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The role played by contract research organizations (CROs) in the last decades has been almost completely neglected by the economic and managerial literature, which at most presents an outdated and misleading portrait, of firms performing routine clinical tasks. This study aims at filling this knowledge gap, by describing the evolution of the CRO segment of the biopharma industry in the last two decades, discussing the foundations of CROs' comparative advantage and underlining the consequences of their growth for the effective functioning of the whole industry. Importantly, this study argues that the increased role of CROs in performing fundamental phases of R & D has made the anatomy of the biopharma system more functional: in fact even if the turbulence and mortality of IPbased biotech firms is extremely high, if they rely to a great extent on CROs, the experience acquired to carry out their projects -which mostly fail -does not get lost but cumulatively enhances CROs' capabilities.
<p>Anthropogenic activities and climate change exert significant pressures on the quality and availability of water resources in karst environments, which supply drinking water to about 9.2% of the world's population. Increasing temperatures and changes in precipitation regimes will strongly impact water recharge processes. Understanding the karst hydrodynamic behaviour in the present context of climate change constitutes a major challenge for a sustainable management of karst groundwater. This study focuses on the Mediterranean area, where up to 90% of the drinking water supply depends on carbonate aquifers. The spring discharge and/or water level of six karst systems in the Mediterranean area (France, Italy, Lebanon, Slovenia, Spain and Tunisia) are simulated using precipitation-discharge reservoir modelling tools. The studied karst systems are well known and have different characteristics in terms of climatic conditions, hydrogeological properties and available data. Using different model structures, the hydrological models are first calibrated and validated over a historical period and then used to simulate spring discharge time series under various climate projections (up to 2100). To account for uncertainties in climate projection, 12 coupled GCM/RCM climate models are considered with two emission scenarios (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5) proposed in the framework of the CMIP5 initiative. The analysis of the forecasted spring discharge and water level time series focuses on (i) the long-term trends in the hydrological functioning of karst systems, (ii) the effects of climate change on spring discharges (intensity and duration of extreme events), and (iii) the study of uncertainties related to the exceedance of the known functioning ranges of the systems. Further discussion is also dedicated to model uncertainties in relation to model parameters and structure, climate models, and the estimation of potential evapotranspiration in future climate. This research has been conducted within the KARMA (Karst Aquifer Resources availability and quality in the Mediterranean Area) project into the PRIMA (Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area) EU program.</p>
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