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China is confronted with an unprecedented water crisis regarding its quantity and quality. In this study, we quantified the dynamics of China?s embodied water use and chemical oxygen demand (COD) discharge from 2010 to 2015. The analysis was conducted with the latest available water use data across sectors in primary, secondary and tertiary industries and input?output models. The results showed that (1) China?s water crisis was alleviated under urbanisation. Urban consumption occupied the largest percentages (over 30%) of embodied water use and COD discharge, but embodied water intensities in urban consumption were far lower than those in rural consumption. (2) The ?new normal? phase witnessed the optimisation of China?s water use structures. Embodied water use in light-manufacturing and tertiary sectors increased while those in heavy-manufacturing sectors (except chemicals and transport equipment) dropped. (3) Transformation of China?s international market brought positive effects on its domestic water use. China?s water use (116?80 billion tonnes (Bts))(9) and COD discharge (3.95?2.22 million tonnes (Mts)) embodied in export tremendously decreased while its total export values (11?25 trillion CNY) soared. Furthermore, embodied water use and COD discharge in relatively low-end sectors, such as textile, started to transfer from international to domestic markets when a part of China?s production activities had been relocated to other developing countries.

Long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) release copious amounts of energy across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and so provide a window into the process of black hole formation from the collapse of massive stars. Previous early optical observations of even the most exceptional GRBs (990123 and 030329) lacked both the temporal resolution to probe the optical flash in detail and the accuracy needed to trace the transition from the prompt emission within the outflow to external shocks caused by interaction with the progenitor environment. Here we report observations of the extraordinarily bright prompt optical and gamma-ray emission of GRB 080319B that provide diagnostics within seconds of its formation, followed by broadband observations of the afterglow decay that continued for weeks. We show that the prompt emission stems from a single physical region, implying an extremely relativistic outflow that propagates within the narrow inner core of a two-component jet.

The Pan-African Consortium for the Evaluation of Anti-Tuberculosis Antibiotics (PanACEA) was designed to build tuberculosis (TB) trial capacity whilst conducting clinical trials on novel and existing agents to shorten and simplify TB treatment. PanACEA has now established a dynamic network of 11 sub-Saharan clinical trial sites and four European research institutions.In 2011, a capacity development program, funded by the European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP), was launched with four objectives, aiming at strengthening collaborating TB research sites to reach the ultimate goal of becoming self-sustainable institutions: networking; training; conducting clinical trials; and infrastructure scaling-up of sites.Assessment in six sub-Saharan TB-endemic countries (Gabon, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia) were performed through a structured questionnaire, site visits, discussion with the PanACEA consortium, setting of milestones and identification of priorities and followed-up with evaluations of each site. The results of this needs-based assessment was then translated into capacity development measures.In the initial phase, over a four-year period (March 2011 - June 2014), the programme scaled-up six sites; conducted a monitoring training program for 11 participants; funded five MSc and four PhD students, fostering gender balance; conducted four epidemiological studies; supported sites to conduct five Phase II studies and formed a sustainable platform for TB research (panacea-tb.net).Our experience of conducting TB clinical trials within the PanACEA programme environment of mentoring, networking and training has provided a sound platform for establishing future sustainable research centres. Our goal of facilitating emergent clinical TB trial sites to better initiate and lead research activities has been mostly successful.

Climate change and biodiversity loss trigger policies targeting and impacting local communities worldwide. However, research and policy implementation often fail to sufficiently consider community responses and to involve them. We present the results of a collective self-assessment exercise for eight case studies of communications with regard to climate change or biodiversity loss between project teams and local communities. We develop eight indicators of good stakeholder communication, reflecting the scope of Verran’s (2002) concept of postcolonial moments as a communicative utopia. We demonstrate that applying our indicators can enhance communication and enable community responses. However, we discover a divergence between timing, complexity and (introspective) effort. Three cases qualify for postcolonial moments, but scrutinising power relations and genuine knowledge co-production remain rare. While we verify the potency of various instruments for deconstructing science, their sophistication cannot substitute trust building and epistemic/transdisciplinary awareness. Lastly, we consider that reforming inadequate funding policies helps improving the work in and with local communities.

Plug-in electric vehicles can potentially emit substantially lower CO2 emissions than internal combustion engine vehicles, and so have the potential to reduce transport emissions without curtailing personal car use. Assessing the potential uptake of these new categories of vehicles requires an understanding of likely consumer responses. Previous in-depth explorations of appraisals and evaluations of electric vehicles have tended to focus on ‘early adopters’, who may not represent mainstream consumers. This paper reports a qualitative analysis of responses to electric cars, based on semi-structured interviews conducted with 40 UK non-commercial drivers (20 males, 20 females; age 24–70 years) at the end of a seven-day period of using a battery electric car (20 participants) or a plug-in hybrid car (20 participants). Six core categories of response were identified: (1) cost minimisation; (2) vehicle confidence; (3) vehicle adaptation demands; (4) environmental beliefs; (5) impression management; and, underpinning all other categories, (6) the perception of electric cars generally as ‘work in progress’ products. Results highlight potential barriers to the uptake of current-generation (2010) plug-in electric cars by mainstream consumers. These include the prioritization of personal mobility needs over environmental benefits, concerns over the social desirability of electric vehicle use, and the expectation that rapid technological and infrastructural developments will make current models obsolete. Implications for the potential uptake of future electric vehicles are discussed.

AbstractIn the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan largely moved away from nuclear power generation and turned back towards an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels. As a result, the pace towards reaching emission reduction targets has largely slowed down. This situation indicates that higher emissions will continue to be generated if there is no appropriate and efficient measurement implemented to bridge the energy demand gap. To contribute adequate mitigation policies, a detailed inventory of both CO2 emissions and socioeconomic factors, both at the national and regional level, should be issued. Thereby, this work contributes to a time-series emission with a record of 47 prefectures in Japan as well as their associated socioeconomic features. The compiled emission inventory is based on three major fossil fuels and 26 sectors with careful emission allocations for regional electricity generation. This dataset is uniformly formatted and can be expected to provide vital information to set regional reduction allowances and sectoral reduction priorities.

The European Union (EU) is committed to reducing its greenhouse gas (GHG) emission levels by 80%–95% in 2050 compared to 1990 levels. Various approaches have been developed to secure and evaluate the progress made towards this objective. To gain insights into how EU Member States are aligning to this collective long-term objective, we systematically compare the planning and ex-ante evaluation processes for five EU countries (respectively Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom). The comparative analysis consists of a qualitative comparison of (1) the governance of long-term policy planning and evaluation processes, (2) the national arrangement for quantitative (model-based) ex-ante policy evaluation and (3) the national arrangement for qualitative ex-ante policy evaluation (stakeholder participation). In a second step we conduct a quantitative comparison of national model-based ex-ante evaluation studies to assess the relative differences between the considered routes and the differences across the various countries. Although the five Member States plan policies along the same EU objective, we find a high diversity in how long-term commitments are established, governed and evaluated on the national level. Model-based scenario analyses are commonly used to explore and evaluate the possible national routes towards the EU 2050 objective. However, as these processes mostly concentrate on domestic action, they pay little attention to how domestic policies are affected by, or affecting, other international activities throughout Europe. Hence, current findings suggest that cross-border collaboration and stakeholder participation could further strengthen the analytical understanding of required transformative change in Europe and subsequently lead to a more durable long-term solution over time.