Disaster Risk Reduction
Making Communities More Resilient to Climate-Induced Weather Disasters
submitted by Samuel Bendett
homelandsecuritynewswire.com - February 18, 2013
Mounting scientific evidence indicates climate change will lead to more frequent and intense extreme weather that affects larger areas and lasts longer. We can reduce the risk of weather-related disasters, however, with a variety of measures. Experts say that a good strategy should include a variety of actions such as communicating risk and transferring it through vehicles such as insurance, taking a multi-hazard management approach, linking local and global management, and taking an iterative approach as opposed to starting with a master plan.
After Disaster, Governor Faced with Challenge of Keeping Jakarta Dry
Since last month, when the worst flooding in six years hit Jakarta, occupancy at Marunda public housing complex north of Jakarta has jumped.
nytimes.com - by Sara Schonhardt - February 20, 2013
JAKARTA, Indonesia — At the Marunda housing projects in North Jakarta, weeds push up through cracks in concrete foundations and grimy facades beg for paint. The rent-subsidized apartments have little access to public transportation, and drainage ditches that ring each building smell of sewage.
It seems unlikely that people would line up to live here.
Global Drought Monitor
Image: An working example of the Global Drought Monitor, focusing on Eurasia and Africa.
drought.mssl.ucl.ac.uk - Benjamin Lloyd-Hughes and Mark Saunders
The Global Drought Monitor is a free internet application which monitors the severity of drought worldwide on an ongoing basis. The product will aid humanitarian relief by assisting warnings of potential food, water and health problems. The Global Drought Monitor will also benefit the general public, government and industry by improving awareness of droughts and their impacts.
(VIEW WEBSITE)
Using Satellite Images for Drought Monitoring: A Knowledge Discovery Approach
na-businesspress.com - Getachew Berhan, Shawndra Hill, Tsegaye Tadesse, Solomon Atnafu
The main objective of this research was to develop a new concept and approach to extract knowledge from satellite imageries for near real-time drought monitoring. The near real-time data downloaded from the Atlantic Bird satellite were used to produce the drought spatial distribution. Our results showed that approximately 40% of the observed areas exhibited negative deviation. In this study, the possibility of using the near real-time spatio-temporal Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) data for drought monitoring in food insecure areas of Ethiopia was tested, and promising results were obtained. The output of this research is expected to assist decision makers in taking timely and appropriate action in order to save millions of lives in drought-affected areas.
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Principles and Practice for Resilience, Food Security and Nutrition
This article by Ambassador Erthin Cousin, Jose Graziano da Silva and Kanayo F. Nwanze addresses six principles to protect the most vulnerable from hunger and malnutrition in a world of global changes that are rapidly increasing risks, often with no social safety net for 80% of the world's population.
PRINCIPLE 1: People, communities and governments must lead resilience-building for improved food security and nutrition
PRINCIPLE 2: Building resilience is beyond the capacity of any single institution
PRINCIPLE 3: Planning frameworks should combine immediate relief requirements with long-term development objectives
PRINCIPLE 4: Ensuring protection of the most vulnerable is crucial for sustaining development efforts
PRINCIPLE 5: Effective risk management requires integration of enhanced monitoring and analysis into decision-making
PRINCIPLE 6: Interventions must be evidence-based and focus on long-term results
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ertharin-cousin/global-food-security_b_254...
Explaining Risks
Image: Aftereffects of the L'Aquila earthquake
compression.org - October 25th, 2012 - Robert W. "Doc" Hall
The difficulties of explaining risk are the nub of the recent conviction on manslaughter changes of six Italian seismologists and a public official for inadequately forewarning the public of the L’Aquila earthquake in 2009: 309 fatalities, over 1500 injuries, and about 20,000 buildings destroyed. Seismologists classified the L’Aquila as a “moderate earthquake,” 6.3 Richter, but losses were very high in a densely populated area.
The case has drawn media attention, but Nature has a more detailed account.
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CIA-commissioned report on climate change released
Image: 2010 Drought in Russia. (c) New York Times.
foreignpolicyblogs.com - November 10th, 2012 - Mia Bennett
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and National Research Council (NRC) have released a report commissioned by the CIA and various other American intelligence agencies on the security threats posed by climate change. The report’s goal is to inform intelligence agencies as to how to best carry out monitoring to anticipate climate-related disasters, help prevent them from occurring, and, when they do, respond to emergencies. The report investigates how climate change could potentially induce social and political stresses that will affect U.S. security over the next decade.
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Stop Talking About the Weather and Do Something: Three Ways to Finance Sustainable Cities
Submitted by Albert Gomez
hbswk.hbs.edu - November 6th, 2012
The wrath of Hurricane Sandy has illuminated a fundamental question: How do we ensure that our cities are resilient in the face of inevitable future disasters? A destroyed city is not a sustainable city. I'm making the case that it's time to stop complaining about climate change.
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Italian Scientists Convicted of Not Warning of Earthquake
Collapsed church building from 2009 earthquake in central Italy
voanews.com - October 22, 2012
An Italian court on Monday convicted seven scientists and experts of manslaughter for underestimating the risks of a killer earthquake and failing to adequately warn citizens before it struck the central Italian town of L'Aquila in 2009.
More than 300 people were killed, tens of thousands were left homeless, and the town's historic center and medieval churches were destroyed in the 6.3-magnitude quake.
Prosecutors argued that the defendants - members of a national panel that assesses major risks - offered "incomplete, imprecise and contradictory information" to residents.
Global Food Supply - We Need to Plan for System Failure
ethicalcorp.com - by Mallen Baker - October 4, 2012
Mallen Baker argues that it’s irresponsible not to make contingency plans, especially when the potential failures concern the fundamentals – such as food
Imagine your critical business systems depend on one computer server. This server is huge – it has immense capacity – but you have grown into that space and now every single day you are pushing it to its limit. . .
. . . Now let’s substitute the global food system for the server. Here we have a system that is operating at full capacity. Any hiccups in normal production can lead to serious problems. This year we have seen such hiccups.
