Empirical Forecasting of Slow-Onset Disasters for Improved Emergency Response

Empirical Forecasting of Slow-Onset Disasters for Improved Emergency Response PDF Author: Andrew G. Mude
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Mitigating the negative welfare consequences of crises such as droughts, floods, and disease outbreaks, is a major challenge in many areas of the world, especially in highly vulnerable areas insufficiently equipped to prevent food and livelihood security crisis in the face of adverse shocks. Given the finite resources allocated for emergency response, and the expected increase in incidences of humanitarian catastrophe due to changing climate patterns, there is a need for rigorous and efficient methods of early warning and emergency needs assessment. In this paper we develop an empirical model, based on a relatively parsimonious set of regularly measured variables from communities in Kenya's arid north, that generates remarkably accurate forecasts of the likelihood of famine with at least 3 months lead time. Such a forecasting model is a potentially valuable tool for enhancing early warning capacity.

Empirical Forecasting of Slow-Onset Disasters for Improved Emergency Response

Empirical Forecasting of Slow-Onset Disasters for Improved Emergency Response PDF Author: Andrew G. Mude
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mitigating the negative welfare consequences of crises such as droughts, floods, and disease outbreaks, is a major challenge in many areas of the world, especially in highly vulnerable areas insufficiently equipped to prevent food and livelihood security crisis in the face of adverse shocks. Given the finite resources allocated for emergency response, and the expected increase in incidences of humanitarian catastrophe due to changing climate patterns, there is a need for rigorous and efficient methods of early warning and emergency needs assessment. In this paper we develop an empirical model, based on a relatively parsimonious set of regularly measured variables from communities in Kenya's arid north, that generates remarkably accurate forecasts of the likelihood of famine with at least 3 months lead time. Such a forecasting model is a potentially valuable tool for enhancing early warning capacity.

Improving Humanitarian Response to Slow-Onset Disasters Using Famine Indexed Weather Derivatives

Improving Humanitarian Response to Slow-Onset Disasters Using Famine Indexed Weather Derivatives PDF Author: Sommarat Chantarat
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 35

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Book Description
This paper illustrates how weather derivatives indexed to forecasts of famine can be designed and used by operational agencies and donors to facilitate timely and reliable financing for effective emergency response to climate-based, slow-onset disasters such as drought. We provide a general framework for derivative contracts, especially in the context of index insurance and famine catastrophe bonds, and show how they can be used to complement existing tools and facilities in drought risk financing through a risk layering strategy. We use the case of arid lands of northern Kenya, where rainfall proves a strong predictor of widespread and severe child wasting, to provide a simple empirical illustration of the potential contract designs.

The Economic Impacts of Natural Disasters

The Economic Impacts of Natural Disasters PDF Author: Debarati Guha-Sapir
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199841934
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
This work combines research and empirical evidence on the economic costs of disasters with theoretical approaches. It provides new insights on how to assess and manage the costs and impacts of disaster prevention, mitigation, recovery and adaption, and much more.

Facing Hazards and Disasters

Facing Hazards and Disasters PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309101786
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Social science research conducted since the late 1970's has contributed greatly to society's ability to mitigate and adapt to natural, technological, and willful disasters. However, as evidenced by Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, and other recent events, hazards and disaster research and its application could be improved greatly. In particular, more studies should be pursued that compare how the characteristics of different types of events-including predictability, forewarning, magnitude, and duration of impact-affect societal vulnerability and response. This book includes more than thirty recommendations for the hazards and disaster community.

The impact of disasters and crises on agriculture and food security: 2021

The impact of disasters and crises on agriculture and food security: 2021 PDF Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.
ISBN: 9251340714
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
On top of a decade of exacerbated disaster loss, exceptional global heat, retreating ice and rising sea levels, humanity and our food security face a range of new and unprecedented hazards, such as megafires, extreme weather events, desert locust swarms of magnitudes previously unseen, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Agriculture underpins the livelihoods of over 2.5 billion people – most of them in low-income developing countries – and remains a key driver of development. At no other point in history has agriculture been faced with such an array of familiar and unfamiliar risks, interacting in a hyperconnected world and a precipitously changing landscape. And agriculture continues to absorb a disproportionate share of the damage and loss wrought by disasters. Their growing frequency and intensity, along with the systemic nature of risk, are upending people’s lives, devastating livelihoods, and jeopardizing our entire food system. This report makes a powerful case for investing in resilience and disaster risk reduction – especially data gathering and analysis for evidence informed action – to ensure agriculture’s crucial role in achieving the future we want.

Measuring resilience in a volatile world

Measuring resilience in a volatile world PDF Author:
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
Substantial numbers of the world’s chronically poor and malnourished population live in an increasingly volatile world. The dangerous nexus of climate change, rapid population growth, conflict, and food price volatility already appears to have pushed several poor regions into states of permanent crisis, even as the rest of the world has seen unprecedented progress against poverty. This disturbing state of affairs, along with our expanded knowledge of the intimate interactions between short-term shocks and long-run development, has catalyzed widespread interest in resilience building, and in what such a framework implies for understanding the causes and consequences of acute vulnerability to natural and man-made disasters. In this paper we ask what this paradigm implies for the measurement and analysis of resilience. Resilience is fundamentally about complex dynamics. Slower-moving ecological, economic, demographic, and social stressors create vulnerability to short-run shocks, which in turn can have long-term consequences by reinforcing preexisting vulnerabilities. In our view, this basic conception of resilience has fundamental measurement implications. First, resilience can be measured and understood only through higher-frequency surveys that capture the causes and consequences of time-varying stressors and shocks, including seasonal shocks. Second, resilience can be understood only through surveys that capture the multidimensional complexity of stressors, shocks, and feedback loops, including the complex interactions between economic, social, and ecological forces. Third, the underlying stressors that create vulnerability, and the resilience-building interventions that reduce vulnerability, can be gauged and evaluated only over the longer term. This conceptualization of resilience motivates us to go a step further than existing research on resilience and on food and nutrition security measurement, by outlining a far more expansive strategy for improving and scaling up the monitoring, measurement, and analysis of the world’s most vulnerable populations. We propose the development of a multicountry system of high-frequency, long-term sentinel sites in the world’s most vulnerable regions. If implemented along the lines we conceive, this system could be a high-return investment for resilience-building efforts, since it would serve multiple purposes. This system offers the only rigorous means of monitoring vulnerability and resilience in the world’s most volatile regions. This system would bolster existing early-warning systems by complementing them with household-level indicators. This system would improve the targeting of emergency resources. This system would be instrumental for diagnosing the underlying sources of vulnerability, for identifying key thresholds of resilience, and for designing appropriate resilience-building strategies. And this system would provide a rigorous foundation for large-scale evaluations of resilience-building activities. While there are strong justifications for such a system, the devil is necessarily in the details, and much of this paper is concerned with those details. Largely to learn from existing experience, we first review existing measurement strategies that are similar in purpose or design to the sentinel system outlined above. When implemented, long-term, high-frequency measurement systems have often yielded great benefits but been hampered by cost, lack of institutional coordination, and insufficient dissemination and usage of data. The need to keep costs down and benefits widespread therefore motivates us to consider which countries in the world have the highest priority for the development of sentinel sites, based on indicators such as child nutrition and health outcomes, exposure to disasters, and past emergency assistance levels from the international community. We then turn to crucial issues of data collection design by outlining a hybrid sampling and survey design that will help achieve the various objectives outlined above while keeping costs down. We also argue that the proliferation of mobile phones and other information and communications technologies offers substantial scope for a cost-effective system of this kind, far more so than would have been available in the past. Finally, we consider who should lead and contribute to this ambitious effort. Since the principal advantage of this approach is that it can yield benefits for a wide range of institutions and purposes (relief and development, operations and research, social and biophysical sciences), and since the costs of a long-term commitment to these sentinel surveys would be large indeed for any single agency, we propose the need for a relatively broad consortium of international donors. This consortium should first focus on establishing partnerships with national governments and then commit to long-term resilience monitoring as well as domestic capacity building. With this essential commitment in place, this consortium would then need to secure implementing partners with a permanent presence on the ground, as well as the technical expertise of international organizations of various sorts. Ultimately, we argue, it is only this kind of long-term, cooperative commitment that will provide a scientific evidence base for diagnosing and resolving the world’s worst problems of hunger, poverty, and malnutrition. Only this kind of sentinel system can generate the data and evidence needed to inform actions to build resilience and to help the global community eliminate extreme poverty in the generation ahead. The status quo is simply not enough.

Humanitarian Logistics

Humanitarian Logistics PDF Author: Martin Christopher
Publisher: Kogan Page Publishers
ISBN: 0749462469
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
In 2007, there were 34 armed conflicts worldwide. That same year, a total of 414 natural disasters affected 211 million people. "Humanitarian Logistics" examines the challenges facing those whose role it is to organize and distribute resources in difficult situations.

Case Studies: Insights on Agriculture Innovation 2018 (IAAS Series)

Case Studies: Insights on Agriculture Innovation 2018 (IAAS Series) PDF Author: Tzong-Ru Lee
Publisher: Vital Wellspring Education Pte. Ltd.
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
[Foreword] The annual International Agriculture Innovation Conference (IAIC) series started in October 2016 as an assembly platform for leading researchers, educators, and developers to present, discuss, and examine various challenging issues relating to agricultural production and innovation. In January 2018, the International Association for Agricultural Sustainability (IAAS) took IAIC under its wing with expectations that IAIC expands its influence by inviting more agriculture-related professionals to participate in conferences. I sincerely welcome you to join our conference and to share your ideas on agriculture sustainability with us. First, I would like to thank the 2018 conference participants who successfully helped us create the IAIC. The IAIC 2018 would not have been successful without their support and cooperation. Next, I especially appreciate the assistance and support from the other Organizer of IAIC 2018- Institute of Agricultural Planning of CAU, China. Last but not least, the keynote speakers of IAIC 2018. This book would not have been published without their efforts and contributions. In order to improve current agricultural circumstances and attain environmental sustainability, agriculture innovation has become the primary strategy nowadays toward achieving these goals. The concept of adapting agricultural innovation to every phase of agricultural production and management is the foundation for this book. This is the sequel of book《Case Studies: Insights On Agriculture Innovation 2017》which collects information on various agricultural innovation ideas and technologies that have been applied or are being developed for agricultural operations and management in different countries. I believe this book will provide you with new and inspiring ideas about the future of agriculture development, and illustrate how innovations in methods and techniques influence agriculture production, environmental sustainability, and the quality of people’s lives around the world. (Dr. Cheng-I Wei, Chairman of IAAS) [Contents] Foreword Preface Introduction of Authors About IAAS Chapter 01 An Ecological Life-Cycle-The Case of Wapno (Göran Svensson / Carmen Padin Fabeiro) Chapter 02 The Application of PMI in Agriculture (Tzong-Ru Lee / Wen-Shin Lin) Chapter 03 Knowledge Management and Innovation: New Trends (Joanna Paliszkiewicz / Magdalena Mądra-Sawicka) Chapter 04 Building Platform Agribusinesses: Opportunity & Challenges(Tan Wee Liang) Chapter 05 Agricultural Innovation and Climate Change Adaptation under Thailand 4.0 National Policy (Nirote Sinnarong / Olalekan Israel Aiikulola) Chapter 06 Supply Chain Performance of Sustainable Palm Oil with Incorporating Big Data (Rika Ampuh Hadiguna) Chapter 07 The Way to Rural Revitalization in the Age of Digital Economy (Tianzhu Zhang / Abudurezhake· Yishake / Chunming Bai / Nannan Ren / Duomei Chai)

Escaping Poverty Traps and Unlocking Prosperity in the Face of Climate Risk

Escaping Poverty Traps and Unlocking Prosperity in the Face of Climate Risk PDF Author: Nathaniel D. Jensen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009558277
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
This Element outlines the origins and evolution of an international award-winning development intervention, index-based livestock insurance (IBLI), which scaled from a small pilot project in Kenya to a design that underpins drought risk management products and policies across Africa. General insights are provided on i) the economics of poverty, risk management, and drylands development; ii) the evolving use of modern remote sensing and data science tools in development; iii) the science of scaling; and iv) the value and challenges of integrating research with operational implementation to tackle development and humanitarian challenges in some of the world's poorest regions. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Dull Disasters?

Dull Disasters? PDF Author: Daniel Jonathan Clarke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198785577
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Dull Disasters? shows how countries and their partners can better prepare for natural disasters such as typhoons, earthquakes, floods, and drought. By harnessing lessons from finance, political science, economics, psychology, and the naturalsciences, it is possible for governments, civil society, private firms, and international organizations to work together to achieve better preparedness, thereby reducing the risks to people and economies and enablingquicker recoveries. In this way, responses to disasters become less emotional, less political, less headline-grabbing, and more business as usual and effective.