There has been a lot of debate lately about the shape of the international currency system. Increasingly, we are told, the world is moving toward a multicurrency system with several poles, implying that the system is becoming more competitive. Polarity, however, is a notoriously crude measure of the level of competition in any kind of system, economic or political. If analysis is to be at all accurate, it should take into account not only the number of poles in a system but also the inequalities among them –an alternative approach encompassed by the concept of concentration. In this paper we make use of the concept of concentration to provide a more accurate picture of the competitive structure of the currency system today. When taking account of concentration as well as polarity, our results suggest that the competitive structure of the system is little changed over a period stretching back more than two decades.

Around the world adaptation projects are being implemented, with the hope of essentially climate proofing communities. While there is an abundance of failed adaptation schemes in developing and developed countries alike, there has been little scholarship on this problem. Through interviews with twenty-two climate change adaptation practitioners, we identify four structural challenges that contribute to maladaptation: the focus on technological fixes versus holistic approaches; the difficultly of distinguishing between adaptation and development; the problem of quantifying non-quantifiable variables; and the existence of competing problems given that failure to mainstream climate change adaptation. Addressing these maladaptation dynamics is necessary to enhance successful adaptation processes.

The growing concern of air quality and its associated health-related impacts has led to increased awareness of pollutant exposure. Most human populations spend the majority of their time indoors and the COVID-19 pandemic has likely exacerbated this behavior. While significant amounts of research have focused on outdoor air quality, to date there have been no studies that examined simultaneous long-term trends on indoor and outdoor air quality on a site using research-grade sensors. We measured fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) for a year using sensors located on the rooftop, air handling room, and indoor office space in a building and captured the impacts of three types of regularly occurring elevated pollution events: wintertime atmospheric inversions, wildfires, and fireworks. The events had different magnitudes and durations, and infiltration rates varied for each event leading to dissimilar indoor air pollution levels. The building's air handling unit and different environmental conditions (lower indoor humidity and temperature during the winter) combined to reduce indoor pollution from inversion events however, particulate matter from wildfires and fireworks infiltrated at higher rates. Together, this suggests possible intervention strategies, such as ventilation rates and filter upgrades, that could be used to mitigate contaminant intrusion during elevated pollution events. This year-long study illustrates an array of ways that elevated pollution events interact with the protective effects that buildings have against air pollution for its occupants. Furthermore, we show that outdoor air pollution is an important variable to consider when studying indoor air quality as contaminant infiltration is strongly dependent on the specific pollution source.

Vehicle emissions are a major source of pollution in urban communities and idling may contribute up to 34% or more to local air pollution levels. Reduced idling has been found to be an effective policy tool for improving air quality, especially around schools, where it may also improve outcomes for asthmatic children. We studied two anti-idling campaigns in Salt Lake County, Utah to understand if reduced engine idling leads to behavioral change and subsequent reduction in traffic-related air pollution exposure of the related school. We found a 38% decrease in idling time following an anti-idling campaign and an 11% decrease in the number of vehicles idling at the school drop-off zones. The air quality measurements showed improvement in the middle of the campaign, but seasonal variability as well as atmospheric inversion events had substantial effects on overall ambient pollutant concentrations. This study provides an encouraging starting point to develop more effective anti-idling campaigns to protect the health of children, school staff, and the surrounding community.

To better understand renewable energy uptake in emergingeconomies, we develop a typology of capitalism for 54 middle-income countries and use Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to test the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) theory to illustrate which type of capitalism produced successful or unsuccessful renewables projects in these states. We find that even when the VoC approach is properly specified for developing states, it only explains about 44% of the outcome. Despite this, four causal pathways of combined economic institutions from the VoC theory were found to be sufficient for explaining this phenomenon, but liberal institutions performed poorly in each case.