Today's modern society depends on a number of infrastructures to operate. Failures in these systems cause significant economic impacts and can also endanger the lives and health of the population. The high importance of these infrastructures has led them to increasing attention in recent years and are referred to as critical infrastructure. Critical infrastructure in the energy sector is considered to be one of the most important infrastructure networks significantly entering into ensuring the functional continuity of the society. Its importance is also perceived in terms of interconnections and correlations with other critical infrastructure sectors as well as in terms of electricity interconnectivity in Europe, as in the interconnected European system the effects are spreading across the systems of all single country transmission system operators very quickly. For these reasons, the European Union considers this sector to be strategic and of European importance. The aim of the article is to clarify the primary causes of disruption of large-scale electricity supply and their impact on the functioning of society, focusing on the vulnerability of urbanized large settlements-urban agglomerations – in the event of long-lasting blackout disturbances. It contains a presentation of the importance of electricity for society, definition and analysis of the causes of disruption of large-scale electricity supply continuity, consequences of large-scale blackout on community functioning and its basic functions and current knowledge on vulnerability of large urban agglomerations to long-term disruption of electricity supply and possible solutions.
Today's modern society depends on a number of infrastructures to operate. Failures in these systems cause significant economic impacts and can also endanger the lives and health of the population. The high importance of these infrastructures has led them to increasing attention in recent years and are referred to as critical infrastructure. Critical infrastructure in the energy sector is considered to be one of the most important infrastructure networks significantly entering into ensuring the functional continuity of the society. Its importance is also perceived in terms of interconnections and correlations with other critical infrastructure sectors as well as in terms of electricity interconnectivity in Europe, as in the interconnected European system the effects are spreading across systems of all single country transmission system operators very quickly. For these reasons, the European Union considers this sector to be strategic and of European importance. The aim of the article is to clarify the primary causes of disruption of large-scale electricity supply and their impact on the functioning of society, focusing on the vulnerability of urbanized large settlements - urban agglomerations in the event of long-lasting blackout disturbances. It contains a presentation of the importance of electricity for society, definition and analysis of the causes of disruption of large-scale electricity supply continuity, consequences of large-scale blackout on community functioning and its basic functions and current knowledge on vulnerability of large urban agglomerations to long-term disruption of electricity supply and possible solutions.
Die hohe Störfanfälligkeit bei der Montage großskaliger Produkte verlangt eine kurzfristige Auswahl von Maßnahmen zur Reaktion auf Störungen, um Auswirkungen wie Lieferterminverspätungen oder Auslastungsverluste zu reduzieren. Die Nutzung von Flexibilitätspotenzialen eines Produktionssystems stellt einen Ansatz dar, um diese Herausforderung zu bewältigen. Dieser Fachbeitrag zeigt auf, welche Flexibilitätspotenziale in diesem speziellen Umfeld zur Verfügung stehen und genutzt werden können. Assembling large-scale products involves frequent process interruptions why in order to reduce the impact of interruptions, a short-term response is necessary to reduce delivery delays and idle times of resources. An approach for challenge this represents the flexibility of a production system. Regarding the environment of large-scale product assembly, it has to be shown which potentials of flexibility are able to use in a short-term manner.
High-frequency trading has been experiencing an increase of interest both for practical purposes within nancial institutions and within academic research; recently, the UK Government O ce for Science reviewed the state of the art and gave an outlook analysis. Therefore, models for tick-by-tick nancial time series are becoming more and more important. Together with high-frequency trading comes the need for fast simulations of full synthetic markets for several purposes including scenario analyses for risk evaluation. These simulations are very suitable to be run on massively parallel architectures. Aside more traditional large-scale parallel computers, high-end personal computers equipped with several multi-core CPUs and general-purpose GPU programming are gaining importance as cheap and easily available alternatives. A further option are FPGAs. In all cases, development can be done in a uni ed framework with standard C or C++ code and calls to appropriate libraries like MPI (for CPUs) or CUDA for (GPGPUs). Here we present such a prototype simulation of a synthetic regulated equity market. The basic ingredients to build a synthetic share are two sequences of random variables, one for the inter-trade durations and one for the tick-by-tick logarithmic returns. Our extensive simulations are based on several distributional choices for the above random variables, including Mittag-Le er distributed inter-trade durations and alpha-stable tick-by-tick logarithmic returns. ; Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant number ES/K002309/1.
Natural resources are likely to become, over the 21st century, the focus of an intensified competition among different uses, competition triggered by the rapidly increasing demand for water, energy, food and minerals related to population growth and urbanisation, and by changing lifestyles and diets. The availability of any kind of resource has a strict dependence on land. This dependence is very high for agriculture and water, and very significant for energy and minerals. Land ownership and use adds layers of complexity in the nexus relating water, energy and food, which are the key pillars of human well-being and societal development globally. In global this context, it seems to be important to increase understanding of the converging global dynamics that have spurred a global rush for agricultural land in Africa, Latin America and parts of South-east Asia, which has intensified after the food price crises in 2007-2008, after many years of little investments in the agricultural sector. This trend is generally referred to as land grabbing and is characterised by purchases or long-term leases (which typically run for 50 to 99 years) of farming land by either private or public investors. In the first part of the thesis, I have reviewed the literature, explaining the drivers and the trends of Large-Scale Land Acquisitions (LSLAs). It is easy to see that the majority of such investments are targeting Africa continent. This because at the first sight the continent presents the most available land in the world ready to be cultivated. "Available", "degraded" and "underutilized", have became epithets in common usage among proponents of large-scale land acquisitions, rendering landscapes as commodities ready for the taking. Foreign and local investments offer crucial opportunities to recipients in terms of access to capital, technology and innovation, foreign market access and infrastructure development. However there are development risk associated with insecure property rights and land concentration. Hence, concern for the recent capital flows is linked to the likelihood that it may shift the path of agricultural development away from smallholder strategies, with the possible negative implications extensively discussed in the development and agricultural economics literature. In the following part, using a beta regression, I have investigated the determinants of land acquisitions for large-scale agriculture. Results confirm the central role of agro-ecological potential as a pull factor, and also that such investments in Africa are targeting forested areas. During the 1980 – 2000 period, more than half of the new agricultural land across the tropics came at the expense of intact forests, and another 28% came from non intact forests, raising concerns about environmental services and biodiversity globally. Intensive farming, which continues to increase, has resulted in loss of natural habitats and species living in them. Forest and mixed-use woodlands are often targeted by government for agriculture expansion in order to avoid the displacement of crop land. In the third part of my thesis, I have analysed the link between inequality access to land and growth, given that the large size of foreign and domestic capital flows in conjunction with state landlordism in Africa may result in a development path that is geared towards large farms and land concentration. The average size of a farm in Africa is 2.2 ha, namely a very small size if compared to investments in land that are at least 200 ha large. In order to analyse the above link I have used a meta regression technique to review the land inequality literature. A large literature on inequality and growth has firmly established a strong role of land inequality as determinant of income inequality, and the negative impact of land inequality on long term growth; long term analysis also clearly shows that inequality in asset ownership once established is very difficult to reverse. The policy implications are that smallholder or outgrower strategies should be encouraged also in a context of large-scale deals, the degree of legal protection of land rights is crucial, elements of land related corporate social responsibility could usefully integrate public regulation in the domain of protection of user's rights. In the last part, I have done a preliminary assessment of loss of carbon following the conversation of land use from forest to crop land. Converting a forest to crop-land, for example, for biofuels production can result in much more global warming pollution than the amount that can be reduced by the biofuels grown on that land. Thus, I have assumed that 30 per cent of such investments are happening on forest land, unfortunately the inaccuracy of localization data do not allow an assessment more precise.
Dramatic events, such as the earthquake that struck China's Sichuan Province in 2008 and the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2005, have brought the financial management of catastrophic risks once again to the forefront of the public policy agenda globally. To address these issues and develop sound policies, the OECD has established an International Network on the Financial Management of Large-Scale Catastrophes. This publication supports the ongoing activities of the Network. This book contains three reports focusing on different institutional approaches to
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