Climate change adds uncertainty to already complex global water challenges. Because climate change affects poorer countries and vulnerable populations the most, the World Bank strives to mainstream climate change considerations into its operations to inform investment and water resources management decisions. Although no standard method has been adopted yet by the Bank, common practice used downscaled projected precipitation and temperature from Global Climate Models (GCMs), as input to hydrologic models. While this has been useful in some applications, they often give too wide a dispersion of readings to provide useful guidance for site-specific water resources management and infrastructure planning and design. Rather than design for an uncertain situation selected a priori, the so-called “bottom-up” approaches explore the sensitivity of a chosen project to the effects of uncertainties caused by climate change. This book summarizes alternatives explored by a group of organizations (such as the U.S. Corps of Engineers, Conservation International, the University of Massachusetts and the Bank) all belonging to the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA), to provide practitioners with the tools to adapt to the realities of climate change by following a decision-making process that incorporates bottom-up thinking.

The era of Sustainable and Energy Efficient Nanoelectronics and Nanosystems has come. The research and development on Scalable and 3D integrated Diversified functions together with new computing architectures is in full swing. Besides data processing, data storage, new sensing modes and communication capabilities need the revision of process architecture to enable the Heterogeneous co integration of add-on devices with CMOS: the new defined functions and paradigms open the way to Augmented Nanosystems. The choices for future breakthroughs will request the study of new devices, circuits and computing architectures and to take new unexplored paths including as well new materials and integration schmes. This book reviews in two sections, including seven chapters, essential modules to build Diversified Nanosystems based on Nanoelectronics and finally how they pave the way to the definition of Nanofunctions for Augmented Nanosystems.

This book focuses on two major challenges in the climate sciences: 1) to describe the decadal-to-centennial variations in instrumental and proxy records; and 2) to distinguish between anthropogenic variations and natural variability. The National Taiwan University invited some of the world's leading experts across the areas of observational analysis, mathematical theory, and modeling to discuss these two issues. The outcome of the meeting is the 23 chapters in this book that review the state of the art in theoretical, observational and modeling research on internal, unforced and externally forced climate variability. The main conclusion of this research is that internal climate variability on decadal and longer time scales is so large that sidestepping it may lead to false estimates of the climate's sensitivity to anthropogenic forcing.World Scientific Series on Asia-Pacific Weather and Climate is indexed in SCOPUS.

The types of actors involved in transnational advocacy have diversified. Northern NGOs have lost power and influence and been restricted in their access to southern states. Southern NGOs have developed a capacity to undertake advocacy on their own and often built closer relationships with their own governments. International institutions have become more open to southern NGOs and more skeptical of southern NGOs' claims to speak for southern populations. The result is that the boomerang theory, although still useful, no longer provides the broad explanation for advocacy. A wealth of recent articles (many by contributors to this volume) showed a growing scholarly recognition of the need for new theory. "Beyond the Boomerang" offers cutting-edge scholarship and synthesizes a new theoretical framework to develop a coherent, integrated picture of the current dynamics in global advocacy. .

An assessment of policy options for future global climate governance, written by a team of leading experts from the European Union and developing countries. Global climate governance is at a crossroads. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was merely a first step, and its core commitments expire in 2012. This book addresses three questions which will be central to any new climate agreement. What is the most effective overall legal and institutional architecture for successful and equitable climate politics? What role should non-state actors play, including multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations, public–private partnerships and market mechanisms in general? How can we deal with the growing challenge of adapting our existing institutions to a substantially warmer world? This important resource offers policy practitioners in-depth qualitative and quantitative assessments of the costs and benefits of various policy options, and also offers academics from wide-ranging disciplines insight into innovative interdisciplinary approaches towards international climate negotiations.

Offers an innovative, holistic and evidence-based pedagogic approach to deeper learning for all subjects of schooling.