Search results

1 – 10 of 423
Open Access
Article
Publication date: 3 February 2021

Marc Zebisch, Stefan Schneiderbauer, Kerstin Fritzsche, Philip Bubeck, Stefan Kienberger, Walter Kahlenborn, Susanne Schwan and Till Below

This paper aims to present the “Vulnerability Sourcebook” methodology, a standardised framework for the assessment of climate vulnerability and risk in the context of adaptation…

6846

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to present the “Vulnerability Sourcebook” methodology, a standardised framework for the assessment of climate vulnerability and risk in the context of adaptation planning. The Vulnerability Sourcebook has been developed for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and has been applied in more than twenty countries worldwide.

Design/methodology/approach

It is based on a participative development of so-called climate impact chains, which are an analytical concept to better understand, systemise and prioritise the climate factors as well as environmental and socio-economic factors that drive climate related threats, vulnerabilities and risks in a specific system. Impact chains serve as the backbone for an operational climate vulnerability assessment with indicators based on quantitative approaches (data, models) combined with expert assessments. In this paper, the authors present the concept and applications of the original Vulnerability Sourcebook, published in 2015, which was based on the IPCC AR4 concept of climate vulnerability. In Section 6 of this paper, the authors report how this concept has been adapted to the current IPCC AR5 concept of climate risks.

Findings

The application of the Sourcebook is demonstrated in three case studies in Bolivia, Pakistan and Burundi. The results indicate that particularly the participative development of impact chains helped with generating a common picture on climate vulnerabilities and commitment for adaptation planning within a region. The mixed methods approach (considering quantitative and qualitative information) allows for a flexible application in different contexts. Challenges are mainly the availability of climate (change) and socio-economic data, as well as the transparency of value-based decisions in the process.

Originality/value

The Vulnerability Sourcebook offers a standardised framework for the assessment of climate vulnerability and risk in the context of adaptation planning.

Details

International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management, vol. 13 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1756-8692

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 22 September 2021

Jin Tang, Weijiang Li, Jiayi Fang, Zhonghao Zhang, Shiqiang Du, Yanjuan Wu and Jiahong Wen

Quantitative and spatial-explicit flood risk information is of great importance for strengthening climate change adaptation and flood resilience. Shanghai is a coastal megacity at…

2081

Abstract

Purpose

Quantitative and spatial-explicit flood risk information is of great importance for strengthening climate change adaptation and flood resilience. Shanghai is a coastal megacity at large estuary delta with rising flood risks. This study aims to quantify the overall economic-societal risks of storm flooding and their spatial patterns in Shanghai.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on multiple storm flood scenarios at different return periods, as well as fine-scale data sets including gridded GDP, gridded population and vector land-use, a probabilistic risk model incorporating geographic information system is used to assess the economic-societal risks of flooding and their spatial distributions.

Findings

Our results show that, from 1/200 to 1/5,000-year floods, the exposed assets will increase from USD 85.4bn to USD 657.6bn, and the direct economic losses will increase from USD 3.06bn to USD 52bn. The expected annual damage (EAD) of assets is around USD 84.36m. Hotpots of EAD are mainly distributed in the city center, the depressions along the upper Huangpu River in the southwest, the north coast of Hangzhou Bay, and the confluence of the Huangpu River and Yangtze River in the northeast. From 1/200 to 1/5,000-year floods, the exposed population will rise from 280 thousand to 2,420 thousand, and the estimated casualties will rise from 299 to 1,045. The expected annual casualties (EAC) are around 2.28. Hotspots of casualties are generally consistent with those of EAD.

Originality/value

In contrast to previous studies that focus on a single flood scenario or a particular type of flood exposure/risk in Shanghai, the findings contribute to an understanding of overall flood risks and their spatial patterns, which have significant implications for cost-benefit analysis of flood resilience strategies.

Details

International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management, vol. 13 no. 4/5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1756-8692

Keywords

Open Access
Book part
Publication date: 19 November 2020

Abstract

Details

The Impact of Global Drug Policy on Women: Shifting the Needle
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83982-885-0

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 2 July 2024

Richard J. Volpe, Xiaowei Cai, Presley Roldan and Alexander Stevens

The COVID-19 pandemic was a shock to the food supply chain without modern precedent. Challenges in production, manufacturing, distribution and retailing led to the highest rates…

Abstract

Purpose

The COVID-19 pandemic was a shock to the food supply chain without modern precedent. Challenges in production, manufacturing, distribution and retailing led to the highest rates of food price inflation in the US since the 1970s. The major goal of this paper is to describe statistically the impact of the pandemic of food price inflation and volatility in the US and to discuss implications for industry and for policymakers.

Design/methodology/approach

We use Bureau of Labor Statistics data to investigate food prices in the US, 2020–2021. We apply 16 statistical approaches to measure price changes and volatility and three regression approaches to measure counterfactuals of food prices, had the pandemic not occurred.

Findings

Food price inflation and volatility increased substantially during the early months of the pandemic, with a great deal of heterogeneity across food products and geographic regions. Food price inflation was most pronounced for meats, and contrary to expectations, highest in the western US Forecasting approaches demonstrate that grocery prices were about 7% higher than they would have been without the pandemic as of the end of 2021.

Originality/value

The research on COVID-19 and the food system remains in its nascent stage. As findings on food loss and waste, employment and wages, food insecurity and more proliferate, it is vital to understand how food prices were connected to these phenomena and affected. We also motivate several ideas for future work.

Details

British Food Journal, vol. 126 no. 13
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0007-070X

Keywords

Open Access
Book part
Publication date: 16 August 2023

Abstract

Details

Digital Transformations of Illicit Drug Markets: Reconfiguration and Continuity
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80043-866-8

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 21 March 2022

Wei Xiong, Ziyi Xiong and Tina Tian

The performance of behavioral targeting (BT) mainly relies on the effectiveness of user classification since advertisers always want to target their advertisements to the most…

2390

Abstract

Purpose

The performance of behavioral targeting (BT) mainly relies on the effectiveness of user classification since advertisers always want to target their advertisements to the most relevant users. In this paper, the authors frame the BT as a user classification problem and describe a machine learning–based approach for solving it.

Design/methodology/approach

To perform such a study, two major research questions are investigated: the first question is how to represent a user’s online behavior. A good representation strategy should be able to effectively classify users based on their online activities. The second question is how different representation strategies affect the targeting performance. The authors propose three user behavior representation methods and compare them empirically using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) as a performance measure.

Findings

The experimental results indicate that ad campaign effectiveness can be significantly improved by combining user search queries, clicked URLs and clicked ads as a user profile. In addition, the authors also explore the temporal aspect of user behavior history by investigating the effect of history length on targeting performance. The authors note that an improvement of approximately 6.5% in AUC is achieved when user history is extended from 1 day to 14 days, which is substantial in targeting performance.

Originality/value

This paper confirms the effectiveness of BT on user classification and provides a validation of BT for Internet advertising.

Details

Journal of Internet and Digital Economics, vol. 2 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2752-6356

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 22 February 2011

Søren Risløv Staugaard and Nicole Kristjansen Rosenberg

Previous research has found that individuals with social phobia differ from controls in their processing of emotional faces. For instance, people with social phobia show increased…

Abstract

Previous research has found that individuals with social phobia differ from controls in their processing of emotional faces. For instance, people with social phobia show increased attention to briefly presented threatening faces. However, when exposure times are increased, the direction of this attentional bias is more unclear. Studies investigating eye movements have found both increased as well as decreased attention to threatening faces in socially anxious participants. The current study investigated eye movements to emotional faces in eight patients with social phobia and 34 controls. Three different tasks with different exposure durations were used, which allowed for an investigation of the time course of attention. At the early time interval, patients showed a complex pattern of both vigilance and avoidance of threatening faces. At the longest time interval, patients avoided the eyes of sad, disgust, and neutral faces more than controls, whereas there were no group differences for angry faces.

Details

Mental Illness, vol. 3 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2036-7465

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 15 October 2020

Josh P. Armstrong

The leaders of the future will have to lead with intercultural competence and with the ability to facilitate this development of competence in others. The development of skills in…

Abstract

The leaders of the future will have to lead with intercultural competence and with the ability to facilitate this development of competence in others. The development of skills in undergraduate students to meet this challenge is paramount to the establishment of effective leadership for the future. Within this study, researchers address the challenge by quantitatively examining intercultural competency outcomes students derive from leadership-based study abroad experiences. For five years, researchers utilized a pre-post intercultural competency survey of student participants in a leadership education study abroad program in Zambia, Africa. Using the Intercultural Effectiveness Scale (IES), data was analyzed for seventy-eight students who participated in this five-week study abroad course. The results demonstrate statistically significant growth on students’ intercultural competency across all ten measures of dimensions and sub-scales. Recommendations provide a framework for leadership educators to employ pedagogies that influence intercultural development within study abroad as a means of developing global leadership in their students.

Details

Journal of Leadership Education, vol. 19 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1552-9045

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 4 September 2017

Yuanxing Zhang, Zhuqi Li, Kaigui Bian, Yichong Bai, Zhi Yang and Xiaoming Li

Projecting the population distribution in geographical regions is important for many applications such as launching marketing campaigns or enhancing the public safety in certain…

Abstract

Purpose

Projecting the population distribution in geographical regions is important for many applications such as launching marketing campaigns or enhancing the public safety in certain densely populated areas. Conventional studies require the collection of people’s trajectory data through offline means, which is limited in terms of cost and data availability. The wide use of online social network (OSN) apps over smartphones has provided the opportunities of devising a lightweight approach of conducting the study using the online data of smartphone apps. This paper aims to reveal the relationship between the online social networks and the offline communities, as well as to project the population distribution by modeling geo-homophily in the online social networks.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, the authors propose the concept of geo-homophily in OSNs to determine how much the data of an OSN can help project the population distribution in a given division of geographical regions. Specifically, the authors establish a three-layered theoretic framework that first maps the online message diffusion among friends in the OSN to the offline population distribution over a given division of regions via a Dirichlet process and then projects the floating population across the regions.

Findings

By experiments over large-scale OSN data sets, the authors show that the proposed prediction models have a high prediction accuracy in characterizing the process of how the population distribution forms and how the floating population changes over time.

Originality/value

This paper tries to project population distribution by modeling geo-homophily in OSNs.

Details

International Journal of Crowd Science, vol. 1 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2398-7294

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 15 October 2018

Melissa S. Terlecki and Anne McMahon

Metacognition is linked to academic achievement and personal development, especially as it relates to leadership education. The current study investigated the impact of a course…

Abstract

Metacognition is linked to academic achievement and personal development, especially as it relates to leadership education. The current study investigated the impact of a course in metacognition. Two hundred and fifty one undergraduates were surveyed for metacognitive ability using the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) and Metacognitive Rubric (MR) before and after participating in a course either involving metacognitive training or alternative coursework. While minimal demographic differences were found, results showed significant improvement among students who trained in the metacognition class. Curricular development in the area of metacognition is recommended as it relates to leadership education.

Details

Journal of Leadership Education, vol. 17 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1552-9045

1 – 10 of 423