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This document sets out the evidence for why resilient rangelands matter to Kazakhstan’speople, its nature and its national development. It draws on evidence from the SNAPPResilient Rangelands project (https://snappartnership.net/team/resilient-rangelands/) andthe wider scientific literature. The project brings together RSPB, ACBK and researchers fromthe Science for Nature and People Partnership (SNAPP) Resilient Rangelands Working Groupto build the evidence base for managing Kazakhstan’s rangelands for people, livestock andnature together. It is an advocacy document. It is not a scientific paper or a formal policy brief.Its purpose is to inform and open debate across ministries, not to set out specific actions.It is written first for a reader in the Ministry of Agriculture. The argument is built on sharedgoals rather than environmental concerns alone. Resilient rangelands are the foundationof Kazakhstan’s livestock sector. Protecting that foundation is the same task as growingthe sector.It is organised in two parts. The executive summary sets out six key messages. Each messageis a short argument with its central evidence. The chapters that follow give the full supportingdetail. They cover what a resilient rangeland is, what it provides, what keeps it resilient, whaterodes it, a West Kazakhstan case study, what policy can do, and examples of good practice.Sources are numbered in the text. The References list them in full, with links. Internal SNAPPResilient Rangelands and other project sources are flagged as such throughout.A resilient rangeland is one that keeps providing forage, water and livelihoods through droughtand disturbance, and recovers when the pressure eases. Resilience is about function heldover time, both productive and ecological, not the condition of the land at a single moment.It is a more precise idea than a “healthy” or a “protected” rangeland. It is also not the same asleaving land unused. Most of Kazakhstan’s rangeland is working land, and moderate, mobilegrazing is itself a source of resilience. Section 02 develops this definition in full.

The engineering of resilient cyber-physical systems requires collaborative development and analysis of models from different disciplines, including discrete-event models of software and continuous-time models of physical plant. This paper describes a rigorous approach to the model-based design of such systems through co-simulation of discrete-event models in the Vienna Development Method (VDM) and continuous-time models in 20-sim. These are coupled by a co-simulation tool that coordinates the execution of the models in their respective simulators. Co-models can be augmented with descriptions of potential failures and fault tolerance mechanisms, allowing early stage evaluation of alternatives before a commitment is made to realising functionality in the cyber or physical side. We describe the content of an emerging methodology for co-model develop- ment, co-simulation and design space exploration, presenting a case study and two examples from the library of design patterns developed for this setting.

This report examines trends in business performance and confidence among sampled firms in the South of Scotland between July 2022 and July 2025. It draws on seven waves of the South of Scotland Enterprise (SOSE) Business Panel Survey, each with 590 to 609 responding businesses. Respondents said whether their employment, sales/turnover, exports and profit margins had increased, stayed the same or decreased over the previous six months, and rated Scotland's general economic outlook. Overlapping pressures marked the period: the after-effects of Covid-19, trading frictions following EU exit, high inflation and interest rates, and fiscal policy changes that raised business costs. Profit margins and exports remained under pressure throughout. The findings point to cautious adaptation rather than confident recovery: businesses continue to operate, but lack the confidence or headroom to invest, expand or export. The report is an output of the Novel Insights on Scotland's Rural and Island Economies (NISRIE) project within the Scottish Government's Strategic Research Programme 2022–2027.

Report on the impact of Epichloë research. Aotearoa New Zealand's pastoral agriculture depends on good grass. During the 1900s, however, ryegrass staggers was a significant problem for the health and welfare of grazing animals and farmers were in urgent need of a solution. A breakthrough came in 1981 when researchers made the critical discovery that an endophyte was the cause of ryegrass staggers. Scientists found that ryegrass hosts Epichloë; a fungal endophyte which lives within ryegrass and gains all its nutrients from the grass. In return, Epichloë produces chemicals that protect ryegrass from insects and help it survive drought. Some of these chemicals are, however, toxic to grazing animals.Because ryegrass is the mainstay of Aotearoa New Zealand's pastures, and the primary feed for livestock, this was a real challenge for farmers. They were faced with a trade-off between robust, high-yielding ryegrass that could cause health problems for their animals, or ryegrass that did not cause animal health problems but was not as robust or high-yielding. Bioeconomy Science Institute Maiangi Taiao researchers embarked on the ambitious quest to develop new Epichloë strains that would protect ryegrass without harming animals.Four decades later that fundamental research has grown into a multidisciplinary endophyte commercialisation pipeline, with a science / industry partnership at its core. This impact case study provides an overview of how this innovation has increased agricultural productivity by increasing the persistence and productivity of ryegrass while eliminating or reducing detrimental effects on animals.What started as detective work to solve an animal health problem has become one of Aotearoa New Zealand's agricultural science partnership success stories. The collaboration between what are now the Bioeconomy Science Institute, Grasslanz Technology Limited and PGG Wrightson Seeds Limited, the endophyte technology they developed, and the successful commercialisation model, demonstrates a pathway for science to deliver major benefits to farmers, enhancing our bioeconomy.

Discussions of local and regional development have recently broadened from a preoccupation with growth to one which captures the notion of resilience. This paper makes two main contributions to these debates. First, the paper critiques static equilibrium-based notions of resilience and instead advances a more dynamic evolutionary approach to explain local and regional resilience. Second, we seek to address the widening gap between resilience thinking and its transfer to practical policy prescription. To do this, we explore the notions of adaptability, adaptive capacity and new path creation in developing local and regional resilience. We then focus upon what this might mean for local and regional strategies and draw on the case study of the Renewable Energy sector in North East England to demonstrate the enduring role of policy intervention in stimulating change and building resilience in peripheral regions.

This paper describes the design of an object replication scheme for the Arjuna distributed system. The design supports K-resiliency, where, in the absence of network partitions, K out of a total of K+1 replica failures can be tolerated before an object becomes unavailable. The scheme chosen employs active replication where each and every functioning replica of an object carries out processing. Computations are structured as atomic actions (atomic transactions). The paper presents the details of how object groups are created and terminated, how a group can be invoked and object replicas inserted and removed in a consistent manner in the presence of node failures.

Sustainable development in the Global South is the most effective long-term mechanism for reducing global vulnerability to the interconnected challenges of climate stress, public health risks, food insecurity, demographic pressures, institutional fragility, and economic instability collectively described as the “polycrisis.” The monograph contends that risk is driven not only by environmental hazards themselves, but by the exposure and vulnerability of rapidly growing populations in regions lacking resilient infrastructure, reliable energy systems, effective healthcare, adaptive governance, and productive economic capacity. The study develops a broad framework linking economic convergence, technological diffusion, and resilience building. It examines how investments in energy access, climate-resilient agriculture, healthcare systems, digital public infrastructure, distributed clean technologies, education, and institutional capacity can substantially reduce disaster vulnerability while accelerating economic growth. The analysis emphasizes that development functions as adaptation: as countries accumulate productive capital and strengthen institutions, mortality, displacement, conflict risk, and economic losses from environmental shocks decline dramatically. A central theme is the contrast between two futures. In a convergence scenario, developing economies successfully adopt modern technologies, expand infrastructure, improve human capital, and gain access to affordable financing, resulting in lower displacement pressures, stronger social stability, and reduced global systemic risk. In a divergence scenario, stalled development amplifies fragility, migration pressures, conflict dynamics, and international instability. The report concludes that coordinated investment in Southern development is not merely a humanitarian objective but a strategic global necessity, proposing a “Polycrisis Insulation Compact” that aligns finance, technology, governance, and human capital development to create a more resilient and prosperous world by midcentury.

This report presents the results of from the development of prototype tool support to demonstrate metadata-based dynamic resilience, and a set of research issues that outline further work to improve the fidelity of the tool support and mature the resilience framework. The problem addressed by the work is the provision of support for dynamic reconfiguration in the context of Network Enabled Capability, by maintaining resilience dynamically. Resilience is defined as the ability of a system to maintain a dependable service while assimilating change, without loss of functionality. To achieve the required level of resilience requires the availability at run-time of dependability explicit metadata, information about system components which can govern decision-making about reconfiguration. This report is in two parts. The first part describes the experiment, which is used to illustrate how metadata-based reconfiguration can be more resilient to change than a system with a static configuration. This experiment is a deterministic simulation which is instrumented to allow the properties and configuration of the system to be read and altered. The second part discusses the simplifications used in the experiment, describes the issues which need to be considered in order to improve the fidelity of the experiment, and presents a set of research issues for further development of the resilience approach in terms of the metadata, provenance and policy definitions which make up the framework. The key results from the experiment efforts are the understanding of the properties that would be required of a simulation platform to gain a realistic confidence in the approach. The main requirements are a high fidelity simulation of a system-ofsystems (SoS), with a valid model of the component failures. This would allow the effectiveness of the transfer of metadata and the decisions made upon it to be assessed. A set of six properties is provided that may be used to guide the definition of metadata for a component or SoS. The main research issues are the generation of ontologies of metadata by examination of existing systems, and the exploration of protocols used to ensure that components within the SoS get the metadata they need in a timely manner.The means for generating policies is seen as the biggest research issue in that particular area, with the policies presented in an earlier deliverable been programmatic and too fine grained for use in a battlespace situation. An approach using natural language terms is suggested and related work from the security community is discussed. The final research issue relates to provenance metadata. Here the provenance structure used during in the experiment is presented and shown to be of use for detecting data incest and data repudiation. The work reported in this document remains at an early stage and is still relatively low Technology Readiness Level (TRL). The research issues section addresses the developments in the approach which would be required in order to increase its maturity

We argue that principles from the design of dependable software, especially separation of concerns and the use of formality, can be applied beneficially in the construction of self-managing systems. We illustrate this approach by presenting an experimental architecture for dynamic and resilient computer-based systems which utilises component metadata to govern reconfigurations in accordance with formally stated policies. Initial experiments with the architecture are described. We argue that the architecture describes a self-organising system and, further, provides a basis for self-managing systems.

The West Coast of Aotearoa is classified as rural or remote rural (1). The Alpine Fault traverses the entirety of the 600km region and has a 75% chance of rupture causing a magnitude 8.1 earthquake within the next 60 years, codenamed by civil defence as ‘AF8’ (2). Primary health teams play a significant role in disaster response. MethodsThe first stage of research included a narrative literature review, focussing on Alpine Fault disaster modelling and disaster preparedness or response for rural/remote primary care teams in Australia and Aotearoa. The second stage of the research involved semi-structured interviews with current general practitioners on the West Coast. Interviews took place via Zoom; data was transcribed, anonymised and considered using content analysis. Ethics approval was attained through the UoO, approval 25/1319. Ngai Tahu Research Committee consultation was undertaken. Informed consent was attained from all participants. Results Literature review included 11 papers. Key findings included:The role of the GP in educating patients about preparedness, particularly regarding medication access (3). Establishing staff and personal response plans (4).Coordination within the organisation and inter-agency (3), including cultural (4). Addressing the practicalities of business continuity (5). Three virtual semi-structured interviews were undertaken. All participants were general practitioners, who were currently practising in central Greymouth (R1) at practices funded by Te Whatu Ora. One participant attended weekly clinics in a more remote location. Overall, participants revealed a general sense of not being fully prepared. The essential points considered:GPs were aware that plans for disaster management had been made, but they were unsure of the details and how it may relate to them. GPs sought clarity regarding their role in disaster response. Discussion Literature findings regarding business continuity practicalities were mentioned in interviews; however, participants felt that the information had not "flowed through to…frontline staff." Interviewees noted uncertainty regarding staff organisation and their role in disaster response. This was a feature of literature findings. Concerns regarded the GP’s responsibility to the practice versus family, access to clinics, and communication amongst professionals. This was particularly relevant given the geography and facilities of the West Coast. There was little mention of the GPs role in educating patients prior to disaster. Literature revealed that patient education regarding medication, vaccination, infection control, use of grab bags and access to resources would be beneficial. However, interviewees displayed agreement that the West Coast population is generally resilient, resourceful, and has a strong sense of community. The key limitations of this paper included sample size (n=3) and participant characteristics. Because the interviews were conducted with practitioners working at the same R1, publicly funded/ TWO clinic, information may not represent views across the wider West Coast region. Results from semi-structured interviews have revealed two key points for further exploration : dissemination of disaster preparedness actions to GPs, and role clarification for the GP in disaster. Conclusions The topography of the West Coast region and proximity to the Alpine Fault makes it vulnerable to devastation following an AF8 event. Analysis of literature revealed four themes: patient education, personal preparedness, business continuity, and coordination and integration. Many of these points were mentioned by participants in semi-structured interviews. These revealed a general sense of a need for further disaster preparedness, particularly related to disseminating plans to clinicians, and clarification of the general practitioner’s role in disaster.

Executive Summary This report presents key insights from the 1st Symposium on Diversity of News Media Diets and its Effect on Democratic Citizenship held in April 2025 in Amsterdam. The event gathered 35 experts in the field and panellists from six European countries. It was convened thanks to the financial support of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science (KNAW) Early Career Partnership program awarded to Sílvia Majó-Vázquez assistant professor of Communication Science at the VU Amsterdam. The report includes the expert analysis and contribution of the organizing committee members, comprising the KNAW’s grant recipient alongside Mariken van der Velden, professor of political communication of the VU Amsterdam, Felicia Loecherbach, assistant professor at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research and Nicolas Mattis, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Amsterdam. The symposium had one specific goal: to promote, protect and understand citizens' exposure to diverse news information. And it was organized around two questions. First, what are the effects of the EMFA’s right to media customisation on democratic citizenship? And second, how can we study online news exposure patterns to understand the consequences of that right? This report aim to contribute to addressing these questions. They key points covered in it are summarised below: A new regulatory framework pending significant definitions. The EMFA is now actively reshaping the environment in which citizens encounter news. Through its right to media customisation (Article 19) and its safeguards for the visibility of media content on very large online platforms (Article 17), the Act gives citizens and media providers a new lever over exposure diversity. Its practical effect, however, will depend on design and implementation. The new regulatory framework does not cover recommender systems, and it is silent on the minimum options users should have when changing default settings. Without those specifications, the rights’ effects on information exposure is currently undefined. The experts agree that the EMFA’s reach is limited by an unresolved definitional question: “who is the media?”. Its service-based definition of a media service provider excludes some of the most vulnerable actors in the information ecosystem, and self-declaration leaves the decision to platforms’ discretion. The right of media customization could deepen fragmentation rather than repair it. Because the right could, in principle, narrow rather than widen news diets, its roll-out warrants close monitoring for unintended democratic consequences. Access to diverse information doesn't guarantee a more resilient public. A diverse supply is necessary but not sufficient, and its effects on citizens are real but conditional according to the evidence available. Availability of media options does not guarantee engagement, and the same diverse content can inform or mislead, build trust or corrode it, depending on the identities, habits, and peer relationships through which audiences process it. Deliberately engineering desirable outcomes through exposure diversity is genuinely difficult. Experts warn that facilitating one outcome can come at the expense of another, and interventions can even backfire. Exposure diversity is a multi-level construct, and how we measure it shapes what we conclude about its effects. It spans topics, actors, and viewpoints, and no single index captures it fully. The choice of measure should follow from the normative goal and the data at hand. Identifying viewpoints, in particular, remains an especially hard methodological challenge for both human and automated approaches. Substantial gaps remain in what we know about exposure diversity and its effects. We still do not understand how heavily non-traditional practices including influencers, podcasters, and peer-mediated flows, among others, weigh in citizens’ overall media mix, how they interact with conventional consumption, or how that interaction shapes democratic engagement across social groups. Closing these gaps calls for wider measurement frameworks, attention to how informed citizens feel, multi-method “linkage designs” that also incorporate qualitative approaches

The ongoing aim behind the work described here is to investigate support for a data centre type environment where an application can be implemented as a composition of components, or workflow. For instance, an application might reuse established components. As is typical in data centre operation, hosting of an application is governed by a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between provider and application owner. Such an SLA describes levels of service and corresponding charges (paid to the provider) and refunds (paid by the provider). The infrastructure can of course vary mapping of hosted applications to machine resources in seeking to meet SLAs efficiently. However, it is also possible to dynamically vary the mapping of composite application to components; for instance to switch between alternate implementations of some particular component. The suggestion is that the availability of alternative components, or even compositions, will arise naturally in a shared repository, and that the presence of the extra degree of control can make the application hosting more resilient. While previous work by the authors has demonstrated basic mechanisms towards a composite service data centre, the current work begins to combine such mechanisms towards the control of both resource and component mapping in the context of concurrent workloads. The paper describes experimental work using a prototype implementation of an adaptive workflow engine.