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Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2006. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file viewed on (April 26, 2007) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Göteborg University. / Thesis t.p. inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-208).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Montana State University, 2004. / Title from PDF title page (viewed Jan. 8, 2005). Includes bibliographical references.

Includes bibliographical references / This thesis explores the relationship between the commercial insurance industry, global environmental change (GEC) and what Beck (1992; 1999) termed the 'risk society'. In recent decades, there have been growing concerns that many of the risks impacting contemporary society have undergone fundamental changes. Many of these risks are increasingly being linked to the unintended consequences of humankind's remarkable progress in science and technology, and have been described as debounded, given that they so often transcend both geographical and temporal boundaries (Beck 1992). Within the risk society, the commercial insurance industry - which relies on statistical (actuarial) analysis to help it assess and manage its risk exposure - has been described as demarcating the frontier barrier between bounded (i.e. insurable) and debounded (i.e. uninsurable) risk. However, this claim has been a highly contested one, leading to calls for more empirical data to help clarify how commercial insurance is actually responding under conditions of uncertainty. Of all the debounded risks, GEC has emerged as one of the risk society's most recognisable. Now understood to be a result of the anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gasses, particularly since the onset of the industrial revolution, its impacts have risen so sharply in recent decades that it has prompted claims that Earth has moved away from the era of the Holocene and into the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002). Given that at least 40% of the cost of environmental catastrophes is now borne by commercial insurance, GEC provides an excellent opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of how the industry is responding to debounded risk at the risk society's frontier barrier. Early commentators suggested that the commercial insurance industry would be well motivated to respond proactively to GEC, by taking a more mitigative approach to managing its drivers at both the global and local levels. However, the industry, so far, has been described as more adaptive of its own business activities than mitigative. This raises questions about whether such claims are true across all three of the insurance industry's activities - as risk carriers, risk managers and as investors, why they have responded in such ways, and what implications this has for broadening our understanding of the complex relationship between commercial insurance, debounded risk and the risk society's frontier barrier. To consider these questions, a collective case study was undertaken with a variety of commercial insurance companies, re-insurers, asset managers, clients, brokers, industry associations and regulators across South Africa, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Belgium. The research identified how commercial insurers have indeed responded more by adaptation of their business activities than mitigation of the drivers of GEC. This is mainly through the use of defensive underwriting to help them manage their exposure. However, the research extends this analysis by highlighting some of the nuances of the industry's response. This includes its focus on centralisation, the influence of the existing paradigm framing its understanding of risk, and by highlighting the irony that the area of insurers' activities, initially believed to be most suited for responding to GEC (i.e. their investment portfolios), have, in practice, been the area recording the least response. In exploring why this is so, the study draws on understandings of the Anthropocene to argue that commercial insurers are finding their existing risk assessment tools progressively out-dated in a world where risk is no longer as predictable as it once was. This is further compounded by increasingly plural access to the risk society's science and technologies, which, in some instances, are undermining the role commercial insurance plays as society's primary financial risk manager. This raises questions around the role commercial insurance plays in demarcating the risk society's frontier barrier which, ultimately, has far broader implications for why so many of society's institutions are struggling to adapt to risk in the 21st Century.

This synthesis article joins the authors of the special issue "Gender perspectives in resilience, vulnerability and adaptation to global environmental change" in a common reflective dialogue about the main contributions of their papers. In sum, here we reflect on links between gender and feminist approaches to research in adaptation and resilience in global environmental change (GEC). The main theoretical contributions of this special issue are threefold: emphasizing the relevance of power relations in feminist political ecology, bringing the livelihood and intersectionality approaches into GEC, and linking resilience theories and critical feminist research. Empirical insights on key debates in GEC studies are also highlighted from the nine cases analysed, from Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Pacific. Further, the special issue also contributes to broaden the gender approach in adaptation to GEC by incorporating research sites in the Global North alongside sites from the Global South. This paper examines and compares the main approaches adopted (e.g. qualitative or mixed methods) and the methodological challenges that derive from intersectional perspectives. Finally, key messages for policy agendas and further research are drawn from the common reflection.

The geographical distributions of many species are changing in response to rapid environmental change, and lags between the emergence and colonisation of new habitat areas are common. Given many species distributions are not at equilibrium with the environment, a greater understanding of the processes that underpin range expansion is required to predict where lags might emerge. Here I explore how population processes lead to emergent patterns of occupancy from the core to the edge of the species range. Working with water voles (Arvicola amphibius) in the UK, I carry out large scale surveys of a recovering metapopulation to explore the contribution of environment and the colonisation process in limiting range extent. I then use experimental translocations of water voles to quantify drivers of colonisation and local persistence, and the spatial scale over which these processes operate. I also explore the role of sociality and conspecific attraction in driving the formation of local populations at low landscape densities, and investigate the potential for between-individual variation in a behavioural trait to influence the formation of these spatial structures. Onward expansion was limited by the spatial scale of the colonisation process, and abrupt declines in occupancy at the range edge suggest that immigration increased the chance of local persistence. Social attraction led to build up of local populations, while more distant, equally suitable habitat area remained vacant. Using an individual based modelling approach, I then test the effect of different dispersal strategies on the rate of range expansion for biologically realistic mating systems. Mating finding requirements lead to slower expansion, though avoiding high density patches and mate-searching reduced these lags. Lags may emerge from processes across a range of spatial scales, though species translocations may offer a potential tool for mitigating these lags, and prevent substantial declines in geographical distributions.

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Johannesburg, 2016. / In current Middle Stone Age research there is interest in understanding whether climatic and environmental factors played a role in behaviours related to subsistence, mobility patterns and material culture production. From a palaeoenvironmental perspective, the southern Cape is recognized as an important study region for exploring the link, if any, between past environmental conditions and key MSA occurrences. The research presented in this thesis aimed to contribute to the existing database of past environments in the southern Cape through the geochemical analysis of speleothems from a previously uninvestigated locality in the De Hoop Nature Reserve. Together, the De Hoop speleothems provide a discontinuous record of environmental change from marine oxygen isotope stage MIS 5a to MIS 3 (and the Holocene). Results from the De Hoop records indicate warm summer rain and C4 vegetation in early MIS 5a (c. 85 ka to 80 ka) but more variability by late MIS 5a (c. 79 ka to 74 ka). At Klasies River main site, also on the southern Cape coast, the upper MSA II is associated with the warm early MIS 5a conditions. At Blombos Cave, another important coastal MSA site, the Still Bay occurring within terminal MIS 5a was linked to warm but more variable late MIS 5a conditions. While early MIS 4 (c. 73 ka to 68 ka) was comparatively cooler, conditions were similar to those in early MIS 5a. From this research, the earlier phase of the Howiesons Poort at Klasies River main site and the Howiesons Poort at Klipdrift Shelter were correlated with the early MIS 4 conditions in De Hoop. By late MIS 4 (c. 67 ka to 60 ka), conditions remained cool, but were seemingly more variable than during the earlier part of this iii stage / GR2016

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