Search

This chapter considers Detroit as one of the first American cities where the COVID-19 virus arrived. It discusses the ways in which the pandemic has impacted seniors in Detroit. It also chronicles the ways in which the Senior Housing Preservation–Detroit (SHP-D) coalition and other organizations worked with residents to provide essential services for their community. The chapter highlights the voices of older Detroiters to describe the city's senior housing context, reflect on Detroit's history of housing struggle, and advocate for the continued need for housing solutions for all ages. It details how seniors developed ways to cope with health challenges in a city where many have had to contend with disparities in health care, sporadic employment histories, and racist hiring, and lending practices.

Dust particles emitted from high latitudes (≥ 50° N and ≥ 40° S, including Arctic as a subregion ≥ 60° N), have a potentially large local, regional, and global significance to climate and environment as short-lived climate forcers, air pollutants and nutrient sources. To understand the multiple impacts of the High Latitude Dust (HLD) on the Earth systems, it is foremost to identify the geographic locations and characteristics of local dust sources. Here, we identify, describe, and quantify the Source Intensity (SI) values using the Global Sand and Dust Storms Source Base Map (G-SDS-SBM), for sixty-four HLD sources included in our collection in the Northern (Alaska, Canada, Denmark, Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, Sweden, and Russia) and Southern (Antarctica and Patagonia) high latitudes. Activity from most of these HLD dust sources show seasonal character. The environmental and climatic effects of dust on clouds and climatic feedbacks, atmospheric chemistry, marine environment, and cryosphere-atmosphere feedbacks at high latitudes are discussed, and regional-scale modelling of dust atmospheric transport from potential Arctic dust sources is demonstrated. It is estimated that high latitude land area with higher (SI ≥ 0.5), very high (SI ≥ 0.7) and the highest potential (SI ≥ 0.9) for dust emission cover >1 670 000 km2, >560 000 km2, and >240 000 km2, respectively. In the Arctic HLD region, land area with SI ≥ 0.5 is 5.5 % (1 035 059 km2), area with SI ≥ 0.7 is 2.3 % (440 804 km2), and with SI ≥ 0.9 it is 1.1 % (208 701 km2). Minimum SI values in the north HLD region are about three orders of magnitude smaller, indicating that the dust sources of this region are highly dependable on weather conditions. In the south HLD region, soil surface conditions are favourable for dust emission during the whole year. Climate change can cause decrease of snow cover duration, retrieval of glaciers, permafrost thaw, and increase of drought and heat waves intensity and frequency, which all lead to the increasing frequency of topsoil conditions favourable for dust emission and thereby increasing probability for dust storms. Our study provides a step forward to improve the representation of HLD in models and to monitor, quantify and assess the environmental and climate significance of HLD in the future.

SummarySurface mining of hydrocarbon deposits is not a new technique, but its application has been mainly limited to the excavation of oil sands in the Athabasca Basin of Alberta, Canada, where the mining method has proved to be commercially successful, although in a narrow set of geological and environmental conditions. This paper discusses the scope for a broader application of a surface-mining approach and builds on the results of a conceptual study that examined the possibility of surface mining the viscous crude oil of the Ratqa Lower Fars (RQLF) reservoir in northern Kuwait. The study findings indicate that a large rate of crude oil might be profitably and sustainably produced for many decades through a surface-mining approach.

The Interdepartmental Liaison Group on Risk Assessment (ILGRA) was established in 1991 on the initiative of the Health and Safety Executive, the regulatory body for most industrial risks in the UK. Risk is a prime example of an issue that pervades policies across government and for which there is a recognised need for integration of policy-making. The ILGRA network in liaison mode was characteristically weak in terms of the interdependencies between the participants. The trigger for the transformation of the ILGRA network from liaison to interdependency came fortuitously. A commitment was given in the White Paper that an annual Forward Look on Government funded Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) would be published and the first of these described a long-term exercise to be undertaken under the aegis of ILGRA on risk assessment and toxicology. The remaining issue of methodologies concerned the development of a common UK approach to negotiations on risk assessment at international level.