Towards responsible science and technology: How nanotechnology research and development is shaping risk governance practices in Australia

Incorporating perspectives of multiple stakeholders concerning the appropriate balance of risks and benefits of new and potentially disruptive technologies is thought to be a way of enhancing the societal relevance and positive impacts of those technologies. A risk governance approach can be instrumental in achieving balance among diverse stakeholders, as it enables decision-making processes informed by multiple dimensions of risk. This paper applies a risk governance approach to retrospectively examine the development of nanotechnology research and development (R&D) in Australia to identify how risk governance is reflected in the practices of a range of stakeholders. We identify ten risk-related challenges specific to nanotechnology R&D based on a review of the international literature, which provided the foundation for documenting how those working in the Australian nanotechnology sector responded to these global risk-related challenges. This case study research draws on a range of sources including literature review, semi-structured interviews, and a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches for data analysis to identify key themes and generate visualisations of the interconnections that exist between risk governance practices. The ability to visualise these interconnections from the qualitative data is a key contribution of this research. Our findings show how the qualitative insights and professional experiences of nanotechnologists provide evidence of how risk governance approaches have been operationalised in the Australian nanotechnology R&D sector. The findings generate three important insights. First, the risk research undertaken by Australian nanotechnologists is interdisciplinary and involves multiple stakeholders from various disciplines and sectors. Unlike traditional risk governance approaches, our findings document efforts to assess, not only physical risks, but also social and ethical risks. Second, nanotechnology risk governance is a non-linear process and practices undertaken to address specific challenges occurred concurrently with and contributed to addressing other challenges. Third, our findings indicate that applying a risk governance approach enables greater intersection and collaboration, potentially bridging any disconnect between scientists, policymakers, and the public to realise transdisciplinary outcomes. This research highlights opportunities for developing systematic methodologies to enable more robust risk governance of other new and emerging technologies.

A New Collaborative Multi-Agent Monte Carlo Simulation Model for Spatial Correlation of Air Pollution Global Risk Assessment

Air pollution risk assessment is complex due to dynamic data change and pollution source distribution. Air quality index concentration level prediction is an effective method of protecting public health by providing the means for an early warning against harmful air pollution. However, air quality index-based prediction is challenging as it depends on several complicated factors resulting from dynamic nonlinear air quality time-series data, such as dynamic weather patterns and the verity and distribution of air pollution sources. Subsequently, some minimal models have incorporated a time series-based predicting air quality index at a global level (for a particular city or various cities). These models require interaction between the multiple air pollution sensing sources and additional parameters like wind direction and wind speed. The existing methods in predicting air quality index cannot handle short-term dependencies. These methods also mostly neglect the spatial correlations between the different parameters. Moreover, the assumption of selecting the most recent part of the air quality time series is not valid considering that pollution is cyclic behavior according to various events and conditions due to the high possibility of falling into the trap of local minimum and poor generalization. Therefore, this paper proposes a new air pollution global risk assessment (APGRA) prediction model for an air quality index of spatial correlations to address these issues. The APGRA model incorporates an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), a Monte Carlo simulation, a collaborative multi-agent system, and a prediction algorithm for reducing air quality index prediction error and processing time. The proposed APGRA model is evaluated based on Malaysia and China real-world air quality datasets. The proposed APGRA model improves the average root mean squared error by 41%, mean and absolute error by 47.10% compared with the conventional ARIMA and ANFIS models.

Bikinis and Other Atomic Incidents: The Synthetic Life of the Nuclear Pacific

This article examines a range of mid-twentieth-century American fashions, particularly women’s intimate wear, that went by the name of “bikini.” In doing so, it identifies the bikini as an overt but unremarkable incident of racial and colonial violence. Treating the nuclear Pacific as conspicuously incidental in mainstream atomic culture enables new insights on the visual interplay between white femininity and primitive sexuality—an interplay that, the author argues, was integral to establishing domestic virtue and modern living as atomic age touchstones of “peace.” To elaborate on this argument, this article tracks the bikini’s achievement of propriety within a broader fashion revolution spurred by the use of high-tech fibers in swim, sleep, and support garments. It shows how an atomic ideal of “nature” arose from an imperial desire for security in the face of extreme risk—both the global risk of nuclear war and the domestic risk of sexual promiscuity.

Climate Change and Health Impacts in Pakistan

Conferring to the Global Risk Index, Pakistan is ranked as the 7th most susceptible country to the inexorable influence of climate change. Before this century ends, the annual mean temperature in Pakistan is expected to rise from 3°C to 5°C for a focal worldwide discharge situation. Usually, annual precipitation is not relied upon to have a critical long haul pattern. Ocean level is relied upon to ascend further by 60 centimeters. All these climatic events are likely to disrupt the economy, lives, and the socio-political aspects of human life. Pakistan has already witnessed massive loss in terms of human, infrastructural, and economic aspects. The chapter is designed to understand both the direct and indirect health risks associated with frequent climatic events like floods, drought, and heat waves in Pakistan. After analyzing the available literature, it was observed that floods and drought have direct and indirect health risks associated with them while in case of heat waves, health risks cannot be established precisely as multiple variables are involved, playing a significant role.

Real-time Estimation of Global CFR Ascribed to COVID-19 Confirmed Cases Applying Machine Learning Technique

The COVID-19 is declared as a public health emergency of global concern by World Health Organisation (WHO) affecting a total of 201 countries across the globe during the period December 2019 to January 2021. As of January 25, 2021, it has caused a pandemic outbreak with more than 99 million confirmed cases and more than 2 million deaths worldwide. The crisp of this paper is to estimate the global risk in terms of CFR of the COVID-19 pandemic for seventy deeply affected countries. An optimal regression tree algorithm under machine learning technique is applied which identified four significant features like diabetes prevalence, total number of deaths in thousands, total number of confirmed cases in thousands, and hospital beds per 1000 out of fifteen input features. This real-time estimation will provide deep insights into the early detection of CFR for the countries under study.

Essays on Foreign Direct Investment and Development Economics

<p>This thesis consists of three empirical essays on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and Small Medium Enterprise (SME) access to finance. The first essay examines determinants of Chinese Outward Direct Investment (ODI) in infrastructure sectors. This study focuses on the role of host country institutions, macroeconomic stability and geography on attracting Chinese ODI. Utilizing micro-level project data over the years 2005 to 2016, results show that Chinese infrastructure investments are attracted to countries with a limited fiscal space but strong institutions. We also find that geographic distance, cultural proximity, Free Trade Agreement with China, country size are important factors in attracting Chinese investments. The second essay studies SME access to finance in Asia. We investigate the relative importance of external finance vis-à-vis internal finance for SME and larger firms and examine how SME characteristics associated with the extent of their bank borrowing. Results indicate that bank borrowing and line of credit availability are positively associated with financial audit, managerial experience, export participation, and ISO certificate, while it is negatively associated with foreign ownership and SME status. Our research suggests that access to finance is an important concern in Asia and government intervention targeting improvement in credit guarantee systems, monitoring and credit scoring can help easing the constraints for SME access to external finance. Finally, the third essay examines the role of infrastructure investment deals as a signaling on attracting FDI. Intriguingly, we find that infrastructure deals produce a negative signal to MNEs’ decision making for developing countries. We look for several channels in which the negative signaling effect can pass through. Findings suggest that increase in global risk aversion stemming from global financial crisis and country specific risk level are the main factors behind the negative signalling effect.</p>

Essays on Foreign Direct Investment and Development Economics

<p>This thesis consists of three empirical essays on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and Small Medium Enterprise (SME) access to finance. The first essay examines determinants of Chinese Outward Direct Investment (ODI) in infrastructure sectors. This study focuses on the role of host country institutions, macroeconomic stability and geography on attracting Chinese ODI. Utilizing micro-level project data over the years 2005 to 2016, results show that Chinese infrastructure investments are attracted to countries with a limited fiscal space but strong institutions. We also find that geographic distance, cultural proximity, Free Trade Agreement with China, country size are important factors in attracting Chinese investments. The second essay studies SME access to finance in Asia. We investigate the relative importance of external finance vis-à-vis internal finance for SME and larger firms and examine how SME characteristics associated with the extent of their bank borrowing. Results indicate that bank borrowing and line of credit availability are positively associated with financial audit, managerial experience, export participation, and ISO certificate, while it is negatively associated with foreign ownership and SME status. Our research suggests that access to finance is an important concern in Asia and government intervention targeting improvement in credit guarantee systems, monitoring and credit scoring can help easing the constraints for SME access to external finance. Finally, the third essay examines the role of infrastructure investment deals as a signaling on attracting FDI. Intriguingly, we find that infrastructure deals produce a negative signal to MNEs’ decision making for developing countries. We look for several channels in which the negative signaling effect can pass through. Findings suggest that increase in global risk aversion stemming from global financial crisis and country specific risk level are the main factors behind the negative signalling effect.</p>

The Effect of Corporate Water Disclosure on Financial Performance

Natural resources crises specifically the water crises are listed in the top ten global risk in 2021. Water demand and withdrawal increase as the population rise. To mitigate water scarcity, companies disclose more on water related information as an engagement to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). Motivated towards exploring the impact of corporate water disclosures, this study aims to examine effect corporate water disclosures for five years to financial performance of the sample companies. The sample companies are the electric utilities companies that listed as the top 50 market capitalisation in the sector. The water related information disclosure in this study include resource reduction policy, policy of water efficiency policy of environmental supply chain, target water efficiency and environmental management team. This study found that corporate water information disclosures including resource reduction policy and policy of water efficiency) have positive significant relationship on earnings per share (EPS). However, the target water efficiency is negatively significant with EPS which explain the behaviour of electric utilities companies all this while.