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The Impacts of the COVID-19 Traffic Light System on Staff in Tertiary Education in New Zealand
(MDPI, Basel, Switzerland, 2024-01) Taylor L-A; Reid J; Jagroop-Dearing A; Liu X
The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic demanded a swift transition in the usual educational mode of delivery from face to face to online. New Zealand established “a traffic light system” after initial COVID-19 lockdowns, and educational delivery adapted accordingly at a tertiary education provider in Te Pūkenga, Eastern Institute of Technology. This study investigates the ramifications of the traffic light system on this institute’s staff, employing semi-structured interviews and an inductive semantic thematic analysis. The findings reveal a universal impact on staff, characterized by an augmented workload attributed to students’ absences and illnesses. This led to increased support demands of staff for their students’ academic progression. Anxiety, stress, and guilt emerged as prevalent emotions linked to student support. Despite the staff adapting to the mandates, a notable challenge arose from the discord between educational and industry directives, causing confusion among the students. While the study indicates staff resilience in navigating the traffic light changes, it underscores the imperative of recognizing the toll on their wellbeing. The research calls for a proactive consideration of future challenges, emphasizing the importance of safeguarding the mental and emotional health of tertiary education staff amidst potential uncertainties in educational delivery.
Evaluation of a text-mining application for the rapid analysis of free-text wildlife necropsy reports
(PLOS, 2025-11-25) Saverimuttu S; McInnes K; Warren K; Yeap L; Hunter S; Gartrell B; Pas A; Chatterton J; Jackson B
The ability to efficiently derive insights from wildlife necropsy data is essential for advancing conservation and One Health objectives, yet close reading remains the mainstay of knowledge retrieval from ubiquitous free-text clinical data. This time-consuming process poses a barrier to the efficient utilisation of such valuable resources. This study evaluates part of a bespoke text-mining application, DEE (Describe, Explore, Examine), designed for extracting insights from free-text necropsy reports housed in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Wildbase Pathology Register. A pilot test involving nine veterinary professionals assessed DEE’s ability to quantify the occurrence of four clinicopathologic findings (external oiling, trauma, diphtheritic stomatitis, and starvation) across two species datasets by comparison to manual review. Performance metrics—recall, precision, and F1-score—were calculated and analysed alongside tester-driven misclassification patterns. Findings reveal that while DEE (and the principals underlying its function) offers time-efficient data retrieval, its performance is influenced by search term selection and the breadth of vocabulary which may describe a clinicopathologic finding. Those findings characterized by limited terminological variance, such as external oiling, yielded the highest performance scores and the most consistency across application testers. Mean F1-scores across all tested findings and application testers was 0.63–0.93. Results highlight the utility and limitations of term-based text-mining approaches and suggests that enhancements to automatically capture this terminological variance may be necessary for broader implementation. This pilot study highlights the potential of relatively simple, rule-based text-mining approaches to derive insights natural language wildlife data in the support of One Health goals.
Planning for sustainable development and tourism in biosphere reserves: a metagovernance appraisal
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2025-11-25) Amore A; Adie BA; Carnicelli-Filho S; Lunden A; Hall CM
Biosphere Reserves can be incubators for innovative approaches that foster sustainable tourism and destination resilience. Yet, research focusing on management and planning at Biospheres Reserves is limited and fragmented. In particular, it fails to address how the overarching Biosphere Reserve programme and the UN-SDGs framing influence Biosphere Reserve at the site level. The aim of this study is to analyse tourism-relevant policies and regulations implemented at Biosphere Reserves and the currently overlooked nexus between the Biosphere Reserve programme and the UN-SDGs. Two Biosphere Reserves sites were chosen for this study: the Archipelago Sea Area Biosphere Reserve in Finland and the Galloway and Southern Ayrshire Biosphere in the United Kingdom. A metagovernance appraisal was adopted to analyse context and processes, governance archetypes, limitations and metagovernance alternatives. The findings indicate that there are different political and institutional governance framings at the two reserves leading to diverging approaches to sustainable tourism. Additionally, sites resort to metagovernance alternatives to address governance shortcomings and foster policy coherency. This study contributes to a greater understanding of governance practices within the context of Biosphere Reserves and provides a timely appraisal of site planning and metagovernance from a public policy and tourism perspectives.
Institutional limits of sustainability in tourism governance: changing governance rationalities in protected area tourism in Finland
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2025-10-02) Lundén A; Saarinen J; Hall CM
This study examines the co-evolution of tourism and the administration of Finnish protected areas (PAs), specifically focusing on how administrative legitimacy-seeking influences sustainable tourism governance. Drawing on concepts from new institutional theory, namely isomorphism (organizational convergence), legitimacy-seeking (the pursuit of societal approval), and decoupling (the separation of formal structures from practices), we analyse key policy documents and annual reports from Finnish Parks and Wildlife from 2005 to 2018. The findings of our study reveal a dual shift in PA governance: ‘platformisation,’ where PAs are transformed into state-orchestrated platforms that facilitate the creation of value and legitimacy through the growth of tourism, and ‘corporatization,’ where private sector governance logics are adopted within public administration. These shifts redefine the state's role in commercializing nature, emphasizing economic outputs and regional development mediated by tourism. We observe a decoupling of organizational practices between broader environmental policies and tourism development objectives, driven by the pursuit of legitimacy. Overall, this research contributes to the critical discourse on the evolution of PA governance. It highlights the significance of understanding these institutional constraints in the context of sustainable tourism governance and evaluates the wider environmental policy implications of tourism growth.
The global geopolitical-energy uncertainty index and total factor productivity: New evidence from firm-level analysis
(Elsevier B.V., 2026-01) Dang THN; Balli F; Balli HO; Qiu M; Nguyen H
This paper examines the impact of the global geopolitical-energy uncertainty (GEU) on firm-level total factor productivity, considering variation across countries, industries, and firm sizes. Employing the novel GEU index proposed by Dang et al. (2024a) and firm-level annual data from 2001 to 2023, we find strong evidence that the GEU index negatively affects firm productivity. There is heterogeneity in the GEU index's impact. Firms in developed countries such as the US, UK, France, and Germany are more negatively affected, whereas Canadian firms show a positive response. Energy-intensive firms and smaller firms experience stronger negative impacts. Mechanism analysis further demonstrates that both firm level characteristics and macroeconomic energy conditions shape productivity responses to GEU. Higher profitability reduces the negative impact of GEU shocks, while higher cost intensity and higher global energy prices amplify the adverse effects, increasing productivity losses. Our baseline results remain robust under different robustness checks. The paper's findings offer guidance for firms to develop effective strategies to manage risks during periods of heightened geopolitical-energy uncertainty.