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This research aims to investigate the technical capability and performance of local builders on residential building construction sites in Gaindakot Municipality, Nepal. The construction industry plays a vital role in the growth of economies worldwide. The quality of construction heavily depends on the technical capacity and performance of builders involved in residential projects. This study aims to assess local builders’ technical competence and performance operating on residential building construction sites. By examining the capabilities of local builders, this research contributes to enhancing the overall quality and efficiency of residential construction projects. The research employs a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative data collection techniques. A comprehensive survey is administered to local builders to evaluate their technical knowledge, skill sets, and utilisation of modern construction techniques. Concurrently, on-site observations and interviews are conducted to gain insights into the actual performance of builders during different construction phases. The findings of this study shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of local builders in residential construction. The on-site observations and interviews offer qualitative insights into the practical application of skills, compliance with safety protocols, and adherence to project timelines. The outcomes of this research are intended to guide policymakers, industry stakeholders, and training institutions in formulating strategies to enhance the technical capacity of local builders. Bridging the identified gaps can improve construction quality, reduce project delays, and increase customer satisfaction. Additionally, the study emphasizes the need for ongoing professional development programs to keep builders updated with the latest construction techniques and standards.

Urban aquatic social-ecological systems (SESs) comprise socio-technical elements, the built environment and its management, and natural elements (water bodies) that provide ecosystem services. Changed hydrology, poor stormwater quality, and the modification of water bodies associated with urban development brings challenges for maintaining ecosystem services provision in an urban aquatic SES. Water sensitive urban design (WSUD) has emerged as a form of development that aims to better support the provision of ecosystem services. Resilience concepts provide a basis for discriminating between WSUD and conventional development approaches. Building on an existing decision support system, a new, preliminary method for assessing resilience based on the combination of the socio-technical capacity (STC) and natural capacity (NC) of urban aquatic SESs has been developed. The STC score reflects a multicriteria assessment of the characteristics of stormwater infrastructure and management. The NC score reflects an assessment of the state and trajectory of biophysical attributes of the system associated with the provision of ecosystem services. By modeling a series of future urban development scenarios in Auckland, New Zealand, the method has been shown to discriminate between scenario outcomes within constraints associated with the biophysical and built characteristics modeled. Results are consistent with key concepts of resilience theory: outcomes are grouped in regimes and exhibit hysteresis, with the ability of WSUD to improve the state of the system strongly influenced by the presence of legacy effects. The method provides a source of additional, valuable information that complements other indicators by providing a snapshot of the interaction of catchment management effort and outcomes and indicating the likely future state of the SES. Recognizing that the method is limited to providing a relative assessment of resilience and adopts certain simplistic assumptions, further research aims to investigate assessment methods that consider other, fundamental biophysical and social properties of urban aquatic SESs.

Limited irrigation adoption hinders agricultural production for Zambia's smallholder farmers, despite its potential to mitigate the impact of erratic rainfall patterns. This scoping review investigates the irrigation equipment supply landscape in Zambia, focusing on its capacity to serve smallholders. Using the PRISMA framework, the review explores the range of available irrigation technologies, the technical knowledge of suppliers, and the challenges and opportunities surrounding equipment supply. The review identifies affordability of irrigation equipment, uneven distribution of technical support and spare parts, and limited access to credit and market opportunities as key challenges hindering smallholder farmers’ irrigation adoption. However, opportunities exist through geographic targeting, collaboration with development initiatives and supermarkets, and improved access to financing. By addressing these challenges and capitalizing on opportunities, stakeholders can empower smallholder farmers to adopt irrigation technologies and achieve increased production.

As a result of its liberalization, the European gas market is organized as an entry-exit system in order to decouple the trading and transport of natural gas. Roughly summarized, the gas market organization consists of four subsequent stages. First, the transmission system operator (TSO) is obliged to allocate so-called maximal technical capacities for the nodes of the network. Second, the TSO and the gas traders sign mid- to long-term capacity-right contracts, where the capacity is bounded above by the allocated technical capacities. These contracts are called bookings. Third, on a day-ahead basis, gas traders can nominate the amount of gas that they inject or withdraw from the network at entry and exit nodes, where the nominated amount is bounded above by the respective booking. Fourth and finally, the TSO has to operate the network such that the nominated amounts of gas can be transported. By signing the booking contract, the TSO guarantees that all possibly resulting nominations can indeed be transported. Consequently, maximal technical capacities have to satisfy that all nominations that comply with these technical capacities can be transported through the network. This leads to a highly challenging mathematical optimization problem. We consider the specific instantiations of this problem in which we assume capacitated linear as well as potential-based flow models. In this contribution, we formally introduce the problem of Computing Technical Capacities (CTC) and prove that it is NP-complete on trees and NP-hard in general. To this end, we first reduce the Subset Sum problem to CTC for the case of capacitated linear flows in trees. Afterward, we extend this result to CTC with potential-based flows and show that this problem is also NP-complete on trees by reducing it to the case of capacitated linear flow. Since the hardness results are obtained for the easiest case, i.e., on tree-shaped networks with capacitated linear as well as potential-based flows, this implies the hardness of CTC for more general graph classes.

Under the wave of digitalization, environmental design education is facing the dilemma that traditional teaching is out of line with industry demand. This study focused on the influence of digital media technology on environmental design education and used mixed research methods to conduct a two-year follow-up study on eight universities. The results show that digital media technology integration teaching can significantly improve students' abilities in spatial cognition, technology integration, and innovative thinking. At the same time, it is found that the development of students' technical ability has three tracks—rapid growth, steady development, and lagging adaptation. In addition, the perceived usefulness has the greatest influence on the behavioral intention of technology adoption, and the quality of teachers' guidance plays an important role in regulating. The research emphasizes that “tool assistance” and “independent innovation” should be balanced, which provides theoretical and practical basis for promoting the digital transformation of environmental design education.

Bioprospecting has been on the agenda for discussion by the government, the academic community, businesses and other pertinent actors for many years now; it is an integral topic representing a potential approach to exploit biodiversity to the fullest. This document presents some definitions of what bioprospecting is (some restrictive, others with a broader perspective, depending on different approaches, actors, target markets and countries) in the context of a mechanism for development and cooperation concerning the construction of capacities, advantages and disadvantages. It was found that bioprospecting in Colombia has been developing from a broad perspective (systematic study of biological-genetic resources, transformation into a product which has led to strengthening some value chains, small- and/or large-scale marketing and some advances in intellectual property rights and the distribution of benefits) in order to provide greater benefits for the nation.

It has been more than 20 years since Brazil's 1988 Constitution formally established the Unified Health System (Sistema Unico de Saude, SUS). Building on reforms that started in the 1980s, the SUS represented a significant break with the past, establishing health care as a fundamental right and duty of the state and initiating a process of fundamentally transforming Brazil's health system to achieve this goal. This report aims to answer two main questions. First is have the SUS reforms transformed the health system as envisaged 20 years ago? Second, have the reforms led to improvements with regard to access to services, financial protection, and health outcomes? In addressing these questions, the report revisits ground covered in previous assessments, but also brings to bear additional or more recent data and places Brazil's health system in an international context. The report shows that the health system reforms can be credited with significant achievements. The report points to some promising directions for health system reforms that will allow Brazil to continue building on the achievements made to date. Although it is possible to reach some broad conclusions, there are many gaps and caveats in the story. A secondary aim of the report is to consider how some of these gaps can be filled through improved monitoring of health system performance and future research. The introduction presents a short review of the history of the SUS, describes the core principles that underpinned the reform, and offers a brief description of the evaluation framework used in the report. Chapter two presents findings on the extent to which the SUS reforms have transformed the health system, focusing on delivery, financing, and governance. Chapter three asks whether the reforms have resulted in improved outcomes with regard to access to services, financial protection, quality, health outcomes, and efficiency. The concluding chapter presents the main findings of the study, discusses some policy directions for addressing the current shortcomings, and identifies areas for further research.

The article has investigated the ecological state of hydroecosystems of the water basin of Kalmius River (WBK). The investigations were carried out with the account of new information methods of monitoring over indicators and their parameters of the development of water ecosystems, which made it possible to understand causal connections in the system hydroecosystems—nature-anthropogenic water ecosystems—socio-economic systems. It has been shown that a self-reconstructive potential of WBK quantitatively agrees with the maximum technogenic load. Proposed methods of monitoring the ecological state of WBK made it possible to determine potentially possible causes of hydrosystem degradation.

People with disabilities in Sierra Leone are disadvantaged in regards to their access to social services and the economic opportunities available to them. Oftentimes, they are marginalized and their rights are ignored. The government of Sierra Leone is taking measures to improve the social and economic situation of people with disabilities in the country. The objective of this note on people with disabilities in Sierra Leone is to: (i) provide a diagnosis on the scale and nature of the problem, (ii) analyze current public policies in support of people with disabilities, (iii) review public and private programs, and (iv) propose policy options to policy makers and development partners. It is meant for policy makers and practitioners in Sierra Leone as well as all those interested in the subject.

The article introduces the Prime Mover Matrix as a conversation piece that will help management build strategic innovation capacity and gain desired influence on industrial standards and thus power. After all, just because a company calls itself innovative and invests in R&D does not mean it is actually innovative. To be strategically innovative means that a company deliberately builds its technical innovative capacity and business innovative capacity in relation to the influence of other actors' actions and innovations. By doing this, a company will be able to increase its influence on industrial standards and gain the necessary power to reach its objectives. It is a relative position towards a moving target, which is why companies must continuously change through learning. This means that management needs help to reflect on how their own company's innovative capacity compares to their competitors, and they must unceasingly steer their capacity towards the desired innovation position. Today, we lack intuitive and usable tools that will facilitate strategic conversations on how to best invest for desired innovation capacity. In order to fill this void, this article proposes the Prime Mover Matrix: a model that functions as a conversation piece for triggering an assessment of an industry's technical, business, and prime movers.