International audienceThis article proposes an original analysis of the international debate on climate change through the use of digital methods. Its originality is twofold. First, it examines a corpus of reports covering 18 years of international climate negotiations, a dataset never explored before through digital techniques. This corpus is particularly interesting because it provides the most consistent and detailed reporting of the negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Second, in this paper we test an original approach to text analysis that combines automatic extractions and manual selection of the key issue-terms. Through this mixed approach, we tried to obtain relevant findings without imposing them on our corpus. The originality of our corpus and of our approach encouraged us to question some of the habits of digital research and confront three common misunderstandings about digital methods that we discuss in the first part of the article (section ‘Three misunderstandings on digital methods in social sciences’). In addition to reflecting on methodology, however, we also wanted to offer some substantial contribution to the understanding of UN-framed climate diplomacy. In the second part of the article (section ‘Three maps on climate negotiations’) we will therefore introduce some of the preliminary results of our analysis. By discussing three visualizations, we will analyze the thematic articulation of the climatic negotiations, the rise and fall of these themes over time and the visibility of different countries in the debate
As the physical impacts of the Anthropocene begin to make themselves felt around the globe, maintaining current levels of economic prosperity, in many communities, will consume an increasing portion of public finances. This is because existing investments in property and capital will require new forms of protection if they are to continue generating stable streams of public revenue. Since Anthropocene impacts are unevenly distributed, some territories will be under more pressure than others to shift limited public spending to cope with growing levels of exposure. The sinking of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands provides a clear example of this trend of accelerating local vulnerability due to human-induced environmental change. With the bulk of state revenue tied to activities concentrated along Louisiana’s coasts, the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority has launched an ambitious plan of government-backed expenditures that seek to defend the economic viability of these zones. Yet, many actions aimed at preventing immediate loss also work to secure incumbent extractive industries, such as offshore oil and gas drilling, which themselves contribute to the very vulnerabilities requiring state intervention in the first place. This paper, borrowing from the environmental sociology of Allan Schnaiberg, considers the social consequences of this dynamic, dubbed the “treadmill of protection.”
This presentation summarises the key points of a project carried out during 2008 by EA Technology Limited (EATL) for Scottish and Southern Energy Power Distribution (SSEPD). The project looked at the potential for arc suppression coils (ASC's) and residual current compensation (RCC) devices to improve network performance by reducing the number of customer interruptions (Cl's) and customer minutes lost (CML's).In the UK all DNO's are incentivized, by the industry regulator Ofgem, to reduce Cl's and CML's, hence all companies are keen to identify initiatives that could improve network performance. SSEPD has chosen to look afresh at the potential benefits that could be delivered by fitting ASC's and how the safety concerns that have traditionally been associated with ASC's can be mitigated by employing RCC devices alongside the ASC's. The project included:• An assessment of the safety implications of using ASC technology, including an example risk assessment. • Researching the current use of ASC technology in the UK and other European countries, looking to understand the benefits delivered and the pitfalls that need to be managed. • A review of the ASCs and associated devices currently on the market. • Analysing the performance incentive in the UK with the intention of identifying the optimum level of CI and CML for the SSEPD. • An assessment of the benefits that could be derived and the costs that would be incurred if ASC technology were to be deployed to the top ten worst performing substations in SSEPD's two distribution areas.
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