Frontier spaces of vulnerability: Regional change,urbanization, drought and fire hazard in Santarém,Pará, Brazil

Fire hazard is a mounting concern in tropical rainforests of the Brazilian Amazon and has raised awareness within the science community of the links between agricultural fire use, drought and accidental fire. As a result, fire is being addressed as a crisis event with mitigation focused on those who light fires, particularly smallholder agriculturalists. Little attention is paid to the historical and ongoing ways in which Amazon landscapes and peoples have been made more susceptible to fire. Frontier regions of the Brazilian Amazon serve a variety of functions within the larger Brazilian society, including as extractive reserves for economic development, as social safety valves to reduce population pressures, and as areas to support urban regional integration. Each of these functions has impacted frontier environments in ways that create more flammable landscapes and/or shape the vulnerability of people to fire hazard. This paper uses a case study inthe Brazilian Lower Amazon to understand how vulnerability to fire hazard develops. It argues that if fire mitigation remains centered on fire as a crisis event, an understanding of what constitutes frontier spaces of vulnerability, both in landscape and in populations, will be limited.     

Earthquake Risk Perception in Bucharest, Romania

The Municipality of Bucharest is one of the capitals with the highest seismic risk in the world. Bucharest is particularly vulnerable to seismic hazard due to: the high density of inhabitants, especially within the residential districts with blocks of flats; the old public utility fund; the out-of-date infrastructure; the numerous industrial parks that are undergoing a restructuring process, not to mention the inefficient organization of civil protection and poor education of the population regarding seismic risk. This research was designed to examine the attitudes and perceptions of people living with the risk of an earthquake hazard in Bucharest. We were interested in how attitudes and perceptions differ depending on gender, age, education, residential area and socioeconomic status, characteristics of seismic hazard, degree of risk exposure, degree of danger, and casualty awareness. At the same time, we compare the results of this study with those from a previous and similar enquiry in 1997. The statistical processing has indicated a significant difference between the declared perception of seismic risk and the independent variables of gender, age, level of education, level of attachment to the residential area, and degree to which the subjects consider they may be affected and could retrieve their losses. Due to the continuous decrease of their living standard, the most vulnerable is the aged population. The feelings toward the residential area is another factor of statistical significance for the population's seismic danger perception. A strong affective bond offers a feeling of safety and leads to the neglect and even total denial of the hazard. In the case of independent variables regarding the type of dwelling, its age, and property form, deviations of empiric values from the theoretical distribution are not relevant for the correlation searched for, which indicates that this issue goes beyond the above-mentioned criteria.     

“A stitch in time”: group work during the covid-19 scare in the Nicobar Islands,India

ABSTRACT

When India suddenly went into its first coronavirus-induced nationwide lockdown in March 2020, several members of a historically isolated indigenous community in the eastern Indian ocean- the Nicobarese, began to panic. Their leaders came together and formed a group to boost community solidarity and helped the vulnerable indigenes to safely navigate through the crisis. In these uncertain times of Covid-19, when the “modern” world appears more fissured than ever, leaving its “others” to fend for themselves; the Nicobarese’s group has set an example for everyone to follow.     

Postdisaster Housing Stages: A Markov Chain Approach to Model Sequences and Duration Based on Social Vulnerability

Housing recovery is an unequal and complex process presumed to occur in four stages: emergency shelter, temporary shelter, temporary housing, and permanent housing. This work questions the four-stage typology and examines how different types of shelter align with multiple housing recovery stages given different levels of social vulnerability. This article also presents a Markov chain model of the postdisaster housing recovery process that focuses on the experience of the household. The model predicts the sequence and timing of a household going through housing recovery, capturing households that end in either permanent housing or a fifth possible stage of failure. The probability of a household transitioning through the stages is computed using a transition probability matrix (TPM). The TPM is assembled using proposed transition probability models that vary with the social vulnerability of the household. Monte Carlo techniques are applied to demonstrate the range of sequences and timing that households experience going through the housing recovery process. A set of computational rules are established for sending a household to the fifth stage, representing a household languishing in unstable housing. This predictive model is exemplified on a virtual community, Centerville, where following a severe earthquake scenario, differences in housing recovery times exceed four years. The Centerville analysis results in nearly 5% of households languishing in unstable housing, thereby failing to reach housing recovery. These findings highlight the disparate trajectories experienced by households with different levels of social vulnerability. Recommendations are provided at the end for more equitable postdisaster recovery policies.     

Feminist Christian Realism

While Christianity and feminism may seem at odds with one another, both make normative claims about justice and addressing the needs of those on the margins of power. This article explores what feminism contributes to Christian realism. The current revival of Niebuhrian Christian realism highlights how much it still has to offer as a theoretical underpinning for policy and governance. However, Christian realism remains wedded to masculinist abstractions and power structures, such as the balance of power, that are ultimately harmful to those on the margins. Thus, this article uses feminism to argue for a greater acceptance of vulnerability and obligation in Christian realism.     

Resource Distribution in Multiple Attacks with Imperfect Detection of the Attack Outcome

This article extends the previous research of consecutive attacks strategy by assuming that an attacker observes the outcome of each attack imperfectly. With given probabilities it may wrongly identify a destroyed target as undestroyed, and wrongly identify an undestroyed target as destroyed. The outcome of each attack is determined by a contest success function that depends on the amount of resources allocated by the defender and the attacker to each attack. The article suggests a probabilistic model of the multiple attacks and analyzes how the target destruction probability and the attacker's relative resource expenditure are impacted by the two probabilities of incorrect observation, the attacker's and defender's resource ratio, the contest intensity, the number of attacks, and the resource distribution across attacks. We analyze how the attacker chooses the number of attacks, the attack stopping rule, and the optimal resource distribution across attacks to maximize its utility.     

Perception of Climate Risk among Rural Farmers in Vietnam: Consistency within Households and with the Empirical Record

Rural farmers in Vietnamese communes perceive climate risk and potential impacts on livelihood within a complex context that may influence individual and household decisions. In a primary survey of 1,145 residents of the Thach Ha district of Ha Tinh province, we gathered data regarding perception about stability in climate, potential risks to livelihood, demographic characteristics, orientation toward risk, and interest in expanding economic activity. Temporal analysis of meteorological and economic indicator data forms an empirical basis for comparison with human perception. We ask the basic question: Are rural farmers’ perceptions of climate consistent with the historical record and reproducible within households? We find that respondents do perceive climate anomalies, with some anchoring on recent extreme events as revealed by climate observational data, and further that spouses disproportionately share perceptions relative to randomly simulated pairings. To put climate‐related risk perception in a larger context, we examine patterns across a range of risks to livelihood faced by farmers (livestock disease, pests, markets, health), using dimension reduction techniques. We find that our respondents distinguish among potential causes of low economic productivity, with substantial emphasis on climate‐related impacts. They do not express uniform concern across risks, but rather average patterns reveal common modes and distinguish climate concern. Still, among those expressing concern about climate‐related risks to livelihood we do not find an association with expressed intention to pursue changes in economic activity as a risk management response.     

中国居民家庭脆弱性及因病致贫效应分析

为定量分析医疗支出对家庭经济水平的冲击,以贫困脆弱性指标作为家庭经济风险的代理变量,利用微观调查数据构造反事实框架估计就医行为对家庭经济境遇的冲击,验证了医疗与家庭致贫效应的因果关系和影响程度。家庭成员在过去半年内若因病住院,对家庭福利会造成损失,损失幅度因贫困标准、样本年份而不同。2012年在贫困线标准为2美元条件下,家庭经济风险概率值增加0.31。分城乡和收入高低不同组估计,农村居民以及低收入群体的福利水平受就医影响幅度大于对应的其他群体。     

长江三角洲城市群洪涝灾害脆弱性评估及影响因素分析

长江三角洲城市群人口、财产、基础设施高度密集,暴雨洪涝灾害带来的影响越来越大,对该区域城市洪涝灾害脆弱性进行评估是保障长江三角洲区域一体化、可持续发展的基础。以长江三角洲城市群中心区27个城市为研究对象,基于超效率DEA模型,将洪涝灾害脆弱性看作一个负面“生产活动”,构建城市洪涝灾害脆弱性评估模型,在分析脆弱性空间分异特征的基础上确定该地区城市洪涝灾害脆弱性的主要影响因素。结果显示：从整体上看,长江三角洲城市群洪涝灾害脆弱性水平差异较大,安徽及浙江远高于江苏和上海,其中,上海的洪灾脆弱性最低;从空间上看,脆弱性分布有明显的地域集聚特征,脆弱性高的城市分布在浙江东南沿海和安徽南部丘陵地区;降雨量、城市发展水平及基础设施的完善性等因素对城市洪涝灾害脆弱性影响显著。     

Vulnerabilities and risks in population and environment studies

In the study of risks , different sciences use the same category in different ways, each related to its own ontological assumptions. But many of these fields communicate very little with one another. This article seeks to approximate two of these areas of study that have shown similar concerns and that can mutually strengthen one another, namely, geography and demography. Geography was one of the first disciplines to include risk in its environmental dimension and has had broad experience in simultaneously focusing on social and natural dynamics. Demography, on the other hand, faces greater difficulties because only recently has it incorporated the environmental dimension into its scientific scope. Both have brought the concept of vulnerability into their conceptual framework as complementary to that of risk. Geographers understand vulnerability as a more symbiotic form of the relationship between society and nature, whereas demographers give it a strong socioeconomic component. In this regard, the conceptual discussion on risks and vulnerabilities, in its attempt at approximating these two fields, is a way of conceptually advancing and strengthening the different approaches to empirical work, especially in population–environment studies which is the common ground for the dialogue between the two disciplines.