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This edited volume examines the opportunities to think, do, and/or create jointly afforded by digital storytelling. The contributors discuss digital storytelling in the context of educational programs, teaching anthropology, and ethnographic research involving a variety of populations and subjects that will appeal to researchers and practitioners engaged with qualitative methods and pedagogies that rely on media technology.

Abstract Levee systems are an important part of California’s water infrastructure, engineered to provide resilience against flooding and reduce flood losses. The growth in California is partly associated with costly infrastructure developments that led to population expansion in the levee protected areas. Therefore, potential changes in the flood hazard could have significant socioeconomic consequences over levee protected areas, especially in the face of a changing climate. In this study, we examine the possible impacts of a warming climate on flood hazard over levee protected land in California. We use gridded maximum daily runoff from global circulation models (GCMs) that represent a wide range of variability among the climate projections, and are recommended by the California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment Report, to investigate possible climate-induced changes. We also quantify the exposure of several critical infrastructure protected by the levee systems (e.g. roads, electric power transmission lines, natural gas pipelines, petroleum pipelines, and railroads) to flooding. Our results provide a detailed picture of change in flood risk for different levees and the potential societal consequences (e.g. exposure of people and critical infrastructure). Levee systems in the northern part of the Central Valley and coastal counties of Southern California are likely to observe the highest increase in flood hazard relative to the past. The most evident change is projected for the northern region of the Central Valley, including Butte, Glenn, Yuba, Sutter, Sacramento, and San Joaquin counties. In the leveed regions of these counties, based on the model simulations of the future, the historical 100-year runoff can potentially increase up to threefold under RCP8.5. We argue that levee operation and maintenance along with emergency preparation plans should take into account the changes in frequencies and intensities of flood hazard in a changing climate to ensure safety of levee systems and their protected infrastructure.

In recent years, the rapid development of the rare earth industry has had a serious impact on the environment. Some enterprises have taken measures to improve the production process. In order to explore the sustainability of this industry and these improvements’ environmental benefits, this paper combines emergy analysis and lifecycle assessment to evaluate and compare the production process of rare-earth oxides considering the three aspects of emergy flow, pollutant emissions, and emergy-based indicators. Changes in the emergy of pollutant emissions before and after improvement of the production process are discussed. The results show that the greatest inputs in the mining and beneficiation stage and smelting separation stage are labor force and service and non-renewable resources, respectively. These two production stages are highly dependent on external input and have weak competitiveness. Both stages place great pressure on the environment, so the bastnasite production process would be unsustainable in the long term. After the improvement, the environmental impact of the production process for bastnaesite changed significantly, indicating that the improvement effect of the wastewater treatment facilities and the change of fuel from coal to natural gas is remarkable.

Background: Fish entrainment through turbine intakes is one of the major issues for operators of hydropower facilities because it causes injury and/or mortality and adversely affects population abundance. Entrainment reduction strategies have been developed based on the behavior of downstream migrating fishes, particularly diadromous species. However, knowledge of the behavior of migratory fishes has very limited application for reducing the entrainment of resident fishes, including several species that represent important recreational and aboriginal fishery resources in reservoirs. In this study, we used fine-scale acoustic telemetry and state-space modeling to investigate behavioral attributes associated with entrainment risk of resident adult bull trout (Salvelinus confluentus) in a large hydropower reservoir in British Columbia, Canada. Results: We found that adult bull trout resided longer in the vicinity of the powerhouse and moved closer to the turbine intakes in the fall and particularly in the winter. Bull trout were more likely to engage in exploratory behavior (characteristic of foraging or reduced activity) during periods when their body temperature was lower or higher than 6°C. We also detected diel changes in behavioral attributes, with bull trout distance to intakes and probability of exploratory behavior slightly increasing at night. Conclusions: We hypothesize that the exploratory behavior in the forebay is associated with foraging for kokanee (nonanadromous form of Oncorhynchus nerka), which have been shown to congregate near the dams of hydropower reservoirs in the winter. Our study findings should be applicable to bull trout populations residing in other reservoirs and indicate that entrainment mitigation (for example, use of deterrent devices) should be focused on the fall and winter. This work also provides a framework for combining acoustic telemetry and state-space models to understand and categorize movement behavior of fish in reservoirs and, more generally, in any environment with fluctuating water levels.

While a firm knows the carbon price with certainty under a tax, it must form an expectation about future allowance prices to identify its cost-effective abatement investment under a capand-trade program. We illustrate graphically how errors in forming this expectation increase the costs of irreversible pollution abatement investment under cap-and-trade relative to a tax. We describe empirical “cost-effectiveness anomalies” in allowance markets that may be attributed to cap-and-trade's inherent uncertainty. We model investment under simulated US carbon tax and cap-and-trade policies and find that allowance price uncertainty can increase resource costs 20 percent for a given quantity of emission abatement.

Decarbonizing the building sector is extremely important to mitigating climate change as the sector contributes 40% of the overall energy consumption and 36% of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Net-zero energy buildings are one of the promising decarbonization attempts due to their potential of decreasing the use of energy and increasing the total share of renewable energy. To achieve a net-zero energy building, it is necessary to decrease the energy demand by applying efficiency enhancement measures and using renewable energy sources. Net-zero energy buildings can be classified into four models (Net-Zero Site Energy buildings, Net-Zero Emissions buildings, Net-Zero Source Energy buildings, and Net-Zero Cost Energy buildings). A variety of technical, financial, and environmental factors should be considered during the decision-making process of net-zero energy building development, justifying the use of multi-criteria decision analysis methods for the design of net-zero energy buildings. This paper also discussed the contributions of renewable energy generation (hydropower, wind energy, solar, heat pumps, and bioenergy) to the development of net-zero energy buildings and reviewed its role in tackling the decarbonization challenge. Cost-benefit analysis and life cycle assessment of building designs were reviewed to shape the priorities of future development. It is important to develop a universal decision instrument for optimum design and operation of net-zero energy buildings.

This paper considers several alternative forms of an energy imbalance market (EIM) proposed in the nonmarket areas of the Western Interconnection. The proposed EIM includes two changes in operating practices that independently reduce variability and increase access to responsive resources: balancing authority cooperation and sub-hourly dispatch. As the penetration of variable generation increases on the power system, additional interest in coordination would likely occur. Several alternative approaches could be used, but consideration of any form of coordinated unit commitment is beyond the scope of this analysis. This report examines the benefits of several possible EIM implementations--both separately and in concert.