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The paper aims to enhance the understanding of the impacts of climate change on rural communities in Africa, including people’s livelihoods, their adaptive capacity, coping practice and ability to engage in sustainable forest use and management of climate change adaptation.

The paper opted for a desktop review approach, using the forest-based rural communities of South Africa as a case study.

This review shows that climate variability and change are affecting rural people and their livelihoods negatively. Forest-based livelihoods are particularly vulnerable. Nevertheless, the people have developed coping mechanisms to cushion the effects of climate variability and change. However, the effectiveness and efficiency of these strategies are greatly constrained by factors that are related mostly to their socioeconomic characteristics (for example, skill level, educational status and health) and the functionalities of infrastructures and services in their communities.

Given that the study focused on forest-based rural communities and livelihoods, the results may be limited in generalizability. This may have particular implications for other categories of rural communities and livelihoods in Africa and developing countries in other continents.

The study showed that opportunities for planning and implementing effective climate change adaptation at rural community level in South Africa are reliant on effective strategies to overcome the constraints identified by the study. The authors thus recommend that climate change adaptation initiatives in rural communities of Africa should focus on improving people’s socioeconomic conditions and the overall sustainable development of the community.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study how climate change affects rural forest-based communities and livelihoods.

The purpose of this study is to propose a bearer service, which generates and maintains a “digital doppelgänger” for every financial contract in the form of a dynamic transaction document that is a standardised “data facility” automatically making important contract data from the transaction counterparties available to relevant authorities mandated by law to request and process such data. This would be achieved by sharing certain elements of the dynamic transaction document on a bearer service, based on a federation of distribution ledgers; such a quasi-simultaneous sharing of risk data becomes possible because the dynamic transaction document maintain a record of state in semi-real time, and this state can be verified by anybody with access to the distribution ledgers, also in semi-real time.

In this paper, the authors propose a novel, regular technology (RegTech) cum automated legal text approach for financial transaction as well as financial risk reporting that is based on cutting-edge distributed computing and decentralised data management technologies such as distributed ledger (Swanson, 2015), distributed storage (Arner et al., 2016; Chandra et al., 2013; Caron et al., 2014), algorithmic financial contract standards (Brammertz and Mendelowitz, 2014; Breymann and Mendelowitz, 2015; Braswell, 2016), automated legal text (Hazard and Haapio, 2017) and document engineering methods and techniques (Glushko and McGrath, 2005). This approach is equally inspired by the concept of the “bearer service” and its capacity to span over existing and future technological systems and substrates (Kavassalis et al., 2000; Clark, 1988).

The result is a transformation of supervisors’ capacity to monitor risk in the financial system based on data which preserve informational content of financial instruments at the most granular level, in combination with a mathematically robust time stamping approach using blockchain technology.

The RegTech approach has the potential to contain operational risk linked to inadequate handling of risk data and to rein in compliance cost of supervisory reporting.

The present RegTech approach to financial risk monitoring and supervisory reporting is the first integration of algorithmic financial data standards with blockchain functionality.

The purpose of the study was to determine the major criteria for a credible integrated development planning (IDP) process in Mbombela municipality, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa.

The study utilizes a combination of sequential exploratory and explanatory mixed methods. About 120 key informants participated in the structured questionnaire, and a further seven interviews were conducted as elite interviews. Four multistakeholder workshop sessions with up to sixty-six participants each were conducted.

To strengthen the integrated planning in local government, the study recommended “stakeholder participation and ownership,” “leadership and accountability,” “impact and outcome-based focus,” “a compact value chain” and “monitoring and evaluation.”

The IDP process is a tactical planning gadget designed to achieve transformation and introduce new systems of governance. IDPs currently tend to lack standard criteria to measure their performance in promoting public leadership and responding to community needs, which is a major challenge in many municipalities across South Africa. Since its introduction in 2000 to fast-track service delivery, concerns have been raised about why there are still constant protests alleged to be caused by poor service delivery.

THE ART OR PRINTING was first introduced into Cumberland in 1735 when Thomas Cotton came to Whitehaven at the invitation of Sir James Lowther. Whitehaven was at that time an expanding town with a growing trade with Ireland and the colonies of Maryland and Virginia.

Using case study analysis, this paper aims to examine the application of capacity development perspectives, critical towards urban tourism that is inclusive and regenerative.

The study design used a mixed qualitative methods approach underpinned by the inclusive tourism development framework following Scheyvens and Biddulph (2017). This comprised in-depth interviews, focus groups and observational research. A community-based approach was adopted in a diverse cultural and socio-economic field setting.

The findings demonstrate that people who are marginalised hold valuable tacit knowledge and unique skills that can complement expert tourism knowledge and contribute to the development of more sustainable places and inclusive communities. This finding challenges claims that capacity development must occur before their participation. Local government, alongside non-government organisations and community groups, were found to have a significant role to play in ensuring that residents and people who are marginalised are included in sustainable tourism development.

This study contributes to the burgeoning discourse regarding stakeholder capacity development and readiness for inclusion in urban tourism initiatives. Importantly, regenerative development approaches are applied within the gambit of capacity development making this a unique attempt to integrate stakeholders into the design and implementation of tourism planning processes that uphold inclusive and regenerative priorities.

This paper aims to summarize the microstructure characterization of parts that were produced using a hybrid manufacturing process consisting of laser metal deposition (LMD) and friction stir processing (FSP). This research was conducted to investigate the evolution of the microstructure following FSP and LMD and to study the possibility of producing or repairing parts with a forged-like microstructure using this hybrid technique.

The microstructure of the nugget regions obtained in the substrate weld, stir over deposit and deposit over stir experiments was investigated.

Highly refined grain size in the order of 1-2 μm was observed where FSP was performed over laser-deposited Ti–6Al–4V. Large equiaxed grains were observed in the experiment where subsequent deposition was carried over the stir. A decreasing grain size was also observed in the dilution zone (DZ) inside the nugget from the stir surface to the bottom of the DZ.

A highly refined microstructure formed from FSP is able to increase the fatigue life by delaying the fatigue crack initiation. Peters et al. (1980) reported that reducing the grain size from 12-15 μm to 1-2 μm in an equiaxed Ti–6Al–4V alloy corresponded with about 25 per cent increase in fatigue strengths at 10,000,000 cycles.

This proposed technical approach is a novel and effective method to produce forged-like parts using a metal additive manufacturing process.

THE Fifty‐First Conference of the Library Association takes place in the most modern type of British town. Blackpool is a typical growth of the past fifty years or so, rising from the greater value placed upon the recreations of the people in recent decades. It has the name of the pleasure city of the north, a huge caravansary into which the large industrial cities empty themselves at the holiday seasons. But Blackpool is more than that; it is a town with a vibrating local life of its own; it has its intellectual side even if the casual visitor does not always see it as readily as he does the attractions of the front. A week can be spent profitably there even by the mere intellectualist.

‘The public library is the research library for small firms in the locality. It is the place where administrative and technical workers can go to keep up with their subject and where the answer to many inquiries can be found…. Specialists using the library service can expect to be served by people familiar with their subjects to a fairly high level and knowledgeable in the relevant literature and terminology.’