Global Changes - Local Stages investigates the relationships between what happened the last twenty years on the ‘world stage’ and how theatre life developed on the local level. The subject has been approached from three different angles, each covered by one part of the book: “The Effects of Social Changes on Theatre Fields”, “Values in Theatre Politics” and “Localization of Theatrical Values”. The group of authors tries to find the links between these three areas. The book profits from the fact that the authors come from two sides of the former ‘Wall’. Twenty years after its fall, the transitional processes in countries of the former ‘Eastern Bloc’ can be compared, not only mutually, but also with the changes in the Western part of Europe. With its 537 pages Global Changes - Local Stages is the most extensive research of the possible relationships between cultural change, theatre politics and theatre life in smaller European countries.

This text investigates the relationships between what happened the last 20 years on the world stage and how theater life developed on the local level in Western European countries.

Water Management Challenges in Global Change contains the proceedings of the 9th Computing and Control for the Water Industry (CCWI2007) and the Sustainable Urban Water Management (SUWM2007) conferences. The rationale behind these conferences is to improve the management of urban water systems through the development of computerbased methods. Issues such as economic globalisation, climate changes and water shortages call for a new approach to water systems management, which addresses the relevant technical, social and economic aspects. This collection represents the views of academic and industrial experts from a number of countries, who provide technical solutions to current water management problems and present a vision for addressing the global questions. The themes underlying many of the contributions include energy and material savings, water savings and the integration of different aspects of water management. The papers are grouped into three themes covering water distribution systems, sustainable urban water management and modelling of wastewater treatment plants. The water distribution topics cover asset and information management, planning, monitoring and control, hydraulic modelling of steady state and transients, water quality and treatment, demand and leakage management, optimisation, design and decision support systems, as well as reliability and security of water distribution systems. The sustainable urban water management topics include urban drainage systems, water reuse, social aspects of water management and also selected facets of water resources and irrigation. Computer control of wastewater treatment plants has been seen as less advanced than that of clean water systems. To address this imbalance, this book presents a number of modelling techniques developed specifically for these plants. Water Management Challenges in Global Change will prove to be invaluable to water and environmental engineering researchers and academics; managers, engineers and planners; and postgraduate students.

Global environmental change often seems to be the most carefully examined issue of our time. Yet understanding the human sideâ€"human causes of and responses to environmental changeâ€"has not yet received sustained attention. Global Environmental Change offers a strategy for combining the efforts of natural and social scientists to better understand how our actions influence global change and how global change influences us. The volume is accessible to the nonscientist and provides a wide range of examples and case studies. It explores how the attitudes and actions of individuals, governments, and organizations intertwine to leave their mark on the health of the planet. The book focuses on establishing a framework for this new field of study, identifying problems that must be overcome if we are to deepen our understanding of the human dimensions of global change, presenting conclusions and recommendations.

This latest Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will again form the standard reference for all those concerned with climate change and its consequences, including students, researchers and policy makers in environmental science, meteorology, climatology, biology, ecology, atmospheric chemistry and environmental policy.

Publisher description

During the summer of 1987, a series of discussions I was held at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (nASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, to plan a study of global vegetation change. The work was aimed at promoting the Interna tional Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), sponsored by the International Council of Scientific Unions (lCSU), of which nASA is a member. Our study was designed to provide initial guidance in the choice of approaches, data sets and objectives for constructing global models of the terrestrial biosphere. We hoped to provide substantive and concrete assistance in formulating the working plans of IGBP by involving program planners in the development and application of models which were assembled from available data sets and modeling ap proaches. Recent acceptance of the "nASA model" as the starting point for endeavors of the Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems Core Project of the IGBP suggests we were successful in that aim. The objective was implemented by our initiation of a mathematical model of global vegetation, including agriculture, as defined by the forces which control and change vegetation. The model was to illustrate the geographical consequences to vegetation structure and functioning of changing climate and land use, based on plant responses to environmental variables. The completed model was also expected to be useful for examining international environmental policy responses to global change, as well as for studying the validity of IIASA's experimental approaches to environmental policy development.