Visual Communication of Climate Change: Local Framing and Place Attachment

To examine the effects of local versus global message framing concerning climate change, data were gathered from 114 undergraduate students at a Southern US coastal university. The experiment accounted for participants' perceived attachment to their environments (place attachment) to observe whether it related to increased engagement and risk perceptions. Messages were most effective in eliciting environmental action when local effects of climate change were emphasized. Those reporting more connection to their local environments perceived more risks and intended more mitigating actions. The results may assist practitioners, researchers, and decision makers in developing more effective approaches to climate change mitigation.     

Optimisation and heuristic approaches for assigning inbound containers to outbound carriers

Due to economical and/or geographical constraints, most of the time overseas containers cannot be directly shipped to their destinations. These containers visit transhipment ports where they are first unloaded and temporarily stored and then loaded onto smaller vessels (feeders) to be transported to their final destinations. The assignment of these containers to outbound vessels necessitates several factors to be taken into account simultaneously. In this paper, we develop a mathematical model to reflect multiple objectives with priorities and to assign these containers to different vessels at the transit container port terminal. Although we solve a single-objective (with the weighted sum of objectives) mathematical model to optimality, we also propose two heuristic approaches to solve this complex problem for a transit agency. The first heuristic is shipment based and has four variants differing in how the opportunity costs of the assignments are calculated. The second greedy heuristic is trip based, where the goal is to maximise the capacity utilisation of the vessels. The heuristics return very promising solutions in ignorable computational times. We also provide real-life cases and present our conclusions.