Communities of practice to actively manage best practices
Stefano Borzillo examines a large variety of CoPs by means of six success factors and identifies three basic types: innovating strategic, operational excellence, and social and productive space CoPs.
Climate-Smart Forestry in Mountain Regions
This book offers a cross-sectoral reference for both managers and scientists interested in climate-smart forestry, focusing on mountain regions. It provides a comprehensive analysis on forest issues, facilitating the implementation of climate objectives. CLIMO has provided scientific analysis on issues including criteria and indicators, growth dynamics, management prescriptions, long-term perspectives, monitoring technologies, economic impacts, and governance tools.
Climate Change Impacts for the Conterminous USA : An Integrated Assessment
In this volume, an improved Integrated Assessment methodology is used to analyse climate change impacts on agriculture, water resources, unmanaged ecosystems, irrigation, and land use in the United States and the economic implications of these impacts. This book contains a series of papers documenting the methods, models, analysis and results of this integrated assessment for a wide ranging set of scenarios describing future climate change. Innovations described include the integration of water resource and agricultural modeling and the refinement of an agriculture and land-use economics model to incorporate results from process-level ecosystem models of agriculture, water and natural ecosystem resources. Scenarios selected for this study address a range of uncertainties associated with choice of climate model, presence or absence of a ‘CO2-fertilization effect’, impacts on international trade in agricultural commodities and their consequences for producers and consumers.
Climate Change and Technological Options : Basic facts, Evaluation and Practical Solutions
climate change focussing on technical solutions for the most important and climate relevant economic sectors is presented. It is intended for key decision makers, and administrators within industry, agricultural and energy sectors, as well as masters students and post graduates. The first of three sections covers the scientific basis of climate change and the instruments to prevent or reduce negative climate effects. It includes a survey covering current practices at different levels.It discusses evaluation methods for climate impacts from industrial processes. Climate relevant processes and measures to reduce their impact such as sequestration are defined in the final section, with the main focus being on renewable resources. Details are given on climate impacts of waste prevention, recycling and waste management as well as are proposals for every day solutions.
Climate Change and Energy Pathways for the Mediterranean : Workshop Proceedings, Cyprus
This the workshop proceedings present an overview of the implications of climate change for the eastern Mediterranean and the impact of climate change response on regional economic activity, particularly in the hydrocarbon industry.
Climate Change and Community Resilience : Insights from South Asia
Documents myriads of ways community-based climate change adaptation and resilience programs are being implemented in South Asian countries. The narrative style of writing in this volume makes it accessible to a diverse audience from academics and researchers to practitioners in various governmental, non-governmental and international agencies. At a time when climate change presents humanity with a gloomy future, the stories of innovation, creativity, grassroots engagement and locally applicable solutions highlighted in this book provides insights into hopeful ways of approaching climate solutions.
Classic Works on the Dempster-Shafer Theory of Belief Functions
This book brings together a collection of classic research papers on the Dempster-Shafer theory of belief functions. By bridging fuzzy logic and probabilistic reasoning, the theory of belief functions has become a primary tool for knowledge representation and uncertainty reasoning in expert systems.
Circular Migration and the Rights of Migrant Workers in Central and Eastern Europe : The EU Promise of a Triple Win Solution
This book adopts a rights-based approach to shed light on the different legal and policy instruments that have been developed to implement circular migration policies in the EU, and their consequences for the rights of migrant workers.
Chitosan-based nanocomposite materials : fabrication, characterization and biomedical applications
Discovery in the use of chitosan-based nanocomposites in biomedical applications, including the scope to which these novel materials have been incorporated by the community. It provides an exceptional insight into the strategies for the synthesis and chemical modifications of chitosan, characterization techniques, their use as anticancer agents, antimicrobial, antiviral, and antifungal agents, their role in the biomedical field, and applications in drug delivery, gene therapy, dentistry, orthopedics, etc. This book will also emphasize the challenges with previous signs of progress and way for further research, details relating to the current pioneering technology, and future perspectives with a multidisciplinary approach. Furthermore, it presents up-to-date information on the economics, toxicity, and regulations related to these novel materials.
Chinese Railways : Reform and Efficiency Improvement Opportunities
Although being huge by any measure, Chinese Railways are a bottleneck for economic growth in China. The state-owned enterprise returns a small profit but is severely capacity constrained and burdened with inefficiency. A comprehensive reform and efficiency improvement program needs to be developed in order to enable Chinese Railways to support further GDP growth in China. Application of industrial economics to the case of Chinese Railways suggests that moderate deregulation of e.g., the freight business could make Chinese Railways fit for future growth. Operational improvements need to complement this development, such as a redesign of the schedule or the introduction of value added services in the freight business. Based on interviews with Chinese experts, benchmarking with railways in the US, Germany, Russia, and Japan as well as broad coverage of Chinese-language sources, the book makes detailed recommendations on how to design a comprehensive turnaround program for Chinese Railways.
China's Long-Term Low-Carbon Development Strategies and Pathways : Comprehensive Report
This book introduces a multi-disciplinary and comprehensive research on China's long-term low-carbon emission strategies and pathways. After comprehensively considering China’s own socioeconomic conditions, policy design, energy mix, and other macro-development trends and needs, the research team has proposed suggestions on China’s low-carbon development strategies and pathways until 2050, with required technologies and policies in order to realize the goals of building a great modern socialist country and a beautiful China.
China's Energy Revolution in the Context of the Global Energy Transition
This book is an encyclopaedic analysis of the current and future energy system of the world’s most populous country and second biggest economy. What happens in China impacts the planet. In the past 40 years China has achieved one of the most remarkable economic growth rates in history. Its GDP has risen by a factor of 65, enabling 850,000 people to rise out of poverty.
China’s Gas Development Strategies
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book examines how China can increase the share of natural gas in its energy system. China’s energy strategy has global ramifications and impact, and central to this strategy is the country’s transition from coal to gas. The book presents the culmination of a two-year collaboration between the Development Research Center of the State Council (DRC) and Shell.
China : Surpassing the “Middle Income Trap”
This book explores one of the most fiercely debated issues in China: if and how China will surpass the middle income trap that has plagued many developing countries for years. This book gives readers a clear picture of China today and acts as a reference for other developing countries.
Childlessness in Europe : Contexts, Causes, and Consequences
This open access book provides an overview of childlessness throughout Europe. It offers a collection of papers written by leading demographers and sociologists that examine contexts, causes, and consequences of childlessness in countries throughout the region.The book features data from all over Europe. It specifically highlights patterns of childlessness in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Finland, Sweden, Austria and Switzerland. An additional chapter on childlessness in the United States puts the European experience in perspective.
Characteristic based planning with mySAP SCM™ : Scenarios, processes, and functions
Characteristics are used in SAP as attributes, e.g. to specify the configuration of products or the properties of batches. In many industries – engineering, automotive, mill, pharmaceutical and foods to name the most typical – supply chain planning has to consider these characteristics. APO offers many different functionalities for planning with characteristics, where each of the functionalities has some prerequisites and incompatibilities. This book offers help and advice for the basic design of the implementation by explaining the processes and scenarios (process chains) for planning with characteristics, the functionalities for planning with characteristics in APO including their prerequisites and incompatibilities and the entities, dependencies and system configuration determinants for planning with characteristics in R/3 and APO. This book is based on the releases R/3 4.7 and mySAP SCM 4.1.
Change from the Inside Out : Making you, your team, and your organization change-capable
Change initiatives fail because humans are hardwired to return to what's worked for them in the past. This book offers a straightforward process for building support for change from the ground up
Change 2.0 : Beyond Organisational Transformation
"This is a book about change … . It’s a collection of 14 articles including four case studies. … ‘a collection of articles intended to inspire those involved in the practical implementation of change’." (Rodney Gray, Strategic Communication Management, Issue 11, 2008)
Chance : The life of games and the game of life
With its many easy-to-follow mathematical examples, this book takes the reader on an almost chronological trip through the fascinating and amazing laws of chance, omnipresent in the natural world and in our daily lives. Along the route many fascinating topics are discussed, such as: challenging probability paradoxes; "paranormal" coincidences; game odds; causes and effects; interpretation of opinion polls; winning chances as a game proceeds; the nature of randomness; entropy and randomness; randomness in life; algorithmic complexity and the undecidability of randomness; possibilities and limitations of learning the laws of a Universe immersed in chance events. This charming book will inform and entertain the scientist and non-scientist alike.
Challenges for Central Banks in an Enlarged EMU
In this book, a set of internationally renowned economists from both sides of the Atlantic analyse the challenges that lie in front of the EU as it used to be, the hurdles that have to be cleared by possible candidates, and the impact of these developments on important economic sectors like the financial markets, etc. The scientists are supported by Central Bankers from current and future Euro-zone members who give their views on the problems and chances of Euro-accession. The book is thus providing an overall view of the major developments regarding the Euro in the years to come.



















