Prediction of the Financial Losses of Subsea Pipeline Failure

The consequences of subsea crude pipeline failure drastically affect the continuity of oil supply and the ability of operating companies to meet market demand. Moreover, it reduces clients’ confidence and reliance on operating companies. There are mainly two types of failures that severely affect the integrity and operability of a pipeline. These are the leakage caused by gradual thinning of the pipeline due to corrosion and the leakage caused by a rupture pressure. The first form of failure results in a constant slow leakage that go over time without being noticed. While the second form of failure takes place without warning which makes the restoration effort extremely difficult and time consuming. Both forms of failure result in delayed production, environmental damage, legal claims as well as financial losses that operating companies could incur. Moreover, leaked oil products adversely impact other industries which bring these industries into a halt. Such industries may include fishery, maritime transportation, and tourism industries. This paper presents a method for predicting the financial losses that a company could incur in the event a corroded pipeline undergoes the abovementioned failures. Basically, this method can be used as a standard estimating tool for predicting the financial losses if such events occur.

Successional change, restoration success, and resilience in boreal mixedwood vegetation communities over three decades

Long-term studies of vegetation succession can inform restoration of degraded forests. We examined resilience of a boreal mixedwood vegetation community, asking whether treatments employed to restore wood production in a degraded ecosystem could also restore diversity and composition of vegetation communities. The Inga Lake trial, established in 1987 in northeastern British Columbia, used mechanical, fire, and chemical and manual treatments, encompassing a gradient of restoration effort, and tree planting to restore a shrubland to white spruce (Picea glauca (Moench) Voss) forest. We monitored vascular plant, bryophyte, and macrolichen composition five times over 31 years on five to seven treatments replicated five times. We used mixed-effects models and nonmetric multidimensional scaling to compare diversity and composition among treatments and with mature reference forests. Low- to high-effort restoration created a gradient from broadleaf- to spruce-dominated overstories. Diversity increased with restoration effort. Four of 253 taxa occurred in mature forests only. There was no evidence that lower versus higher effort treatments followed divergent successional pathways toward broadleaved versus spruce reference communities. Our results suggest that these mixedwood vegetation communities lie within a broad domain of successional attraction that confers high ecological resilience to disturbance. Gap cuttings to stimulate understory re-initiation and provide woody debris are recommended to complete the restoration.

Optimal Supply Diversification Strategy under Supply Disruption

When a disruption caused by human or environmental accident occurs in production systems, it may cause a shortage of the supply, and thus the buyers’ procurement behaviors will be influenced. This paper studies a supply chain comprised of a buyer and two types of suppliers: one is cheap but unreliable and the other is reliable but expensive. If there is a major disruption, the unreliable supplier may not be able to fully satisfy the buyer’s order, despite the fact that it exerts additional effort to rebuild capacity; at the same time, the reliable supplier cannot fulfill extra orders from the buyer due to capacity constraints. In this way, the buyer should strategically allocate its order between the two types of suppliers by offering different contracts at the very beginning, and then the unreliable supplier chooses its optimal restoration effort according to the contract if a disruption occurs. The model is built based on the real-life cases such as Walmart and Apple such that it is the buyer who determines the wholesale price of the unreliable supplier’s products. The results show the optimal contracts provided by the buyer under different circumstances, which aims to help managers design their contracts under disruption risks to maximize the company’s profit.

Sampling event dataset for ecological monitoring of riparian restoration effort in Colorado foothills

The foothills and shortgrass prairie ecosystems of Colorado, United States, have undergone substantial and sustained anthropogenic habitat change over the past two centuries. Riparian systems have been dramatically altered by agriculture, hydrological engineering, urbanisation and the introduction of non-native invasive species. In 2016, Denver Botanic Gardens began a restoration effort of Deer Creek which seeks to modify the hydrology of the creek by mimicking the effects of beaver dams with artificial structures. The site, owned by the US Army Core of Engineers and managed by Denver Botanic Gardens, had been the subject of previous botanical surveys. With the initiation of the restoration project, permanent transects were established along the stream and are sampled for ground vegetation richness and abundance, canopy cover, soil and stream conditions and aquatic macroinvertebrate community makeup on an annual basis. To provide a means for tracking any post-intervention changes in the riparian ecosystem, this resource reports all recorded occurrences and measurements, along with methodologies and motivations from past and current surveys in the form of a sampling event dataset. The current project and past surveys document 382 plant taxa and 157 aquatic macroinvertebrate taxa. A total of 16304 occurrences and 7422 measurements are included in the resource. Occurrence and measurement data taken from transects provide a means to measure species abundance, ground cover and other biotic and abiotic characteristics relevant to assessing the effects of hydrological restoration on riparian plant communities.

Strategies to improve implementation of adaptive management practices for restoration in coastal Louisiana

Natural resources of coastal Louisiana support the economies of Louisiana and the whole of the United States. However, future conditions of coastal Louisiana are highly uncertain due to the dynamic processes of the Mississippi River delta, unpredictable storm events, subsidence, sea level rise, increasing temperatures, and extensive historic management actions that have altered natural coastal processes. To address these concerns, a centralized state agency was formed to coordinate coastal protection and restoration effort, the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA). This promoted knowledge centralization and supported informal adaptive management for restoration efforts, at that time mostly funded through the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act (CWPPRA). Since the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill in 2010 and the subsequent settlement, the majority of restoration funding for the next 15 years will come through one of the DWH mechanisms; Natural Resource and Damage Assessment (NRDA), the RESTORE Council, or National Fish and Wildlife Foundation –Gulf Environmental Benefit Fund (NFWF-GEBF). This has greatly increased restoration effort and increased governance complexity associated with project funding, implementation, and reporting. As a result, there is enhanced impetus to formalize and unify adaptive management processes for coastal restoration in Louisiana. Through synthesis of input from local coastal managers, historical and current processes for project and programmatic implementation and adaptive management were summarized. Key gaps and needs to specifically increase implementation of adaptive management within the Louisiana coastal restoration community were identified and developed into eight tangible and specific recommendations. These were to streamline governance through increased coordination amongst implementing entities, develop a discoverable and practical lessons learned and decision database, coordinate ecosystem reporting, identify commonality of restoration goals, develop a common cross-agency adaptive management handbook for all personnel, improve communication (both in-reach and outreach), have a common repository and clearing house for numerical models used for restoration planning and assessment, and expand approaches for two-way stakeholder engagement throughout the restoration process. A common vision and maximizing synergies between entities can improve adaptive management implementation to maximize ecosystem and community benefits of restoration effort in coastal Louisiana. This work adds to current knowledge by providing specific strategies and recommendations, based upon extensive engagement with restoration practitioners from multiple state and federal agencies. Addressing these practitioner-identified gaps and needs will improve engagement in adaptive management in coastal Louisiana, a large geographic area with high restoration implementation within a complex governance framework.

An overview of Deepwater Horizon restoration progress in Alabama

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill caused extensive damage to the northern Gulf of Mexico ecosystem, and resulted in numerous fines and penalties that will be available in the coming years for environmental restoration and economic recovery. These funds are jump-starting recovery and restoration efforts across the Gulf region, including in Alabama where more than $720 million has been approved for projects to date. The Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (ADCNR) oversees many aspects of this restoration effort in the state, leveraging existing planning and stakeholder investments to maximize efficiencies and take advantage of local expertise. This paper provides an overview of a selection of planning tools Alabama utilizes to support DWH restoration efforts and highlights several of the ongoing restoration projects that will benefit coastal habitats and wildlife.

Social Factors Key to Landscape-Scale Coastal Restoration: Lessons Learned from Three U.S. Case Studies

In the United States, extensive investments have been made to restore the ecological function and services of coastal marine habitats. Despite a growing body of science supporting coastal restoration, few studies have addressed the suite of societally enabling conditions that helped facilitate successful restoration and recovery efforts that occurred at meaningful ecological (i.e., ecosystem) scales, and where restoration efforts were sustained for longer (i.e., several years to decades) periods. Here, we examined three case studies involving large-scale and long-term restoration efforts including the seagrass restoration effort in Tampa Bay, Florida, the oyster restoration effort in the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland and Virginia, and the tidal marsh restoration effort in San Francisco Bay, California. The ecological systems and the specifics of the ecological restoration were not the focus of our study. Rather, we focused on the underlying social and political contexts of each case study and found common themes of the factors of restoration which appear to be important for maintaining support for large-scale restoration efforts. Four critical elements for sustaining public and/or political support for large-scale restoration include: (1) resources should be invested in building public support prior to significant investments into ecological restoration; (2) building political support provides a level of significance to the recovery planning efforts and creates motivation to set and achieve meaningful recovery goals; (3) recovery plans need to be science-based with clear, measurable goals that resonate with the public; and (4) the accountability of progress toward reaching goals needs to be communicated frequently and in a way that the general public comprehends. These conclusions may help other communities move away from repetitive, single, and seemingly unconnected restoration projects towards more large-scale, bigger impact, and coordinated restoration efforts.

THE RESTORATION EFFORT OF PEAT MOSS ECOSYSTEM POSTCONFLAGRATION OF THE FOREST AND THE LAND IN LUKUN VILLAGE OF TEBING TINGGI TIMUR REGENCY

The conflagration continuously occurs with a different trend each year. Indonesian is especially an area that takes the root of peat moss labeled as the exporter of the smoke to the neighbor states and all at once it is not able to solve the conflagration completely because of various reasons. More or less 2 million hectares of the peat moss land has degradation and needs the recovery effort to be the job desk of the government to implement the restoration effort as soon as possible. Not only needing very big budget, that becoming the note is the society truly needs to support the activity to work well. The goal of this research is namely: 1). identifying the factor of the forest and the land conflagration cause and its impact, 2) analyzing the restoration efforts of post conflagration disaster of the forest and the land. And the location of the research is in Lukun Village of Tebing Tinggi Timur Regency of Kepulauan Meranti Subdistrict. This research uses the qualitative descriptive approach. The causing factor of the conflagration disaster of the forest and the land is namely the natural condition and the human activity. The impact that is caused by the conflagration disaster of the forest and the land can be divided to be: the impact against the peat moss ecosystem and the impact against the society’s social economy. The effort that is implemented in the recovery of post conflagration disaster of the forest and the land is the ecosystem restoration and the revitalization of human’s economy.

Penilaian Ganti Kerugian dalam Pengadaan Tanah untuk Kepentingan Umum: Perspektif HAM

The construction was the one of the realization of human rights, including the role of infrastructure development which was need the land. The implication was the land procurement for the public interest that have an impact on the improvement of agrarian conflicts, especially influenced by the damages assessed factors not yet viable and fair. This research was conducted to describe (1) how regulatory aspects in law number 2 of 2012 that govern the land procurement in formulating viable and fair criteria, and (2) how the assessment was conducted by the appraisal (The office of Public Assesor Agent), was given the authority to conduct an assessment of attributive replace losses seen in the perspective of human rights. This study uses qualitative methods. Primary data collection was done by interviews directed and secondary data was sourced from a variety of literature. The results of this research was the regulation of viable and equitable damages in law number 2, of 2012 was still unclear the message and in accordance with human rights norms. This was the case in the assessment aspect of damages has not been standard. This discrepancy has to do with the essence of viable and equitable reimbursement for items that have a restoration effort in school victims both material and immaterial, to rise up and to fulfill their right.Keywords: Land acquisition, infrastructure development, compensation, human rights, Indonesia.Intisari: Pembangunan merupakan perwujudan hak asasi manusia, termasuk pembangunan infrastruktur yang membutuhkan tanah. Implikasinya pengadaan tanah bagi kepentingan umum berdampak pada peningkatan konflik agraria, terutama dipengaruhi faktor ganti kerugian yang dinilai belum layak dan adil. Penelitian ini dilakukan untuk menggambarkan (1) bagaimana aspek regulasi dalam UU Nomor 2 Tahun 2012 yang mengatur pengadaan tanah bagi pembangunan untuk kepentingan umum terkait rumusan kriteria layak dan adil, dan (2) bagaimana penilaian dilakukan oleh appraisal Kantor Jasa Penilai Publik (KJPP) yang diberikan kewenangan atributif. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kualitatif. Pengumpulan data primer dilakukan dengan wawancara terarah dan data sekunder bersumber dari berbagai literatur. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukan regulasi ganti kerugian layak dan adil dalam UU Nomor 2 Tahun 2012 belum jelas kriterianya dan sesuai dengan norma hak asasi manusia. Demikian halnya dalam aspek penilaian ganti kerugian belum ada standar dan instrumen baku. Ketidaksesuaian ini berkaitan dengan esensi layak dan adil yang memiliki unsur penggantian untuk upaya pemulihan korban terdampak baik, bersifat material dan imaterial agar mampu bangkit dan terpenuhi hak asasinya.Kata kunci: Pengadaan tanah, pembangunan infrastruktur, ganti kerugian, HAM, Indonesia.