Hydraulic improvement aimed to abolish recurrent flooding in wetland commons and generate an environment capable of supporting intensive cultivation. In practice, however, the interventions of Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden and his collaborators created new flooding in unfamiliar patterns and places. As communities were left more exposed to risk and less able to adapt or recover, a fraught hydro-politics rippled out of drainage in Hatfield Level, pivoting on disputes over risk and responsibility. Displacing customary methods of water management, improved hydraulic systems generated institutional as well as environmental disruption. In 1635, a new sewer commission was established to manage Hatfield Level as a hydrological unit defined by improvement. Lacking legitimacy, it struggled to control flow, contain disorderly commoners, or compel cooperation from improving landowners. Wetland communities negotiated new risks by adapting customary practices, launching petitioning campaigns, and high-profile destruction of improved infrastructure during the English civil wars. In this context, water management became highly politicised and precariously balanced.

The chapter examines the extensive parallels between the Gospel and Epistles of John, concluding that these connections result from deliberate literary borrowing. It also presents evidence that each of these works was written by a different author and that they were written in the following order: John, 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John.

The other facet of adaptation, immutability or homeostasis, is discussed. Dynamical system models that buffer external changes in a few variables to suppress changes in other variables are presented. In this case, some variable makes a transient change depending on the environmental change before returning to the original state. This transient response is shown to obey fold-change detection (or Weber–Fechner law), in which the response rate by environmental changes depends only on how many times the environmental change is to the original value. As for the multicomponent cell model, a critical state in which the abundances of each component are inversely proportional to its rank is maintained as a homeostatic state even when the environmental condition is changed. In biological circadian clocks, the period of oscillation remains almost unchanged against changes in temperature (temperature compensation) or other environmental conditions. When several reactions involved in the cyclic change use a common enzyme, enzyme-limited competition results. This competition among substrates explains the temperature compensation mentioned above. In this case, the reciprocity between the period and the plasticity of biological clocks results.

Two basic characteristics of adaptation, plasticity and robustness, are discussed. The former concerns itself with changeability – how a system changes its internal state in response to environmental changes, and the latter concerns itself with robustness – how most internal states are unaltered by environmental changes. Although such changes which occur as part of the adaptation process have been explained as an evolved signal transduction system, a generic adaptation mechanism without it is strongly requested, considering the genericity of adaptation. Here, it is shown that adaptation, that is, the selection of an attractor with a higher growth rate, can occur without specific signaling circuits, by considering the dilution of each component by cell growth, the homeostatic process in which components are synthesized to compensate for this dilution, in the presence of noise in the reaction process. Constructive experiments and simulations demonstrating such attractor selection are presented. This attractor selection can occur even when the adaptive attractor is not prepared in advance. Although direct experimental verification of attractor selection has not yet been achieved, it is a strong candidate to explain observed spontaneous adaptation. Besides the abovementioned adaptation with significant state change, the experimental evidence for a passive adaptation mechanism by fluctuation is also presented.

The second case study in Chapter 7 presents a detailed examination of the future environmental rights implications of climate change. It addresses the implications for future generations of climate change itself, as well as our responses to climate change, including adaptation measures, decarbonisation and geoengineering. Each of these is considered in terms of the potential impact they might have on the human rights of future generations. The chapter also provides an overview of recent human rights-based climate litigation, with a particular focus on cases that have been brought on behalf of future generations or by children and young people. These cases show that, while some cases have successfully argued for intergenerational climate justice, international human rights law remains an unfriendly forum for litigating future environmental harms or the rights of future generations. The chapter concludes by considering the ways in which this could be improved through the application of the new theory and practice outlined in Chapter 5.

Rules for regulatory intervention aim to ensure that cumulative impacts remain or fall below thresholds of acceptable cumulative harm. A rule has two key dimensions: (1) its strategy – how it changes cumulative harm by reducing impacts, offsetting impacts, restoring, or facilitating coping with impacts; and (2) its approach – how it influences actions that cause impacts by using mandates (sticks), incentives (carrots) or information and persuasion (sermons) to influence adverse actions, or by using direct state action (state rescue). Each strategy and approach has strengths and weaknesses in addressing cumulative harms, and a cumulative environmental problem will likely need a carefully designed mix. In designing this mix, important challenges are ensuring connected decision-making so that actions are not considered in isolation; ensuring comprehensiveness, to avoid overlooking actions, including "de minimis" actions that could cause cumulatively significant impacts; managing costs related to intervention; and adapting interventions to accommodate changes to impacts and new information. Real-world examples illustrate legal mechanisms that include features designed to address these challenges.

In the coming decades, cities and other local governments will need to transform their infrastructure as part of their climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. When they do, they have the opportunity to build a more resilient, sustainable, and accommodating infrastructure for humans and non-humans alike. This chapter surveys a range of policy tools that cities and other local governments can use to pursue co-beneficial adaptations for humans, non-humans, and the environment. For example, they can add bird-friendly glass to new and upgraded buildings and vehicles; they can add overpasses, underpasses, and wildlife corridors on transportation systems; they can reduce light and noise pollution that impact humans and nonhumans alike; they can use a novel trash policy to manage rodent populations non-lethally; and more.

Anticipatory processes can influence how quickly comprehenders can process novel linguistic input and how they learn from linguistic surprises. This chapter outlines experimental evidence establishing the psychological reality of anticipatory processes and sketches some contemporary accounts that explain how comprehenders generate predictions from linguistic input. Accounts like Pickering & Gambi’s (2018) formulation suggest that comprehenders covertly engage language production mechanisms to generate predictions about future input and to know when it is time to stop processing current input. Kuperberg and colleagues’ (2021, 2023) formulation lays out a multi-layered network that produces predictions for several different types of linguistic and semantic information (phonological/orthographic, syntactic, lexical, event). N-gram accounts (Brennan, 2020; Hale, 2003, 2016) focus on word predictions and include formal metrics of entropy and surprisal derived from information-theoretic frameworks like Shallice’s. On this account, comprehenders store in long-term memory strings of words (N-grams) and these stored patterns serve as the basis for calculating entropy (how many different continuations are possible at a given point) and surprisal (how likely is a specific word in a specific context). We present a variety of evidence indicating that n-grams may not be the sole or main basis for predictions.

In this chapter, Sarah Parker interviews Tom Floyd and Sophie Goldrick of Shadow Opera about the process of creating Veritable Michael, an opera and podcast inspired by Michael Field’s life and work. Tom Floyd is the Artistic Director of Shadow Opera and Sophie Goldrick is the Producer and mezzo-soprano, who sings the part of Katharine Bradley in the show. In this interview, they respond to questions about how they originally conceived the piece, why opera is a suitable form for telling Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s story, how the collaborative creative process worked, and how audiences have reacted to the performance and the podcast.

The Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) and the V20 group of finance ministers address climate change impacts on vulnerable countries. This chapter introduces the interconnectedness of climate justice, economic resilience, and sustainable development. It highlights personal stories, such as Victor Yalanda from Colombia and Jevanic Henry from Saint Lucia, who share their experiences of climate change’s impacts on their communities — covering both the economic loss and the emotional devastation caused to communities. We introduce the CVF’s Climate Vulnerability Monitor — a unique study of the impacts of climate change, including fresh modelling, covering biophysical, economics and health projections up to 2100. The global community via COP27 and COP28 have agreed on the urgency of both adaptation and mitigation strategies. Yet the speed of change is not sufficient. The fate of today’s most vulnerable will soon be the fate of the world.

Three potential climate futures — 1.5 °C, 2 °C, and 3.6 °C — are predicted by the UNFCCC’s ‘climate action pathways’, each with major and escalating implications for adaptation and mitigation. Marina Romanello, Co-Lead Health Editor for The Monitor, highlights the dangers of anything above a 1.5 °C scenario, emphasizing increased health risks and economic damages. The chapter outlines the CVF Monitor’s projections for each of the three scenarios and discusses the significant differences in outcomes depending on global warming levels. Stressing the importance of adhering to international agreements like the Paris Agreement, immediate and substantial emissions reductions are crucial to avoid catastrophic impacts. The chapter underscores the need for global cooperation in achieving these goals.