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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.

Since 1958, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has funded a programme of scientific activities with the aim of promoting conditions of stability and well-being. Under its current title of Science for Peace and Security, the programme has evolved from being entirely science-driven to having a closely-defined link with security in a broad sense. This paper traces this evolution and places the present Advanced Research Workshop in its evolutionary context, particularly in relation to the environmental security theme of the Workshop. The observations in the paper are addressed mainly to the scientific community and draw on the author’s experience of the programme in a variety of roles.

The anticipation and prevention of potential industrial accidents with severe consequences has benefited from the development of formal methods of assessment for the different stages of the life cycle of an accident. A similar approach has subsequently been applied in other situations where anticipation of hazards is necessary, including natural disasters and in areas such as food safety and public health. The application of the methods in high hazard sectors of industry has been accompanied by new regulatory procedures in the UK to ensure effective implementation. This paper reviews the relevant lessons from experience of regulating and managing industrial safety and responding to natural disasters and other hazards. It is concluded that learning from this experience would be beneficial to assessing and minimizing threats from terrorist acts and to improving preparedness and prioritizing protective

The interaction of man with natural and manmade hazards is subject to many uncertainties. Risk assessment in its general sense is the study of that interaction in order to inform decisions about what should be done in any given context. Advances in risk estimation methodologies have been paralleled by equally important changes in society’s response to risk issues. For a long time, risk was seen as no more than an objective measure of the possibility of identified physical harm and exclusively a matter for expert assessors. Any reluctance to accept the expert view was dismissed as irrational. But several factors have combined to make decision making on risk a fertile and complex subject of debate. These include: growing understanding of the influences that colour people’s perception of risks; heightened awareness of the dependency of expert assessments on judgement; consequent demands for greater openness and inclusion of stakeholder values in framing the issues and arriving at a balanced decision, and incessant media clamour driven by the difficult politics of the equitable distribution of costs and benefits. In threading a way through this minefield, the decision maker can succeed only with expert advice that is robust and tractable to public scrutiny. Various developments relevant to that aim will be discussed.