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1. Adapting to extreme events: small drinking water system manager perspectives on the 2012–2016 California Drought

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03305-8  

   Klasic, Meghan ; Fencl, Amanda ; Ekstrom, Julia A. ; Ford, Amanda ( February 2022 , Climatic Change)

   Under a changing climate, droughts are projected to increase in frequency and duration in the Southwestern USA. Between 2012 and 2016, California experienced one of the region’s worst droughts, with record high temperatures and low snowpack, runoff, and precipitation. This study documents small drinking water system managers’ experiences during the 2012–2016 Drought. We contribute to research on water system drought resilience by elevating small drinking water system manager perspectives and expertise. We are especially focused on small systems that are not reliant on imports from state or federal water projects. A mixed-method approach ensures each data collection period informs the next to gather statewide perspectives and experiences of managers.

   Based on an analysis of drinking water manager reflections, the types of impacts, responses, and barriers differed based on both system size and water source portfolio. Common disadvantages that hinder small drinking water systems’ drought resilience and, similarly, climate adaptation include staff and administrative capacity; the financial burden of promoting water conservation over revenue compounded by onerous reporting and funding support programs; consumer awareness challenges; and challenges to consolidation from both local political differences and physical limitations. Systems that built technical, managerial, or financial capacity prior to the Drought were at an advantage over systems that lacked this capacity. In the long term, we found a dearth of adaptation planning among small water systems. Documentation of experiences from the 2012–2016 Drought can inform future planning for droughts and more broadly highlight needs for climate adaptation.

    

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2. ANTI‐PUBLIC FINANCE ? The Democratic Effects of Municipal Bond Markets

   https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13181  

   Mizes, James Christopher ( July 2023 , International Journal of Urban and Regional Research)

   Municipal bonds are a financial instrument once largely limited to North America. Today, they are appearing in international development reports as a novel best‐practice for closing the world's infrastructure funding gap and for promoting democracy. Critics of financialization have argued that municipal bonds have had the opposite effect: they have deepened austerity, ceded control of democratic municipalities to the global financial industry, and depoliticized public decision‐making. Yet in this article, I observe a relationship between democracy, politics and finance which contrasts with the now common uses of ‘financialization’ popularized by critical scholars in Euro‐American universities. I argue that, elsewhere in the world, capital markets have come to be understood as an important element of democratization. To make this argument, I develop the concept of ‘financial publics’—a group of strangers participating in a reflexive and reciprocal style of address through which they negotiate their financial relationships with one another. Using this concept, I analyze data drawn from over two years of ethnographic research on one of the most noteworthy experiments in municipal finance in the global South: the City of Dakar's failed attempt to issue the first ever municipal bond on the Regional Stock Exchange of West Africa.

    

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3. Buyouts with rentbacks: a policy proposal for managing coastal retreat

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-022-00762-0  

   Keeler, Andrew G. ; Mullin, Megan ; McNamara, Dylan E. ; Smith, Martin D. ( April 2022 , Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences)

   The discussion of adaptation to climate change in coastal areas has focused on short-term risk reduction and climate-proofing, but there is growing recognition that—at some point in the future—relocation to less vulnerable geographical areas will become necessary for large numbers of residents in many coastal communities. Spontaneous relocations that occur after catastrophic events can entail high costs, both for those who resettle elsewhere and for the remaining community. Managed retreat attempts to reduce such costs, thereby facilitating the relocation process. Property buyouts, the most prominently discussed policy tool for managed retreat, present significant challenges in terms of equity, timing, finance, and scale. We discuss innovation in buyout policy that allows residents to remain in their homes as renters after being bought out. We develop the basic structure of such a policy and show the pathways through which it can help to finance buyouts, harmonize public and private decision-making, and manage the timing of community transition. We also recommend funding mechanisms and other details to overcome the substantial barriers to implementation. Although buyouts with rentbacks will require institutional innovation in order to serve as an effective policy framework, the policy has the potential to improve social, economic, and environmental outcomes from the eventual unfortunate but necessary migration away from coastal areas.

    

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4. Rethinking Explainability as a Dialogue: A Practitioner's Perspective

   Lakkaraju, Himabindu ; Slack, Dylan ; Chen, Yuxin ; Tan, Chenhao ; Singh, Sameer ( January 2022 , NeurIPS Workshop on Human Centered AI)

   As practitioners increasingly deploy machine learning models in critical domains such as health care, finance, and policy, it becomes vital to ensure that domain experts function effectively alongside these models. Explainability is one way to bridge the gap between human decision-makers and machine learning models. However, most of the existing work on explainability focuses on one-off, static explanations like feature importances or rule lists. These sorts of explanations may not be sufficient for many use cases that require dynamic, continuous discovery from stakeholders. In the literature, few works ask decision-makers about the utility of existing explanations and other desiderata they would like to see in an explanation going forward. In this work, we address this gap and carry out a study where we interview doctors, healthcare professionals, and policymakers about their needs and desires for explanations. Our study indicates that decision-makers would strongly prefer interactive explanations in the form of natural language dialogues. Domain experts wish to treat machine learning models as "another colleague", i.e., one who can be held accountable by asking why they made a particular decision through expressive and accessible natural language interactions. Considering these needs, we outline a set of five principles researchers should follow when designing interactive explanations as a starting place for future work. Further, we show why natural language dialogues satisfy these principles and are a desirable way to build interactive explanations. Next, we provide a design of a dialogue system for explainability and discuss the risks, trade-offs, and research opportunities of building these systems. Overall, we hope our work serves as a starting place for researchers and engineers to design interactive explainability systems. 

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5. Model for improved undergraduate training in translational conservation science

   https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.5  

   Kelley, Patricia H. ; Dietl, Gregory P. ; Visaggi, Christy C. ( April 2019 , Conservation Science and Practice)

   The “Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) in Biodiversity Conservation” project models transdisciplinary training in conservation science, and particularly in the emerging field of conservation paleobiology (CPB), which applies geohistorical records (e.g., sediments, fossils) and approaches to solve conservation problems. We analyzed recent funding patterns in the National Science Foundation REU program (Biological Sciences and Geosciences directorates) and found that, at most REU sites, undergraduates conduct individual projects supervised by a mentor. In contrast, at the REU in Biodiversity Conservation Site, students from geology, biology, archaeology, and environmental sciences worked in transdisciplinary teams on conservation‐related research using fossil, archaeological, and modern samples. The project successfully incorporated CPB approaches and taught research and soft skills useful in conservation; 85% of students subsequently pursued STEM graduate study or employment. However, because translational science partnerships with conservation practitioners were not sought, the research‐implementation gap remained. We propose a new model for REU sites involving conservation practitioners and stakeholders as partners in research that includes the human dimension and meets community needs, resulting in transdisciplinary, team‐focused training that yields actionable results. We recommend that the National Science Foundation encourage researchers to think beyond typical one‐on‐one mentorship when planning an REU, especially for conservation science projects.

    

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