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Evictions are a common contributing factor to homelessness and are experienced overwhelmingly by vulnerable populations, including low-income households, single parents and minority groups. At the same time, social and affordable housing providers serve increasingly vulnerable populations. Although all evictions are potentially problematic, those that occur in social and affordable housing can carry particularly severe consequences. Little research exists on evictions in social and affordable housing, and even less on eviction prevention practices in this sector. This project seeks to fill this research gap by exploring emerging eviction prevention practices in social and affordable housing in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Our findings show that evictions are a complicated process for both tenants and housing providers, and most commonly occur because of rent arrears. Housing providers try to prevent evictions, and towards this end, they have adopted four broad eviction prevention practices, centred on financial management, regular communication with tenants, provision of tenant supports, and community development. However, housing providers are often constrained in their ability to prevent evictions, in particular by human resource and financial limitations. These challenges lead to complex negotiations between housing providers’ social mandates to provide affordable housing to vulnerable households and their regulatory and operational environments.

HPC-TRES | The Italian National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics - OGS and CINECA drew up an agreement to implement a training program focussed on High Performance Computing (HPC) applications for Earth Sciences, the “HPC Training and Research for Earth Sciences” (HPC-TRES). The program is co-sponsored by the Minister of University and Research (MUR) under its extraordinary contribute for the Italian participation to activities related to the international infrastructure PRACE – The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe. The major objectives of the program are: capacity building, enhancement of human resources, and advanced training in the fields of Earth System modelling (atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere and biosphere) and numerical models, the latter considered as a strategic cross cutting element for modelling activities. These objectives will be pursued through the use of national and European HPC infrastructures and services in the framework of PRACE, the optimization of algorithms and numerical codes, the optimal management of “Earth Sciences Big Data”, and the graphical visualization techniques for multidisciplinary applications in the Earth Sciences, also in the frame of the “Blue Growth” strategy. Therefore, HPC-TRES agreement establishes, sponsor and oversees training and research awards (i.e. contributes for training and research activities set up according to current regulations that regulate scholarships – to be also used for masters and specialized courses in HPC -, research grants and PhDs) that will support the research lines scientific plan of the HPC-TRES program. Some Italian research groups and institutions (INGV-Pisa, CNR/ISAC, CNR/IGG, CMCC, ICTP ESP), where the external members of the HPC-TRES Steering Committee lead their research activities and personally contributed to define the scientific plan of the HPC-TRES program, have already subscribed the HPC-TRES initiative, offering logistic support and hospitality to the winners of the training and research awards sponsored by OGS. In 2021, OGS, CINECA, CNR, INGV, CMCC, POLITO-DIATI, and ICTP signed the constitution of the Joint Research Unit HPC-TRES (JRU HPC-TRES), to further support the action of the HPC-TRES program. More information:https://www.ogs.it/it/content/hpc-training-and-research-earth-sciences-hpc-tres