Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
1,144
result(s) for
"Urban, Michael A."
Sort by:
The return of the neighborhood as an urban strategy
\"In this new volume, Michael A. Pagano curates essays focusing on the neighborhood's role in urban policy solutions. The papers emerged from dynamic discussions among policymakers, researchers, public intellectuals, and citizens at the 2014 UIC Urban Forum. As the writers show, the greater the city, the more important its neighborhoods and their distinctions. The topics focus on sustainable capital and societal investments in people and firms at the neighborhood level. Proposed solutions cover a range of possibilities for enhancing the quality of life for individuals, households, and neighborhoods. These include everything from microenterprises to factories; from social spaces for collective and social action to private facilities; affordable housing and safety to gated communities; and from neighborhood public education to cooperative, charter, and private schools.\"--Back cover.
Book
Improving the taxonomy of fossil pollen using convolutional neural networks and superresolution microscopy
Taxonomic resolution is a major challenge in palynology, largely limiting the ecological and evolutionary interpretations possible with deep-time fossil pollen data. We present an approach for fossil pollen analysis that uses optical superresolution microscopy and machine learning to create a quantitative and higher throughput workflow for producing palynological identifications and hypotheses of biological affinity. We developed three convolutional neural network (CNN) classification models: maximum projection (MPM), multislice (MSM), and fused (FM). We trained the models on the pollen of 16 genera of the legume tribe Amherstieae, and then used these models to constrain the biological classifications of 48 fossil Striatopollis specimens from the Paleocene, Eocene, and Miocene of western Africa and northern South America. All models achieved average accuracies of 83 to 90% in the classification of the extant genera, and the majority of fossil identifications (86%) showed consensus among at least two of the three models. Our fossil identifications support the paleobiogeographic hypothesis that Amherstieae originated in Paleocene Africa and dispersed to South America during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (56 Ma). They also raise the possibility that at least three Amherstieae genera (Crudia, Berlinia, and Anthonotha) may have diverged earlier in the Cenozoic than predicted by molecular phylogenies.
Journal Article
Variability of tundra fire regimes in Arctic Alaska: millennial-scale patterns and ecological implications
Tundra fires have important ecological impacts on vegetation, wildlife, permafrost, and carbon cycling, but the pattern and controls of historic tundra fire regimes are poorly understood. We use sediment records from four lakes to develop a 2000-yr fire and vegetation history in a highly flammable tundra region and compare this history with previously published fire records to examine spatial and temporal variability of tundra burning across Arctic Alaska. The four sites span a modern climatic gradient in the Noatak National Preserve, from warmer, drier down-valley locations to cooler, generally moister up-valley locations. Modern vegetation varies from herb- to shrub-dominated tundra from down- to up-valley sites, and pollen data suggest that this spatial pattern in vegetation persisted over the past two millennia. Peaks in macroscopic charcoal accumulation provide estimates of fire-event return intervals (FRIs), which did not vary significantly at millennial time scales but did vary across space. Down-valley sites burned relatively frequently over the past two millennia, with median FRIs of 150 years (95%% CI 101-150) and FRI distributions statistically similar to those from ancient shrub tundra and modern boreal forest. At up-valley sites FRIs were significantly longer than those at down-valley sites, with a median FRI of 218 years (95%% CI 128-285). These differences likely reflect the cooler growing-season temperatures and lower evaporative demand at up-valley sites, but local-scale variability in vegetation may have also shaped tundra fire regimes. Comparisons with other long-term fire records in Alaska reveal that the tundra biome can sustain a wide range of burning, with individual FRIs from as low as 30 years to more than 5000 years. These records together indicate that frequent tundra burning has occurred under a range of climatic and vegetation scenarios. The variety of tundra fire histories within Alaska suggests that the ecological impacts of tundra burning likewise vary widely, with important implications for wildlife-habitat maintenance and for the responses of tundra biophysical and biogeochemical processes to climatic change.
Journal Article
Alternative ESG Ratings: How Technological Innovation Is Reshaping Sustainable Investment
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) rating agencies have been instrumental in mainstreaming sustainability in the investment industry. Traditionally, they have relied on company disclosure and human analysis to produce their ratings. More recently however, technological innovation in data scraping and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have undercut the traditional approach. Tech-driven Alternative ESG ratings are becoming increasingly influential yet remain critically underexplored in sustainable finance scholarship. Grounded within financial geography and using mixed methods, this paper fills this gap by comparing a set of Traditional ratings, sourced from MSCI ESG, with an Alternative AI-based set of ESG ratings sourced from Truvalue Labs. Our results expand upon recent research on ESG ratings by shedding new light on low commensurability between Traditional and Alternative ESG ratings. Specifically, we show that differences in ratings are driven by four main factors: differences in ESG theorisation based on key issue selection, differences in data sources analysed, differences in weighting structures for rating aggregation, and finally differences in controversy analysis. Our findings are contextualised using participatory observations collected during fieldwork at a leading asset manager in the City of London. Overall, we show that the advantages of Alternative ESG ratings include higher levels of standardisation, a transparent ‘outside-in’ perspective on ratings, a more democratic aggregation process, and rigorous real-time analytics. We argue that these characteristics reflect a geographic reconfiguration of ESG rating construction, expanding from financial agglomerations to technological and digital spaces of innovation. While Alternative ESG ratings make major promises on how technology can reform sustainable investing, we recognise that risks remain.
Journal Article
Dirty Banking: Probing the Gap in Sustainable Finance
In 2016, the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance estimated the market for sustainable investments to have reached 22.89 trillion USD of assets under management. While financial institutions have embraced the idea of sustainable finance as a business opportunity, they have arguably done little, but to piggy-back on investors’ demand. Today, it is not unusual for a single firm to retail fossil free investment funds and concomitantly offer commercial loans towards fracking, coal, and Arctic drilling. This paradox is underpinned by a major gap in the way sustainability has permeated primary and secondary markets which, we argue, calls for a serious rethinking of the sustainability transition in finance. This article proposes two contributions in this direction. First, we develop an original conceptualisation of finance as a socio-technical system to discuss the dynamics that both hinder and promote a transition from mainstream to sustainable finance. Second, we propose to study how investment banks integrate sustainability in their underwriting services. To do so, we filter through close to half a million of debt and equity underwriting deals (2005–2017) using the Government Pension Fund Global of Norway’s list of 153 excluded companies. Our results suggest that investment banks do not shy away from underwriting companies that have been flagged for major environmental, social, and governance misconduct, neither do they restrain from underwriting companies providing contentious products, such as tobacco, coal, and nuclear weapons. Moving forward, we suggest ways to address this problem and call for further research on the responsibility and agency of finance and advanced business services firms in sustainability transitions.
Journal Article
Water Resource Variability and Climate Change
A significant challenge posed by changing climates is how water cycling and surficial and subsurface water availability will be affected at global and regional scales. Such alterations are critical as they often lead to increased vulnerability in ecosystems and human society. Understanding specifically how climate change affects water resource variability in different locations is of critical importance to sustainable development in different parts of the world. The papers included in this special issue focus on three broad perspectives associated with water resource variability and climate change. Six papers employ remote sensing, meteorological station-based observational data, and tree-ring records to empirically determine how water resources have been changing over historical time periods. Eight of the contributions focus on modeling approaches to determine how known processes are likely to manifest themselves as climate shifts over time. Two others focus on human perceptions and adaptation strategies in the midst of unstable or unsettled water availability. The findings and methods presented in this collection of papers provide important contributions to the increased study and awareness of climate change on water resources.
Journal Article
Placing the Production of Investment Returns: An Economic Geography of Asset Management in Public Pension Plans
Public pension funds are engulfed in a severe funding crisis. At stake is the financial stability of state and local governments as well as the welfare of over thirty million public-sector employees. Although cutting back on external asset management expenses could help save billions in taxpayers' money and improve public pension funding, recent research suggests that public pensions remain predominantly outsourced and keep paying high fees to private-sector asset managers. This article examines why public pension funds outsource their asset management functions. It relies on mixed methods, juxtaposing positivist and reflexive approaches. The study relies on an econometric analysis of a unique panel data set of twenty-one state pension plans. The model tests specific relationships between levels of outsourcing and the organizational, economic, and political context in which these plans are embedded. The results indicate that outsourcing is linked to plans' (1) investment return targets, (2) allocation to nondomestic and private market investments, (3) local financial sector vibrancy, and (4) proximity to a leading financial center. These quantitative results are enriched with insights from thirty-seven semistructured interviews with investment professionals employed by a top-performing state pension plan. The interviews help shed further light on how distance, politics, and governance affect pension plans' outsourcing strategies. This article contributes new insights on context to economic geographic literature on pension decision-making as well as new perspectives to financial geography literature on the role of place and distance in institutional asset management.
Journal Article
Perceptions of Wood in Rivers and Challenges for Stream Restoration in the United States
This article reports a study of the public perception of large wood in rivers and streams in the United States. Large wood is an element of freshwater aquatic ecosystems that has attracted much scientific interest in recent years because of its value in biological and geomorphological processes. At the heart of the issue is the nature of the relationship between scientific recognition of the ecological and geomorphological benefits of wood in rivers, management practices utilizing wood for river remediation progress, and public perceptions of in-channel wood. Surveys of students’ perceptions of riverscapes with and without large wood in the states of Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Oregon, and Texas suggest that many individuals in the United States adhere to traditionally negative views of wood. Except for students in Oregon, most respondents considered photographs of riverscapes with wood to be less aesthetically pleasing and needing more improvement than rivers without wood. Analysis of reasons given for improvement needs suggest that Oregon students are concerned with improving channels without wood for fauna habitat, whereas respondents elsewhere focused on the need for cleaning wood-rich channels for flood risk management. These results underscore the importance of public education to increase awareness of the geomorphological and ecological significance of wood in stream systems. This awareness should foster more positive attitudes toward wood. An integrated program of research, education, and policy is advocated to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and public perception for effective management and restoration of river systems with wood.
Journal Article
Six Key Influences on the Efficiency of Insourcing in State and Local Plans
State and local pensions can take care of the investment function in-house, or they can outsource part or all of it. Which strategy is the more desirable depends on six key influences: the behavior of cash flows, the significance of economies of scale, asset allocation, staff compensation, a plan's geographic location, and the scope of fiduciary duty and oversight. These influences have been identified because of their role in the effective management of internal assets and are discussed, taking account of how they vary across institutions. This article does not propose a set of best practices but instead sets out a number of analytical building blocks. It offers a way to think comprehensively about insourcing in institutions that are embedded in different local contexts. In particular, the article gives attention to the influence of local politics and regulation, governance, and geography.
Journal Article
A late-Quaternary perspective on atmospheric pCO2, climate, and fire as drivers of C4-grass abundance
Various environmental factors, including atmospheric CO
2
(
p
CO
2
), regional climate, and fire, have been invoked as primary drivers of long-term variation in C
4
grass abundance. Evaluating these hypotheses has been difficult because available paleorecords often lack information on past C
4
grass abundance or potential environmental drivers. We analyzed carbon isotope ratios (δ
13
C) of individual grains of grass pollen in the sediments of two East African lakes to infer changes in the relative abundance of C
3
vs. C
4
grasses during the past 25 000 years. Results were compared with concurrent changes in
p
CO
2
, temperature, moisture balance, and fire activity. Our grass-pollen δ
13
C analysis reveals a dynamic history of grass-dominated vegetation in equatorial East Africa: C
4
grasses have not consistently dominated lowland areas, and high-elevation grasses have not always been predominantly C
3.
On millennial timescales, C
4
grass abundance does not correlate with charcoal influx at either site, suggesting that fire was not a major proximate control of the competitive balance between C
3
and C
4
grasses. Above the present-day treeline on Mt. Kenya, C
4
grass abundance declined from an average of ~90% during the glacial period to less than ~60% throughout the Holocene, coincident with increases in
p
CO
2
and temperature, and shifts in moisture balance. In the lowland savanna southeast of Mt. Kilimanjaro, C
4
grass abundance showed no such directional trend, but fluctuated markedly in association with variation in rainfall amount and seasonal-drought severity. These results underscore spatiotemporal variability in the relative influence of
p
CO
2
and climate on the interplay of C
3
and C
4
grasses and shed light on an emerging conceptual model regarding the expansion of C
4
-dominated grasslands in Earth's history. They also suggest that future changes in the C
3
/C
4
composition of grass-dominated ecosystems will likely exhibit striking spatiotemporal variability as a result of varying combinations of environmental controls.
Journal Article