This article is a study of water scarcity in Cyprus, examining the implications on the demand and supply side of water under the transformations caused by economic development, urbanisation and environmental changes. Measures and actions taken by water stakeholders to tackle the water poverty issue are discussed and assessed, together with possible future solution methods. In the light of the success of global climate models to forecast future conditions and advances in integrated management tools, the suggestion here is the need for a global systems approach to help guide policy decisions.

Generally speaking, crime is, fortunately, a rare event. As far as modelling is concerned, this sparsity of data means that traditional measures to quantify concentration are not appropriate when applied to crime suffered by a population. Our objective is to develop a new technique to measure the concentration of crime which takes into account its low frequency of occurrence and its high degree of concentration in such a way that this measure is comparable over time and over different populations.

We present a simple mathematical model to replicate the key features of the sterile insect technique (SIT) for controlling pest species, with particular reference to the mosquito Aedes aegypti, the main vector of dengue fever. The model differs from the majority of those studied previously in that it is simultaneously spatially explicit and involves pulsed, rather than continuous, sterile insect releases. The spatially uniform equilibria of the model are identified and analysed. Simulations are performed to analyse the impact of varying the number of release sites, the interval between pulsed releases and the overall volume of sterile insect releases on the effectiveness of SIT programmes. Results show that, given a fixed volume of available sterile insects, increasing the number of release sites and the frequency of releases increases the effectiveness of SIT programmes. It is also observed that programmes may become completely ineffective if the interval between pulsed releases is greater that a certain threshold value and that, beyond a certain point, increasing the overall volume of sterile insects released does not improve the effectiveness of SIT. It is also noted that insect dispersal drives a rapid recolonisation of areas in which the species has been eradicated and we argue that understanding the density dependent mortality of released insects is necessary to develop efficient, cost-effective SIT programmes.

Motivated by the dynamics of a trimaran, an investigation of the dynamic behaviour of a double forcing parametrically excited system is carried out. Initially, we provide an outline of the stability regions, both numerically and analytically, for the undamped linear, extended version of the Mathieu equation. This paper then examines the anticipated form of response of our proposed nonlinear damped double forcing system, where periodic and quasiperiodic routes to chaos are graphically demonstrated and compared with the case of the single vertically-driven pendulum.

A person’s perception of the level of security at a specific location depends on many factors, including past experiences in that location, the actual crime suffered by the population and more. Thus, when the individual perception that a location is insecure becomes the general rule is when the perception of security becomes an attribute of the region rather than the fears of some of its individuals, hence the relevance of aggregating individual perceptions of security into a single regional perception of security. Residents of two different regions, which have the same levels of crime, of a similar nature, may have different perceptions of the level of security. The perception of security associated with a particular place is relevant by itself but is much more useful when compared to the perception of other regions or when the perception changes over time and hence a ranking of the perception levels from different places would be a useful tool. A metric is suggested here to determine first the regional perception of security from a location and then to quantify its relationship with different victimisation rates. We quantify the relationship between the perception of security and different victimisation rates, based on data obtained from Mexico through victimisation surveys.