Incorporating localized perceptions of climatic impacts to livelihoods and traditions is critical to shaping effective adaptive climate change and disaster risk reduction strategies in the Greater Caucasus Mountains of Georgia. This study uses a phenomenological research framework to investigate the lived experience of climate and the associated impacts of its change in Upper Svaneti. In addition, a vulnerability assessment examines the social and environmental aspects of disasters, including localized perceptions. Results are drawn from eight months of field research conducted from 2012-2013. Multiple in-depth qualitative methods were implemented to generate rich descriptive data, giving way to the roles that environmental changes, disasters, and glacial recession play across six villages. Semi-structured interviews, key informant interviews, informal conversations, observations, participation, and six vulnerability assessments were undertaken. A thematic analysis of respondents narratives yielded themes of helplessness, fear, and perceived benefits. The resulting vulnerability assessment explores the social, economic, and political aspects that are constraining local capacities to prevent, mitigate, and recover from natural disasters.

It is strange that in a country of Canada's dimensions and regional diversities, the study of areal differentiation has advanced so little. Manufacturing is directly responsible for the means of livelihood of one-quarter of the population, and its development is popularly regarded as a barometer of economic maturity and nationhood. A long-awaited Seaway is now being constructed and speculation on area benefits and handicaps is rife. Yet the existing pattern of manufacturing, which forms the basis of future developments, remains uncharted. It is a purpose of this study to survey and present an initial differentiation of the manufacturing belt in central Canada, that area lying between the vicinity of Quebec City and Georgian Bay.

Land use has a major influence on water quality, and the issue is of great concern in developing world urban areas where there are competing land uses. Kumasi, Ghana like most cities in the developing world, struggles to control and prevent urban water supply pollution through appropriate water resource protection measures that minimize or eradicate adverse impacts of land uses. Presently all rivers in the city are highly polluted, including the one where raw-water is obtained for treatment and supply of potable water. This study investigates how sources of drinking water are impacted by land use in Kumasi, the implications associated with the impacts, community perceptions of urban land use impacts on sources of drinking water, and community adaptations to water supply problems. It relies on field data collected through semi-structured interviews, a transect walk conducted upstream from the source of public water supply, and a transect walk bisecting the river in each of two communities characterized by differing levels of economic affluence. The study also draws on other secondary data sources. Using these methods, the study finds that urban land use is increasing the nutrient content of the source of public water supply, threating water quality, reducing a water reservoirs storage capacity, increasing the cost of water treatment, and contributing to water supply restrictions causing water scarcity at the household level, especially in the poor urban community. As a result residents use various coping mechanisms to manage with water scarcity. To ensure sustainable water supply, there is the need to address land use challenges and the threats they pose for sources of public water supply, and this calls for collaboration among all departments, institutions, agencies, and interest groups involved in land use and water resource protection issues.

<p> In this dissertation research, I investigate two cases which exemplify a larger politics of multimodal transportation in Wisconsin: the 2010 Wisconsin high-speed rail (HSR) debate; and the 2011 debate over whether to add a bike path to Milwaukee's Hoan Bridge during its redecking. In both case studies, I trace the politics of these projects, and investigate how the decisions not to pursue these projects came to be legitimized. I approach these case studies using a transportation-focused politics of mobility framework, located at the intersection of transportation geography and new mobilities paradigm scholarship. Employing a range of qualitative methods, I find that not only were certain stakeholders (such as newly-elected politicians in state government, and Department of Transportation officials) significant in making decisions against these projects, but the way that transportation was thought about among the general public in Wisconsin served to legitimize the end of these projects. In the case of Wisconsin HSR, the original contribution I make is to demonstrate how the manner in which Wisconsin HSR was spatially conceptualized in the debate was ultimately significant for how the decision to abandon the project came to make logical sense to a majority of Wisconsin residents. Further, this case study contributes original insights into the meanings that HSR had for people in Wisconsin, which serves as a caution against overly rigid, national-scale explanations of why the project failed. In the case of the Hoan Bridge bike path, the original contribution is to empirically demonstrate how the tools of traffic engineering have embedded within them particular visions of how mobility and its spaces ought to be, and that this embedded bias can be concealed by claiming that such tools are scientific, and by implication, value-free. In addition to revealing this embedded bias, the case study demonstrates that the representation of these tools to the general public can be political. Taken together, these case studies suggest that productive work can be done at the intersection of transportation geography and mobilities research by using this politics of mobility framework. Further, these case studies underline the fact that debates over transportation involve a range of competing interests, beliefs, normative values, and meanings that are bound up with transportation, and that these aspects deserve greater attention in transportation geography and mobilities research.</p>

“Operation Hazen,” sponsored by the Defence Research Board, Department of National Defence, Ottawa, was a three-phase expedition forming part of the Canadian contribution to the International Geophysical Year. The first phase of the expedition, from May, 1957 to August, 1958, involved the establishment of a base camp on the shores of Lake Hazen, and the setting up of an “Icecap” station on the Gilman Glacier. At the latter camp, a programme of glaciological, meteorological, survey and seismic work was carried out during field season of 1957.

Location of the Stanstead area. The Stanstead area comprises a region approximately 230 square miles in extent in the southwestern part of the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Including Stanstead Township, the southern parts of Hatley and Hagog townships, and the western edge of Barnston Township, it occupies the eastern half of the Memphremagog topographic map sheet (31 H/L), the eastern and northern boundaries being those of the map sheet, the western boundary, Lake Memphremagog, and the southern, the International Boundary between Quebec and Vermont.

The problem is to make a separate study of the fishing and farming occupations in order to find out the main weaknesses of each one. At the same time, the most importnat measures for the improvement of each occupation are pointed out, and finally, an analysis is made of the effects which these improvements and consequent specialization have on the economic and social structure of the combination of occupations.

The Island of Jamaica, lying in the northwest of the Caribbean Archipelago, is experiencing a critical stage in its economic development. The welfare of the island depends almost entirely on land utilization, and it is to a peculiar degree dependent on the soil. There are no manufactures based on imported raw materials, and the minor manufacturing industries are merely the processing of agricultural products. Moreover, there are no considerable exports other than agricultural commodities. At the same time, farming is in a backward condition.

Twenty-five years ago a geomorphologist, N. M. Fenneman, discussed what he called “the circumference of geography”. On that circumference Fenneman placed climatology, biogeography, commercial geography, political geography, mathematical geography, and physiography (geomorphology); all of which overlapped, in both data and techniques, the territories of related disciplines. If geography consisted of no more than an aggregate of these peripheral subjects, said Fenneman, it would have little right to exist.

There are about 750 Eskimos living round the shores of Ungava Bay in northernmost Quebec (Fig. 1), all of whom, except the few permanently employed by whites, are recipients of government relief rations for part or all of the year. Their experience of white culture consists solely of contacts with traders, missionaries and for a few of them, contacts with a war-time American air base, Department of Transport Meteorological Stations, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, nurses of the Indian Health Service, and, in the last few years, summer employment with prospectors and surveyors.