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The world has already warmed by more than 1.2C compared with preindustrial levels, resulting in profound, immediate, and rapidly worsening health effects, and moving dangerously close to the agreed limit of maintaining temperatures “well below 2C”. These health impacts are seen on every continent, with the ongoing spread of dengue virus across South America, the cardiovascular and respiratory effects of record heatwaves and wildfires in Australia, western North America, and western Europe, and the undernutrition and mental health effects of floods and droughts in China, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and South Africa. In the long term, climate change threatens the very foundations of human health and wellbeing, with the Global Risks Report registering climate change as one of the five most damaging or probable global risks every year for the past decade.
Rapid growth in smart meter installations has given rise to vast collections of data at a high time-resolution and down to an individual level. However, to enable efficient policy interventions, we need to be able to appropriately segment the population of users. The aim of this paper is to consider challenges and opportunities associated with large highly-granular temporal datasets that describe residential electricity consumption. In particular, the focus is on experiments relating to aggregation of smart meter time-series data in the context of clustering and prediction tasks that are often used for customer targeting and to gain insight on energy-use about sub populations. To cluster energy use profiles, we propose a novel framework based on a set of Gaussian based models which we use to encode individuals’ energy consumption over time. The dataset consists of half hourly electricity consumption records from smart meters of households in the UK (2014–2015). The contribution of this paper comes from its investigation of how consumers or groups may be clustered according to model parameters in scenarios where additional data on consumers is not available to the researcher, or where anonymity preservation of the smart meter user is prioritised. A secondary aim is to invite greater awareness when data reduction is required to reduce the size of a large dataset for computational purposes. This may have implications for policy interventions acting at the individual or small group level, for instance, when designing incentives to encourage energy efficient behaviour or when identifying fuel poor customers.
Advances in community detection reveal new insights into multiplex and multilayer networks. Less work, however, investigates the relationship between these communities and outcomes in social systems. We leverage these advances to shed light on the relationship between the cooperative mesostructure of the international system and the onset of interstate conflict. We detect communities based upon weaker signals of affinity expressed in United Nations votes and speeches, as well as stronger signals observed across multiple layers of bilateral cooperation. Communities of diplomatic affinity display an expected negative relationship with conflict onset. Ties in communities based upon observed cooperation, however, display no effect under a standard model specification and a positive relationship with conflict under an alternative specification. These results align with some extant hypotheses but also point to a paucity in our understanding of the relationship between community structure and behavioral outcomes in networks.
The 2021 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: code red for a healthy future
(2021)
The Lancet Countdown is an international collaboration
that independently monitors the health consequences of a
changing climate. Publishing updated, new, and improved
indicators each year, the Lancet Countdown represents the
consensus of leading researchers from 43 academic
institutions and UN agencies. The 44 indicators of this
report expose an unabated rise in the health impacts of
climate change and the current health consequences of the
delayed and inconsistent response of countries around the
globe—providing a clear imperative for accelerated action
that puts the health of people and planet above all else.
The 2021 report coincides with the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change 26th Conference of the
Parties (COP26), at which countries are facing pressure
to realise the ambition of the Paris Agreement to keep
the global average temperature rise to 1·5°C and to
mobilise the financial resources required for all
countries to have an effective climate response. These
negotiations unfold in the context of the COVID-19
pandemic—a global health crisis that has claimed
millions of lives, affected livelihoods and communities
around the globe, and exposed deep fissures and
inequities in the world’s capacity to cope with, and
respond to, health emergencies. Yet, in its response to
both crises, the world is faced with an unprecedented
opportunity to ensure a healthy future for all.
The decision to establish direct elections to the European Parliament was intended by many to establish a direct link between the individual citizen and decision making at the European level. Elections were meant to help to establish a common identity among the peoples of Europe, to legitimise policy through the normal electoral processes and provide a public space within which Europeans could exert a more direct control over their collective future. Critics disagreed, arguing that direct elections to the European Parliament would further undermine the sovereignty of member states, and may not deliver on the promise that so many were making on behalf of that process. In particular, some wondered whether elections alone could mobilise European publics to take a much greater interest in European matters, with the possibility of European elections being contested simply on national matters. Evaluating these divergent views, the subject of this article is to review the literature on direct elections to the European Parliament in the context of the role these elections play in governance of the European Union. The seminal work by Reif and Schmitt serves as the starting point of our review. These authors were the first to discuss elections to the European Parliament as second-order national elections. Results of second-order elections are influenced not only by second-order factors, but also by the situation in the first-order arena at the time of the second-order election. In the 30 years and six more sets of European Parliament elections since the publication of their work, the concept has become the dominant one in any academic discussion of European elections. In this article we review that work in order to assess the continuing value of the second-order national election concept today, and to consider some of the more fruitful areas for research which might build on the advance made by Reif and Schmitt. While the concept has proven useful in studies of a range of elections beyond just those for the European Parliament, including those for regional and local assemblies as well as referendums, this review will concentrate solely on EP elections. Concluding that Reif and Schmitt’s characterisation remains broadly valid today, the article allows that while this does not mean there is necessarily a democratic deficit within the EU, there may be changes that could be made to encourage a more effective electoral process.
The paper explores a question raised by the 2011 Irish election, which saw an almost unprecedented decline in support for a major governing party after an economic collapse that necessitated an ECB/IMF ‘bailout’. This seems a classic case of ‘economic voting’ in which a government is punished for incompetent performance. How did the government lose this support: gradually, as successive economic indicators appeared negative, or dramatically, following major shocks? The evidence points to losses at two critical junctures. This is consistent with an interpretation of the link between economics and politics that allows for qualitative judgements by voters in assigning credit and blame for economic performance.
The 2011 election in Ireland was one of the most dramatic elections in European post-war history in terms of net electoral volatility. In some respects the election overturned the traditional party system. Yet it was a conservative revolution, one in which the main players remained the same, and the switch in the major government party was merely one in which one centre right party replaced another. Comparing voting behaviour over the last three elections we show that the 2011 election looks much like that of 2002 and 2007. The crisis did not result in the redefinition of the electoral landscape. While we find clear evidence of economic voting at the 2011 election, issue voting remained week. We believe that this is due to the fact that parties have not offered clear policy alternatives to the electorate in the recent past and did not do so in 2011.