Tropical Cyclones in the Great Barrier Reef,Australia, 1910–1999: a First Step Towards Characterising the Disturbance Regime

The proximity of a reef to a tropical cyclone path is the simplest means of estimating the potential for disturbance (that is, physical damage from waves) at that reef. Calculated for cyclones that tracked across a sample of reefs spanning much of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) from 1910 to 1999, such proximities provide a preliminary history of cyclone disturbance in that region for which spatial and temporal trends can be examined. As the long‐term dynamics of cyclone disturbance affect the structure and function of coral reef communities, the disturbance regime can be used to consider whether the current state of coral communities (as measured in 1999) represents that which was present over the entire time series, and whether the frequency of cyclone disturbance across the GBR is high (limited recovery time between events) or intermediate (variable recovery time between events) in nature. This analysis reveals that for more than half of the GBR, the latest major disturbance occurred less recently than normal for the time series (current communities had more time for recovery than usual) and that these disturbances are generally intermediate in frequency. However, because many factors other than distance affect the potential for disturbance, these results represent a first step towards characterising the nature of cyclone disturbance across the GBR.     

Ageing in remote and cyclone‐prone communities: geography,policy, and disaster relief

Focusing on the experience of independent‐living older adults, this study explored how those in regional Australian coastal communities have coped with repeated natural disasters. Using an exploratory, mixed‐method, and phenomenological approach, an array of non‐probability snowballing techniques was used to seek participation from residents aged 65 years or more, and from emergency services officers, disaster managers, and community health care providers located in regional communities affected by Cyclone Larry (2006) and Cyclone Yasi (2011). The research found that post‐disaster political decisions have had a negative long‐term impact on local economies, causing outmigration by those seeking employment, and resulting in many elderly residents facing a future without family support. As government policies encourage ageing‐in‐place by providing subsidised in situ care, increasingly older adults are remaining in exposed vulnerable locations, reliant on authorities for their survival both day‐to‐day and during an emergency. Findings also uncovered inconsistent disaster management policies between neighbouring local government councils and an unrealistic reliance on in situ care organisations by disaster managers during preparation and recovery stages of a natural hazard. These results highlight the need for those charged with emergency management to reassess both the future natural hazard adaptive capacities of ageing regional communities and policy responses to such challenges.     

NRM Regions in Australia: the ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have Nots’

This paper identifies external factors affecting the capacity of Australia's now‐formalised 56 regional natural resource management (NRM) bodies and their community‐based Boards to meet planning and management responsibilities. It demonstrates that little is known about the basic capacity‐related characteristics of NRM regions, despite the lengthy and elaborate process of regionalism that Australia has embarked upon, with its associated and substantial devolution of responsibilities and resources. A suite of indicators is used to develop an ‘exploratory’ capacity typology of NRM regions. The ten regional ‘types’ identified are found to attract varying budget allocations under the Natural Heritage Trust Extension and National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality. There are indications that State and regional interests within and outside NRM can significantly influence the distribution of resources. An examination of resources allocated to capacity‐building activities shows significant differences between regions in the scale of resources allocated (0–96% of total budget). The paper argues the case for intervention to reduce the gap between ‘have’ and ‘have not’ regions, and for further exploration of disparities in the allocation of resources to capacity‐building activities. Clarification is needed of the extent to which capacity‐building activities adequately target regional NRM bodies and their Boards.     

Regional Planning in Queensland's Rangelands: Challenges and Prospects for Biodiversity Conservation

In Australia, the Commonwealth and State governments are increasingly devolving natural resource management (NRM) responsibilities to regional bodies. This move has led to the development of regional NRM plans. Native vegetation and biodiversity conservation, along with soil, pasture and water resources, are key components of the regional NRM plans in Queensland's extensive rangelands. This paper outlines and applies a set of criteria for evaluating the native vegetation and biodiversity content of accredited regional NRM plans for Queensland's rangelands. The evaluation showed considerable variation in the comprehensiveness of the information and knowledge base and management action targets among plans, including the poor articulation of impacts of excessive grazing pressure on biodiversity. The NRM plans lacked effective integration of natural resource, native vegetation and biodiversity conservation targets and actions. Several regions had too many biodiversity targets, many of which were poorly integrated. This is symptomatic of a limited understanding of rangelands as ecological systems and the lack of an integrated planning framework. We conclude regional NRM planning is not a ‘silver bullet’ for biodiversity conservation in the rangelands, but rather, it is the beginning of a long road to address complex, multi‐scale problems at a regional level.     

‘Aceh thanks the world’: The possibilities of the gift in a post‐disaster society (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

While it has often been argued that post‐disaster aid is humiliating for its beneficiaries, based on my ethnographic research in post‐tsunami Aceh, Indonesia, I argue that such aid may also come to mean the opposite. Rather than feeling humiliated by foreign aid, people in Aceh actively glossed post‐tsunami foreign assistance as ‘gifts’ for which they often expressed their gratitude. Building on Marcel Mauss's classic argument, as well as on more recent works on the nature of the gift, I argue that they did so because they felt that the gift of post‐disaster aid brought with it both a long wished‐for recognition of Aceh and the possibility of establishing long‐term relationships between Aceh and ‘the world’. Therefore, rather than something humiliating, the post‐disaster aid became a medium for imagining what James Ferguson has called a ‘place‐in‐the‐world’ for Aceh.     

Water,Wind, Wood,and Trees: Interactions,Spatial Variations,Temporal Dynamics,and their Potential Role in River Rehabilitation

Recent Australian research has quantified the role of large wood (wood of any origin and length with a diameter greater than 0.1 m) in dissipating stream energy, forming pool habitats by local bed scour, protecting river banks from erosion, and damming rivers with long rafts causing avulsions. Large wood in Australian streams is sourced by a range of processes from the nearby riparian zone which has usually been degraded by post‐European settlement vegetation clearing. Large wood loadings within the bankfull channel are dependent not only on the type and quality of the riparian plant community but also on bankfull specific stream power, channel width, and the processes of large wood delivery to the stream. While bank erosion and floodplain stripping by catastrophic floods are obvious and important delivery mechanisms, treefall and trunk and branch breakage by strong winds during tropical cyclones and severe storms are also significant in the tropics. Furthermore, wood decay and downstream transport produce temporally dynamic large wood distributions. The longevity of natural large wood structures in rivers, such as rafts, debris dams, and log steps, requires determination. River rehabilitation programs need to not only include the reintroduction of large wood, but also carefully plan the spatial distribution of that wood, the most appropriate type and range of large wood structures, and, most importantly, the revegetation of the riparian zone to ensure a natural long‐term source of large wood. Exotic species management is an essential part of river rehabilitation.     

“Whiteness” and natural resource management: let's talk about race baby,let's talk about sovereignty!

Issues of race and sovereignty are embedded in every cross‐cultural collaboration in natural resource management (NRM). This article aims to bring these issues to the forefront by incorporating the term whiteness. Whiteness enables a critique of the privileging of Western sovereignty and the so‐called objective and universal value of Western science. By reversing the gaze away from the colonised Other and onto systems descended from colonial authority and its inheritors, whiteness identifies how race privilege works. A critical whiteness lens provides an analytical and practical tool for decolonising NRM. We provide a case study of the South Australian Department of Environment and Water to consider how NRM professionals reproduce and deconstruct whiteness in nuanced ways, where (a) participants are defeated by Western sovereignty when whiteness is seen as normal or as the only way; (b) the privilege of Western sovereignty begins to be unsettled; and (c) the gaze is reversed. Thus,Western sovereignty is problematized, and solutions to persistent problems are found in collaboration. We argue that reversing the gaze is a process that opens spaces to co‐develop context specific solutions with Indigenous nations that decolonise cross‐cultural engagement in NRM and respect Indigenous sovereignty.     

Not Learning from the Past: Adaptive Governance Challenges for Australian Natural Resource Management

Australia's governance arrangements for natural resource management (NRM) have evolved considerably over the last 30 years. The impact of changes in governance on NRM planning and delivery requires assessment. We undertake a multi‐method programme evaluation using adaptive governance principles as an analytical frame and apply this to Queensland to assess the impacts of governance change on NRM planning and governance outcomes. Data to inform our analysis includes: (1) a systematic review of 16 audits/evaluations of Australian NRM over a 15‐year period; (2) a review of Queensland's first‐generation NRM plans; and (3) outputs from a Queensland workshop on NRM planning. NRM has progressed from a bottom‐up grassroots movement into a collaborative regional NRM model that has been centralised by the Australian government. We found that while some adaptive governance challenges have been addressed, others remained unresolved. Results show that collaboration and elements of multi‐level governance under the regional model were positive moves, but also that NRM arrangements contained structural deficiencies across multiple governance levels in relation to public involvement in decision‐making and knowledge production for problem responsiveness. These problems for adaptive governance have been exacerbated since 2008. We conclude that the adaptive governance framework for NRM needs urgent attention so that important environmental management problems can be addressed.     

Not About Land,Not Quite a Grab: Dispersed Dispossession in Rural Russia

In most literature in geography and agrarian studies, rural dispossession is neatly related to land rights or access, a trend that increased with debates about the recent wave of farmland investments worldwide. Drawing on long‐term fieldwork in rural Russia, this paper critiques that focus and the assumed nexus between rural dispossession and farmland, as is prevents an understanding of more dispersed stakes, modes and temporalities of dispossession. I introduce the concept of dispersed dispossession which advances our understanding of social and relational objects of dispossession beyond natural resources (such as sustaining institutions and infrastructures), and the tangled, complex, often slow and silent modes and temporalities of dispossession beyond spectacular events. I show how the concept sheds new light on current agrarian change in Russia, and how it contributes to debates on (rural) dispossession and “land grabs” more generally.     

Storm Tide Recurrence Intervals – A Statistical Approach Using Beach Ridge Plains in Northern Australia

The marine inundation generated by Tropical Cyclone Yasi, north Queensland, February 2011, flooded at least 130 beachfront homes and many commercial businesses, becoming the most substantial marine inundation impact in Australia's modern history. As a consequence, guidelines for building in storm tide impact areas have been developed and discussions are beginning on whether Australia needs a national standard for buildings impacted by these events. Central to this will be determining which areas of coastal land need to be subjected to the standard, and this will likely be based upon the magnitude of a particular return interval event. The veracity of the current method for determining these return intervals is difficult to determine as there has been no objective way to assess the accuracy of this approach. One such method is developed here – applying extreme value theory statistics to millennial scale sedimentary records of tropical cyclone marine inundations. The approach is applied to a 5000‐year‐long beach ridge record of tropical cyclone inundations near Tully Heads and the results suggest that the inundation generated by Tropical Cyclone Yasi here had a return interval of approximately 1000 years. This is a substantially lower figure than the approximately 5000‐year return interval suggested by the currently accepted approach. Irrespective of which method is more accurate, the marine inundation generated by Yasi was a very rare event and one that may become more common under a future altered climate.     

Resource Accessibility and Vulnerability in Andhra Pradesh: Caste and Non‐Caste Influences

Coastal Andhra Pradesh in southern India is prone to tropical cyclones. Access to key resources can reduce the vulnerability of the local population to both large‐scale disasters, such as cyclones, and to the sort of small‐scale crises that affect their everyday lives. This article uses primary fieldwork to present a resource accessibility vulnerability index for over 300 respondents. The index indicates that caste is the key factor in determining who has assets, who can access public facilities, who has political connections and who has supportive social networks. The ‘lower’ castes (which tend to be the poorest) are marginalized to the extent that they lack access to assets, public facilities and opportunities to improve their plight. However, the research also indicates that the poor and powerless lower castes are able to utilize informal social networks to bolster their resilience, typically by women's participation with CBOs and NGOs. Nevertheless it is doubtful whether this extra social capital counterbalances the overall results which show that — despite decades of counteractions by government — caste remains a dominant variable affecting the vulnerability of the people of coastal Andhra Pradesh to the hazards that they face.     

Data Integration Issues in Research Supporting Sustainable Natural Resource Management

Current decision‐making in natural resource use and management aims at delivering ecologically‐sustainable development to achieve conservation and economic benefits. The process of guiding natural resource use requires the integration of social, economic and biophysical information on which to base management decisions. This paper discusses the integration of socio‐economic information for natural resource management (NRM) planning and decision‐making in the Australian context. A comprehensive resource of socio‐economic data is the Census, which is undertaken every five years by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) for the whole of Australia. Unfortunately there are qualitative and quantitative issues stemming from the use of ABS census data maps for NRM decision‐making, as they are at a different scale to and the boundaries do not coincide with biophysical information. These issues include the variable shape of collection districts, the use of enumerated data for population‐based statistics, the large size of collection districts in low populated areas, and the averaging of socio‐economic information over the collection districts. Examples highlight these issues and show a way forwards in improving data integration, which includes simple spatial overlay methods and regression modelling.     

DO FLOODS HAVE PERMANENT EFFECTS? EVIDENCE FROM THE NETHERLANDS

This study investigates the short‐ and long‐run impact on population dynamics of the major flood in the Netherlands in 1953. A dynamic difference‐in‐differences analysis reveals that the flood had an immediate negative impact on population growth, but limited long‐term effects. In contrast, the resulting flood protection program (Deltaworks), had a persisting positive effect on population growth. As a result, there has been an increase in population in flood‐prone areas. Our results suggest a moral hazard effect of flood mitigation leading to more people locating in flood‐prone areas, increasing potential disaster costs.     

Queering disasters: on the need to account for LGBTI experiences in natural disaster contexts

This article seeks a queering of research and policy in relation to natural disasters, their human impacts, management and response. The human impacts of natural disasters vary across different social groups. We contend that one group largely absent from scholarly and policy agendas is sexual and gender minorities, or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual and intersex (LGBTI) populations. To demonstrate that these minorities have particular experiences that need to be addressed, we critically review five case studies that comprise the limited scholarly and policy research on LGBTI populations in disasters to date. Building on this, we offer some specific ways forward for queer disaster research that accounts for the vulnerabilities, needs and resilient capacities of LGBTI populations. In doing so, we recognise and urge researchers, policy-makers and aid agencies to acknowledge that LGBTI populations are not homogeneous and have different needs wrought by intersections of socio-economic resources, gender, race/ethnicity, age and regional or national location.     

State Making and the Politics of the Frontier in Central Benin

Kopytoff's model of the African frontier has opened room for renewed approaches to settlement history, politics, ethnicity and cultural reproduction in pre‐colonial Africa. This interpretative framework applies well to central Benin (Ouessè). Over the long term, mobility has been a structural feature of the regional social history, from pre‐colonial times onwards. Movements of people, resources, norms and values have been crucial in the production and reproduction of the social and political order. The colonial intrusion and its post‐colonial avatars gave way to renewed relations between mobility and locality, in particular in the form of a complex articulation between control over labour force, access to land and natural resources, and out‐ and in‐migrations. This article argues that the political frontier metaphor provides a useful heuristic device to capture the logic of state making, as the changing outcome of organizing practices taking place inside and outside state and non‐state organizations and arenas. Governmentality in post‐colonial central Benin thus results from the complex interplay of mobility, control over resources and state‐led forms of ‘villagization’.     

四川平武白马生态脆弱地区经济模式变迁评析

历史上白马地区的经济发展经历了从原始的农牧业到消耗型的伐木经济,再到今天的民俗生态旅游和生态农牧经济的变迁。半个多世纪白马人的经济发展告诉我们,凡是以高度消耗自然资源为代价的经济活动都难以持续。白马地区的经济变迁还显示,生态脆弱地区理想的经济结构应当是适应环境特点的多元复合结构,而不能是一条腿走路的单一结构;同时,生态脆弱地区发展生态经济还应当根据当地的自然地理条件,充分发挥当地人民的创造性,走内源发展之路,避免盲目移植外来的经济模式。     

Does time heal all wounds? Restoring place attachment in Halifax's Point Pleasant Park after Hurricane Juan

On September 29, 2003, Hurricane Juan profoundly altered Halifax's Point Pleasant Park, resulting in feelings of solastalgia (the distress caused by perceived negative changes to a beloved place) as park users mourned the loss of a place that held great significance for the city. Starting in 2008, over 100,000 trees have been planted in order to restore the original Acadian mixed forest to this landscape. Drawing on scholarly literature focused on place attachment and disaster recovery, this paper utilizes interviews (n = 11) and online surveys (n = 79) to determine whether long‐term park users have re‐established positive place attachments in conjunction with the park's restoration. Our results indicate that participants have largely overcome their solastalgic outlook and restored meaningful place attachments to the park. Unexpectedly, our results also suggest that long‐term participants have current place attachments that appear stronger than the place attachments expressed by participating short‐term users, who never experienced the traumatic impact of Hurricane Juan on Point Pleasant Park.     

Fluvial Sediment Supply to the North-East Queensland Coast,Australia

Rivers play a dominant role in supplying sediment to the mainly siliceous sandy north-east Queensland coast. The interaction of geology and the seasonally wet tropical climate in the coastal catchments results under natural conditions in a high, but seasonally variable river discharge and sediment yield. These are examined in the sample catchments of the Barron, Mulgrave-Russell and Burdekin Rivers Peak sediment delivery occurs with major river floods produced by tropical cyclones. The initial erosive impact of these floods and subsequent constructional effects are examined along the Burdekin and Barron delta coasts. Human interference in the coastal catchments has caused increased sediment yield especially with extensive clearance of tropical rainforest and with some agricultural practices; but when dams and weirs trap sediment and sand is extracted from river beds a decrease occurs.     

Environmentalists,Rubber Tappers and Empowerment: The Politics and Economics of Extractive Reserves

Extractive reserves are important initiatives in tropical forest zones which seek to integrate conservation of natural resources with development and human welfare objectives. Increasingly in such initiatives empowerment of local communities is seen as both a means of achieving this integration and as an end in itself. This article presents a theoretically informed analysis of the interactions between rubber tappers and environmental organizations in the establishment and implementation of extractive reserves in Rond? nia, Brazil. It distinguishes two dimensions of empowerment — political and economic — and examines how the alliances between organizations have impacted differentially on the two dimensions. The analysis suggests that these alliances have so far been more successful in enabling political rather than economic empowerment. Advances in political empowerment are shown, in the short‐term at least, not to have resulted in improvements in livelihood conditions of poor forest dwellers.     

Palestinian Water: Resources,Use, Conservation,Climate Change,and Land Use

This article addresses the future of freshwater resources in the Palestinian West Bank through a discussion of contemporary issues that each plays a vital role in determining the long‐term sustainability of freshwater reserves, such as water resource availability, trans‐boundary water issues, water reuse and conservation, changes in land use, and the potential impact of climate change on long‐term water management. Climate change and changing land use patterns are already altering this region's water resources. Future predictions regarding the long‐term effects of these changes are complex and therefore inherently uncertain. However, the consensus among most studies on this subject indicates that currently water‐poor regions such as the Middle East will experience even greater water stress in the future. Nearly all of the freshwater consumed in the West Bank is obtained from local groundwater supplies that are suffering overdraft as well as decreasing water quality. Climate change will exacerbate water stress by increasing overall temperatures, decreasing and fluctuating precipitation, and reducing overall aquifer replenishment. Expanding urbanization will continue to strain freshwater supplies by negatively impacting the quality and quantity of available freshwater. Water management in the West Bank is further complicated by total Israeli control over water resources, which often causes water delivery to Palestinians in this region to be marginalized. This article finds that Palestinian and Israeli water managers must plan for future water crises, which will likely be a result of the combined effects of increasing urbanization and climate change coupled with exponential population growth.