifically, it takes Sierra Leone as a case study to demonstrate how Krio grew from being primarily a language of urban areas in the 1960s to one spoken by most of the population in the 2000s. While some of this was due to “normal” factors such as population movement and growing urbanization, the civil war from 1991 to 2002 certainly catalyzed the process of language spread in the 1990s. Using census documents and surveys, the chapter tests the hypothesis at the national, regional, and individual levels. The spread of a language has political consequences, as it allows for citizen participation in the political process. It is an example of political scientists’ approach to uncovering the mechanisms for and evidence of language movement in Africa.

scholarly journals Spatial-Temporal Land Use and Land Cover Changes in Urban Areas Using Remote Sensing Images and GIS Analysis: The Case Study of Opole, Poland

Geosciences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 312
Author(s):  
Barbara Wiatkowska ◽  
Janusz Słodczyk ◽  
Aleksandra Stokowska
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Satellite Imagery ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Urban Expansion ◽  
Landsat 8 ◽  
Rate Of Increase ◽  
Management Procedures

Urban expansion is a dynamic and complex phenomenon, often involving adverse changes in land use and land cover (LULC). This paper uses satellite imagery from Landsat-5 TM, Landsat-8 OLI, Sentinel-2 MSI, and GIS technology to analyse LULC changes in 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020. The research was carried out in Opole, the capital of the Opole Agglomeration (south-western Poland). Maps produced from supervised spectral classification of remote sensing data revealed that in 20 years, built-up areas have increased about 40%, mainly at the expense of agricultural land. Detection of changes in the spatial pattern of LULC showed that the highest average rate of increase in built-up areas occurred in the zone 3–6 km (11.7%) and above 6 km (10.4%) from the centre of Opole. The analysis of the increase of built-up land in relation to the decreasing population (SDG 11.3.1) has confirmed the ongoing process of demographic suburbanisation. The paper shows that satellite imagery and GIS can be a valuable tool for local authorities and planners to monitor the scale of urbanisation processes for the purpose of adapting space management procedures to the changing environment.

Refugees’ dehumanization in the Spanish media: A corpus-assisted study within the semantic preference framework

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gema Alcaraz-Mármol ◽  
Jorge Soto-Almela
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Economic Burden ◽  
Digital Libraries ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Manual Analysis ◽  
Syrian Civil War ◽  
The Media

AbstractThe dehumanization of migrants and refugees in the media has been the object of numerous critical discourse analyses and metaphor-based studies which have primarily dealt with English written news articles. This paper, however, addresses the dehumanizing language which is used to refer to refugees in a 1.8-million-word corpus of Spanish news articles collected from the digital libraries of El Mundo and El País, the two most widely read Spanish newspapers. Our research particularly aims to explore how the dehumanization of the lemma refugiado is constructed through the identification of semantic preferences. It is concerned with synchronic and diachronic aspects, offering results on the evolution of refugees’ dehumanization from 2010 to 2016. The dehumanizing collocates are determined via a corpus-based analysis, followed by a detailed manual analysis conducted in order to label the different collocates of refugiado semantically and classify them into more specific semantic subsets. The results show that the lemma refugiado usually collocates with dehumanizing words that express, by frequency order, quantification, out-of-control phenomenon, objectification, and economic burden. The analysis also demonstrates that the collocates corresponding to these four semantic subsets are unusually frequent in the 2015–16 period, giving rise to seasonal collocates strongly related to the Syrian civil war and other Middle-East armed conflicts.

scholarly journals Multi-Criteria, Co-Evolutionary Charging Behavior: An Agent-Based Simulation of Urban Electromobility

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Lennart Adenaw ◽  
Markus Lienkamp
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
City Planning ◽  
User Behavior ◽  
Transport Sector ◽  
Simulation Framework ◽  
Agent Based Simulation ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Charging Station ◽  
Spatio Temporal

In order to electrify the transport sector, scores of charging stations are needed to incentivize people to buy electric vehicles. In urban areas with a high charging demand and little space, decision-makers are in need of planning tools that enable them to efficiently allocate financial and organizational resources to the promotion of electromobility. As with many other city planning tasks, simulations foster successful decision-making. This article presents a novel agent-based simulation framework for urban electromobility aimed at the analysis of charging station utilization and user behavior. The approach presented here employs a novel co-evolutionary learning model for adaptive charging behavior. The simulation framework is tested and verified by means of a case study conducted in the city of Munich. The case study shows that the presented approach realistically reproduces charging behavior and spatio-temporal charger utilization.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document