Throughout history, societies have had to decide whom to 'sacrifice' and whom to help in times of disaster. This volume examines how elite groups attempt to maintain power through the use of particular economic, political, and ideological instruments and how both ruling elites and common people endeavor to create meaningful traditions while enduring hardship.
This article uses a systemic perspective to identify and analyze the conceptual relations among vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity within socio-ecological systems (SES). Since different intellectual traditions use the terms in different, sometimes incompatible, ways, they emerge as strongly related but unclear in the precise nature of their relationships. A set of diagnostic questions is proposed regarding the specification of the terms to develop a shared conceptual framework for the natural and social dimensions of global change.
Indigenous populations have been identified as vulnerable to climate change. This framing, however, is detached from the diverse geographies of how people experience, understand, and respond to climate-related health outcomes, and overlooks non-climatic determinants. I reviewed research on indigenous health and climate change to capture place-based dimensions of vulnerability and broader determining factors. Studies focused primarily on Australia and the Arctic, and indicated significant adaptive capacity, with active responses to climate-related health risks.
Death tolls and economic losses from natural hazards continue to rise in many parts of the world. With the aim to reduce future impacts from natural disasters it is crucial to understand the variability in space and time of the vulnerability of people and economic assets. In this paper, we quantified the temporal dynamics of socio-economic vulnerability, expressed as fatalities over exposed population and losses over exposed GDP, to climate-related hazards between 1980 and 2016.
International trade plays an important role in facilitating global food security in the face of a changing climate. In considering this issue, it is useful to distinguish between two different time scales: inter-annual and inter-decadal.
Climate change will have far-reaching impacts on crop, livestock and fisheries production, and will change the prevalence of crop pests. Many of these impacts are already measurable. Climate impact studies are dominated by those on crop yields despite the limitations of climate-crop modelling, with very little attention paid to more systems components of cropping, let alone other dimensions of food security.
Global food production must increase by 50% to meet the projected demand of the world’s population by 2050. Meeting this difficult challenge will be made even harder if climate change melts portions of the Himalayan glaciers to affect 25% of world cereal production in Asia by influencing water availability. Pest and disease management has played its role in doubling food production in the last 40 years, but pathogens still claim 10–16% of the global harvest.
Worldwide, anthropogenic climate change is now a reality and is already affecting the biology and ecology of some organisms, as well as several chemical pathways. Little is known about the consequences of climate change for the food system, particularly seafood, comprising all stages from ''farm to fork" (mainly primary production, processing, transport, and trading). In this context, the current review aims to elucidate climate change impacts on seafood safety and its human health implications.
Climate change poses considerable challenges to food security. Adapting food systems both to enhance food security for the poor and vulnerable and to prevent future negative impacts from climate change will require attention to more than just agricultural production. This article surveys the multiple components of food security, particularly those relating to access and utilization, which are threatened by the complex responses of food systems to the impacts of climate change.
Forecast-based financing is a financial mechanism that facilitates humanitarian actions prior to anticipated floods by triggering release of pre-allocated funds based on exceedance of flood forecast thresholds. This paper presents a novel model suitability matrix that embeds application-specific needs and contingencies at local level on a pilot project of forecast-based financing. The added value of this flexible framework is demonstrated on a set of hydrological and machine learning models.
