Optimising for equity: Sensor coverage, networks and the responsive city

Decisions about sensor placement in cities are inherently complex, balancing structural inequalities with the differential needs of populations, local stakeholder priorities and the technical specificities of the sensors themselves. Rapid developments in urban data collection and Geographic Data Science have the potential to support these decision-making processes, yet even the most cutting-edge algorithms cannot deliver on complete and equitable sensor coverage. Focusing on a case study of air-quality sensors in Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), we employ spatial optimisation algorithms as a descriptive tool to illustrate the complex trade-offs that produce sensor networks that miss important groups—even when the explicit coverage goal is one of equity. The problem is not technical; rather it is demographic, structural and financial. Despite the considerable constraints that emerge from our analysis, we argue the data collected via sensor networks is of continued importance when evidencing core urban injustices (e.g., air pollution or climate-related heat). We therefore make the case for a clearer distinction to be made between sensors for monitoring and sensors for surveillance, arguing that a wider presumption of bad intent for all sensors potentially limits the visibility of positive types of sensing. For the purpose of monitoring, we also propose that basic spatial optimisation tools can help to elucidate and remediate spatial injustices in sensor networks.

Exploring accountability of Australia and New Zealand's temporary labour mobility programmes in Samoa using a talanoa approach

PurposeTemporary labour mobility programmes (TLMPs) are initiated by high-income nations to fill their labour demands by offering temporary work opportunities to migrants from low-income nations. TLMPs also seek to contribute to economic development in workers' home countries. This paper aims to assess the accountability of New Zealand's Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) Scheme and Australia's Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) in reaching their economic development objectives in one sending nation, Samoa.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative study with RSE and SWP workers and key informants (collectively stakeholders) in Samoa was undertaken to assess the contributions of these schemes to economic development. An interdisciplinary research approach was taken using the Pacific methodology of talanoa. Talanoa was used to “operationalise engagement” and empower local stakeholder accounts.FindingsTalanoa supported the elicitation of accounts that contributed nuanced insights into the accountability of TLMPs. Specifically, stakeholder accounts revealed limitations in the ability of the RSE Scheme and SWP to meet their economic development objectives for Samoan communities and workers. Adjustments are necessary to meet Pacific nations' economic development objectives.Practical implicationsThis study responds to calls for on-the-ground accounts of stakeholders involved in TLMPs. It provides insights that may contribute to the development of more effective TLMPs, particularly regarding economic development in workers' home countries.Originality/valueDrawing on dialogic accounting literature, which calls for engagement with the marginalised, a talanoa approach has been engaged to assess TLMPs via on-the-ground participant accounts in a specific context. This paper introduces talanoa to the critical and social accounting literature, to move beyond a typical accounting qualitative interview process and encourage greater engagement and collaboration with Pacific scholars and partners.

Cross-Boundary Weed Management in Protected Area-Centered Ecosystems: How Can it Work and What Makes it Harder to Achieve?

Invasive species management in natural landscapes is generally executed at the scale of independent jurisdictions, yet the ecological processes and biodiversity to be protected from invasion occur over large spatial scales and across multiple jurisdictions. Jurisdictional land boundaries can influence the flows and dynamics of ecological systems, as well as the social systems that exist in these complex landscapes. Land management entities in large, protected area-centered ecosystems may use different approaches to address cross-boundary management challenges. To understand these differing strategies and their effects on cooperative invasive plant management, we interviewed employees with federal, county and state agencies, research organizations, nonprofits, and local stakeholder groups in two national parks and their surrounding lands in California, USA. Although all participants stressed the importance of working together, they did so along a continuum of strategies ranging from simple communication to coordination of independent efforts to active collaboration. Barriers to collaboration can be categorized as originating within or externally to the management unit, including limited resources, differing agency priorities, paperwork requirements, and lack of support by higher-level managers. Strategies to reduce barriers depend on where they originate.

eLaunceston Revisited – A Novel Regional Research Project from 1999

An historical paper from 1999 is republished because of its relevance to using digital communications to boost regional communities and their digital economies. Telstra Research Laboratories created a community website for Launceston Tasmania, with local stakeholder oversight, to test whether locally oriented information can increase the value of the Internet to existing users and make digital access more attractive to non-users.

Overcoming vaccine deployment challenges among the hardest to reach: lessons from polio elimination in India

After more than 30 years of efforts to eliminate polio, India was certified polio free by WHO in 2014. The final years prior to polio elimination were characterised by concentrated efforts to vaccinate hard-to-reach groups in the state of Uttar Pradesh, including migrant workers, religious minority Muslims and impoverished communities with poor pre-existing social support systems. This article aims to describe the management strategies employed by India to improve the deployment and acceptance of vaccines among hard-to-reach groups in Uttar Pradesh in the final years prior to polio elimination.Three main management principles contributed to polio elimination among the hardest to reach in Uttar Pradesh: bundling of health services, local stakeholder engagement and accountability mechanisms for public health initiatives. In an effort to market the polio campaign as an authentic health-oriented programme, vaccine acceptance was improved by packaging other basic healthcare services such as routine check-ups and essential medications. India also prioritised local stakeholder engagement by using influential community leaders to reach vaccine hesitant groups. Lastly, the accountability mechanisms developed between non-profit organisations and decision-makers in the field ensured accurate reporting and identified deficiencies in healthcare worker training. The lessons learnt from India’s polio vaccination programme have important implications for the implementation of future mass vaccination initiatives, particularly when trying to reach vulnerable communities.

Participatory Use of a Tool to Assess Governance for Sustainable Landscapes

Sustainable management of resources is crucial for balancing competing livelihood, economic, and environmental goals. Since forests and other systems do not exist in isolation, comprehensive jurisdictional approaches to forest, and land-use governance can help promote sustainability. The ability of jurisdictions to provide evidence of progress toward sustainability is essential for attracting public and private sector investments and maintaining local stakeholder involvement. The Sustainable Landscapes Rating Tool (SLRT) provides a way to assess enabling conditions for jurisdictional sustainability through an evidence-based rating system. We applied this rating tool in 19 states and provinces across six countries (Brazil, Ecuador, Indonesia, Cote d'Ivoire, Mexico, Peru) that are members of the Governors' Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF TF). Each SLRT assessment was completed using publicly available information, interviews with stakeholders in the jurisdiction, and a multi-stakeholder workshop to validate the indicator ratings. This paper explores the effects of stakeholder involvement in the validation process, along with stakeholder perceptions of the tool's usefulness. Our analysis shows that the validation workshops often led to modifications of the indicator ratings, even for indicators originally assessed using publicly available data, highlighting the gap between existence of a policy and its implementation. Also, a more diverse composition of stakeholders at the workshops led to more changes in indicator ratings, which indicates the importance of including different perspectives in compiling and validating the assessments. Overall, most participants agreed that the tool is useful for self-assessment of the jurisdiction and to address coordination gaps. Further, the validation workshops provided a space for discussions across government agencies, civil society organizations (CSOs), producer organizations, indigenous peoples and local community representatives, and researchers about improving policy and governance conditions. Our findings from the analysis of a participatory approach to collecting and validating data can be used to inform future research on environmental governance and sustainability.

Introducing the Vienna Urban Carbon Laboratory (VUCL)

<p>The Vienna Urban Carbon Laboratory (VUCL) has begun testing in situ measurement-based options for monitoring local carbon dioxide (CO<sub>2</sub>) and methane (CH<sub>4</sub>) emissions in Austria’s capital city. Building upon the groundwork of the CarboWien project, VUCL extends and expands the current tall-tower eddy covariance flux system and will furthermore conduct campaigns to measure carbon isotopes and isofluxes, as well as upwind-downwind gradients in total column CO<sub>2</sub> and CH<sub>4</sub> mixing ratios. The project, which runs between 2021 and 2024 and is funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF), will be implemented by a collaboration between the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU), the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the Environment Agency Austria (EAA) and A1 Telekom Austria AG (A1). In addition to contributing to international research into measurement-based greenhouse gas emissions monitoring, the multi-method approach provides an opportunity to demonstrate measurement-based emissions monitoring options directly to Vienna’s civil servants responsible for climate change mitigation action in the city. Continuous local stakeholder engagement over the project duration is therefore planned.</p><p>This conference contribution to the WMO-IG3IS session at vEGU21 will allow VUCL to be introduced to relevant scientists and stakeholders in the international community. Given the recent project start (01 Feb 2021), the foreseen discussions on the project’s planned implementation will provide an important and timely input into VUCL. Finally, initial VUCL results will be presented together with data from the preceding CarboWien project (2018-2020) to show how the measured CO<sub>2</sub> fluxes in Vienna have been impacted by the lockdown restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.</p>

"Domains of Deprivation Framework" for Mapping Slums, Informal Settlements, and Other Deprived Areas in LMICs to Improve Urban Planning and Policy: A Scoping Review

The majority of urban inhabitants in low- and middle-income country (LMIC) cities live in deprived urban areas. However, statistics and data (e.g., local monitoring of Sustainable Development Goals - SDGs) are hindered by the unavailability of spatial data at metropolitan, city and sub-city scales. Deprivation is a complex and multidimensional concept, which has been captured in existing literature with a strong focus on household-level deprivation while giving limited attention to area-level deprivation. Within this scoping review, we build on existing literature on household- as well as area-level deprivation frameworks to arrive at a combined understanding of how urban deprivation is defined with a focus on LMIC cities. The scoping review was enriched with local stakeholder workshops in LMIC cities to arrive at our framework of Domains of Deprivations, splitting deprivation into three different scales and nine domains. (1) Socio-Economic Status and (2) Housing Domains (Household scale); (3) Social Hazards & Assets, (4) Physical Hazards & Assets, (5) Unplanned Urbanization and (6) Contamination (Within Area scale); and (7) Infrastructure, (8) Facilities & Services and (9) city Governance (Area Connect scale). The Domains of Deprivation framework provides a clear guidance for collecting data on various aspects of deprivation, while providing the flexibility to decide at city level which indicators are most relevant to explain individual domains. The framework provides a conceptual and operational base for the Integrated Deprived Area Mapping System (IDEAMAPS) Project for the creation of a data ecosystem, which facilitates the production of routine, accurate maps of deprived “slum” areas at scale across cities in LMICs. The Domains of Deprivation Framework is designed to support diverse health, poverty, and development initiatives globally to characterize and address deprivation in LMIC cities.

“Domains of Deprivation Framework” for Mapping Slums, Informal Settlements, and Other Deprived Areas in LMICs to Improve Urban Planning and Policy: A Scoping Review

The majority of urban inhabitants in low- and middle-income country (LMIC) cities live in deprived urban areas. However, statistics and data (e.g., local monitoring of Sustainable Development Goals - SDGs) are hindered by the unavailability of spatial data at metropolitan, city and sub-city scales. Deprivation is a complex and multidimensional concept, which has been captured in existing literature with a strong focus on household-level deprivation while giving limited attention to area-level deprivation. Within this scoping review, we build on existing literature on household- as well as area-level deprivation frameworks to arrive at a combined understanding of how urban deprivation is defined with a focus on LMIC cities. The scoping review was enriched with local stakeholder workshops in LMIC cities to arrive at our framework of Domains of Deprivations, splitting deprivation into three different scales and nine domains. The Domains of Deprivation framework provides a clear guidance for collecting data on various aspects of deprivation, while providing the flexibility to decide at city level which indicators are most relevant to explain individual domains. The framework provides a conceptual and operational base for the Integrated Deprived Area Mapping System (IDEAMAPS) Project for the creation of a data ecosystem, which facilitates the production of routine, accurate maps of deprived “slum” areas at scale across cities in LMICs. The Domains of Deprivation Framework is designed to support diverse health, poverty, and development initiatives globally to characterize and address deprivation in LMIC cities.

How to Protect Free Flowing Rivers: The Bita River Ramsar Site as an Example of Science and Management Tools Working Together

The Orinoco river basin is the third largest river in the world by volume. Its catchment encompasses 27 major sub-basins including the Bita with a catchment area of about 825,000 ha, which originates in the Colombian high plains in the Llanos ecoregion. It has been recognized as a priority area for conservation through different gap analyses and overall determined to have good health according to the Orinoco report card 2016. The natural climate and hydrologic processes, and their synergies with flooded forests, savannas, wetlands, species diversity and local economic activities, are part of a dynamic and sensitive system. With the purpose of conserving the ecological, social and cultural benefits that it brings, the Colombian Government, with the support of regional and local civil society organizations, promoted the designation of a conservation area. Technical exercises were carried out including biological and socioeconomic surveys, local stakeholder consultations and future scenario modeling. In June 2018, the Bita River basin was designated as the largest Ramsar site in Colombia, providing a worldwide example of explicit protection of riverine systems. In order to maintain this free-flowing river, land use and fisheries management, in conjunction with other conservation actions, are being implemented and provide a model of protection for freshwater ecosystems that could be replicated elsewhere.