Integrating management tools and concepts to develop an estuarine planning support system: A case study of the Humber Estuary, Eastern England.

Estuaries are important because of their multiple uses and users which often makes them challenging to manage since management must strike a balance between the needs of users, the estuaries' ecological and economic value and the context of multiple legislative drivers. To facilitate management we have therefore developed an Estuarine Planning Support System (EPSS) framework using the Humber Estuary, Eastern England, as a case study which integrates the current legislation tools and concepts. This integrated EPSS framework is an improvement on previous approaches for assessing cumulative impacts as it takes into account legislative drivers, management tools and other mechanisms for controlling plans/projects specific to the estuary. It therefore enables managers and users to assess and address both the current state and the way in which a new industrial, port or urban development could impact an estuary in an accessible and understandable framework.

Fat nation: deciphering the distinctive geographies of obesity in England.

Much attention is focused on obesity by both the media and by public health. As a health risk, obesity is recognised as a contributing factor to numerous health problems. Recent evidence points to a growth in levels of obesity in many countries and particular attention is usually given to rising levels of obesity among younger people. England is no exception to these generalisations with recent studies revealing a clear geography to what has been termed an 'obesity epidemic.' This paper examines the complexities inherent in the geography of adult obesity in England. Existing knowledge about the sub-national geography of obesity is examined and assessed. Multilevel synthetic estimation is then used to construct an age-sex-ethnicity disaggregated geography of obesity. These differing geographies are compared and contrasted with pre-existing findings and explored at multiple scales. A complex picture of the geography of obesity in England is revealed.

Social capital, geography and health: a small-area analysis for England.

There has recently been much debate about the influence of social capital on health outcomes. In particular it has been suggested that levels of social capital vary from place to place and that such variations may account for previously unexplained between-place variations in health outcomes. As yet few studies exist of the influence of small-area variations in social capital on health outcomes. One reason for this is the difficulty of obtaining indicators for small areas such as electoral wards in England, and we describe a method used to derive what we term 'synthetic estimates' of aspects of social capital by linking coefficients produced from multi-level analyses of national survey datasets to census data. We produce estimates for electoral wards in England and apply these in multi-level models of our response variable, the probability of survival of individuals surveyed in the Health and Lifestyle Survey of England. We report various combinations of models incorporating individual attributes, health-related behaviours, area measures of deprivation, and area measures of social capital. Our overall conclusion is that we find little support, at this spatial scale, for the proposition that area measures of social capital exert a beneficial effect on health outcomes.