Limits to Climate Change Adaptation: Case Study of the Australian Alps

Climate change is occurring and not being mitigated, motivating adaptation but adaptation strategies can have biophysical, economic, technological, and social limits. We review publicly available documents to assess how successful current and proposed adaptation strategies may be for the Australian Alps, including likely limits and potential collaborations and conflicts among stakeholders. Conservation managers, the tourism industry, and local communities have implemented or are proposing a range of adaptation strategies in the region. Some stakeholder strategies complement each other (e.g. invasive species control, fire management), while others are potential sources of conflict (water and electricity for snowmaking, year‐round tourism). Economic costs and biophysical constraints are the most important limits to these adaptation strategies. These types of limits and conflicts between different stakeholders on adaptation strategies are likely to occur in other regions and demonstrate that adaptation may only provide partial and short term solutions to the challenges of climate change.     

Too little,too much: Cultural feminist geographies

This paper traces some of the contours of recent critiques of cultural geography and reflects upon the implications they have for the continuing vitality of a feminist geography concerned with the cultural. The paper seeks to work away from this current disenchantment suggesting that in the field of feminist geography there are explicit intellectual and political imperatives that keep central the field of concerns associated with cultural geographical perspectives. Along the way we examine emergent scholarship on the governance of gender through culture concepts, the idea of gender as a form of foundational ordering grammar, the implications of non-representational claims for feminist scholarship, and the nature of performativity. We conclude by encouraging feminist cultural geography to chart the emergent geographies of relational natures and material cultures that reveal gender as both embodied and discursive, given and enacted.     

EUROCODE 8 DESIGN RESPONSE SPECTRA EVALUATION USING THE K-NET JAPANESE DATABASE

The Eurocode 8 (EC8) currently proposes two standard shapes for the design response spectra. Type 1 spectra are enriched in long period and are suggested for high seismicity regions. Conversely, Type 2 spectra are proposed for low to moderate seismicity areas (like France), and exhibit both a larger amplification at short period, and a much smaller long period contents, with respect to Type 1 spectra. These propositions, however, were constrained using few events mostly recorded on analogical instruments. In the present study, we use the Japanese high quality digital K-net array in order to evaluate the proposed ECS response spectra. Furthermore, all K-net stations have geotechnical characterisation. We first constructed a database of shallow events, depth less than 25 km, to avoid subduction related records. The database spans six years of seismicity from 1996 until 2003. Thus, 591 events were selected with moment magnitude between 4 and 7.3, recorded at 691 stations, giving a total of 6812 two horizontal components accelerograms. Using these records, we computed spectral ground-motion prediction equations and we used them to review the shape of the proposed EC8 spectra. In particular, we studied the plateau-PGA ratio level, the period interval where this plateau is constant, and site amplification effects. The results show surprisingly that the Type 2 rock better envelope the Japanese data. Another interesting observation is that the K-net data corresponding to all soil classes are rich in short periods around 0.1 s. This characteristic has not been observed in other worldwide databases. Normalised empirical predictions show a widening of the plateau as the soil conditions degrade. This suggests that the Type 2 EC8 spectra do not cover enough the long periods for EC3-soil classes C, D and E. Finally, the computed ground-motion prediction equations show that the peak ground acceleration (PGA) is nearly invariant to the soil conditions. Soil effects are mainly seen in the shape and plateau level.     

Origins of the norm against chemical weapons

The use of chemical weapons in Syria in August 2013 led to calls for a tough international response in order to uphold the norm against what is often portrayed as a particularly odious form of warfare. The condemnation of poison weapons has a long history and this article examines the origins of the international norm against their use. It focuses particularly on the proceedings of the first Hague Peace Conference and suggests that this represented the emergence of an important distinction between the customary norm against poison and poisoned arms, and a newly codified norm against the use of asphyxiating gas projectiles, which was primarily an attempt to limit the potential of new weapons technologies. However, psychological responses to the wide‐scale use of chemical weapons in the First World War underscored a deep revulsion to this form of warfare and blurred the distinction between gas projectiles and poison. While the Hague Conventions ultimately failed to avert the use of chemical weapons, the formation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol reaffirmed the norm against the use of poison in war and represented both a legal and moral condemnation of chemical and biological weapons that continues to be enshrined in international law today.     

Wildlife Visual Imagery: Do Pictures Used to Promote Destinations Online Match On‐site Species Visibility at Two Geographic Destinations?

Diverse photographic images (pictures) are used to promote wildlife tours on the Internet. But what pictures are used and are they likely to accurately reflect what visitors might see, and hence create realistic expectations for tourists? The relative importance of wildlife and the prevalence of iconic species were assessed for pictures on the Internet used by six English tour companies offering wildlife tours to very different destinations: Southern Africa and Australia. These were then compared with the likely visibility of wildlife at the destination. The content of 926 Southern African pictures representing 1316 different subjects, and 228 pictures representing 307 different subjects from Australia were classified into four themes (wildlife, landscapes/vegetation, activities, accommodation). Wildlife, particularly large mammals, was more frequently used for Southern African tours (43%) whereas pictures for Australian tours were often of landscapes (45%). Large, social mammals active during the day and hence highly visible (e.g. elephant, n= 64) were often used, while iconic, but cryptic, species such as koalas (n= 7), Tasmanian devil (n= 1), leopards (n= 12), and black rhinos (n= 2) were seldom used. Therefore, online pictures used for wildlife tours appear to merge well with what tourists are likely to see at the destination, but appear to diverge somewhat from established destination images for these two regions, particularly Australia.     

POTS AND POTTERS IN ATHENS AND CORINTH: A REVIEW

Summary. In this article, we draw upon a wide range of archaeological, technical and iconographical evidence in order to examine the organisation and social role of fine pottery production in two contrasting Archaic and Classical poleis, Athens and Corinth. We examine developments in the relationship between the organisation of production, changes in decorative style and the degree of complexity of the social and political organisation of the two producer societies during a period of state formation. We also consider variation in the behavioural patterns surrounding ceramic use, and the role of production within the overall economy (and especially its relationship to subsistence activity). Such a study of comparative ceramic ecology not only offers a distinctive source of information about the internal ordering of producer societies, but also addresses the issue of the generation of variability in the ceramic record, an issue which has hitherto received little attention from Classical archaeologists, but which is central to a full understanding of ceramic trade and exchange.