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This paper aims to evaluate the antimicrobial and antioxidant activity of ethanol, methanol and aqueous extracts of the jujube fruit.

The fruit samples were harvested from Ziziphus lotus L. in three regions of Morocco: Aïn Chifae (Immouzer), Saiss (Fez) and Guercif. The fruit extracts were obtained by Soxhlet method using ethanol, methanol and water, and then a phytochemical screening was done for each extract. Total phenolic and total flavonoids contents were also determined. Afterward, the antimicrobial activity of the studied extracts was evaluated using the broth microdilution method. To estimate the total antioxidant effect of these extracts, the DPPH (2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) scavenging and phosphomolybdate tests were performed.

Results showed that the highest content of polyphenols and flavonoids was found for ethanol and methanol extracts, while the lowest content was found in the aqueous extracts for all populations studied. Thus, results showed that the highest content of phenolic compounds was recorded in the population of Fez. Methanol extract of this population was the richest in polyphenols (30.36 mg/g) and in flavonoids (13.03 mg/g). The antimicrobial tests showed that Enterococcus faecalis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa were the most sensitive (6.25 mg/ml), compared to the other tested strains. Based on the minimal bactericidal concentrations/minimal fungicidal concentration or MFC/MIC ratio, it seems that ethanol extracts showed a bactericidal effect against Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus subtillis, and a bacteriostatic effect against Enterococcus faecalis. On the other hand, the methanol extract showed bacteriostatic effect against Enterococcus faecalis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. In addition, methanol extracts of Ziziphus lotus have significant antioxidant potent.

Methanol and ethanol extracts of Ziziphus lotus fruit have demonstrated strong antimicrobial effect. Moreover, the authors were able to show that the extract of Ziziphus lotus fruit has a very important antioxidant power.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the physicochemical properties, fatty acids, tocopherols, and polyphenols of Algerian argan oil.

The argan oil was extracted from the kernel by an organic solvent, the n‐hexane. Several methods and techniques (spectrophotometric, titrimetric, refractometric, and chomrtographic (CPG/high‐performance liquid chromatographic – HPLC) were used to characterise to argan oil.

The argan oil was yellow oil with faintly marked smell and flavour. The physicochemical analysis showed that the oil was pure, fresh, not siccative and rich in C₁₈ medium chain unsaturated fatty acids, particularly the oleic acid. A HPLC and gaseous phase chromatography methods were developed for the quali‐quantitative analysis of α‐tocopherol and fatty acids composition, respectively.

This highlight shows that the composition of argan oil is oleic‐linoleic type rich in α‐tocopherol (20 mg/kg). The phenolic fraction known for its antioxidant properties ranges from 30 to 50 mg/kg. The argan oil is mainly rich in antioxidant compounds such as phenolic compounds and α‐tocopherol. Argan oil is rich in unsaturated fatty acids, tocopherol and phenolic compounds.

Considering its rich composition in antioxidant compounds and essential fatty acid, argan oil has been used for a long time as a food and for body care, prevention and treatment of cardiovascular and some cancers diseases. A deep knowledge of the chemical composition of argan oil will certainly show that is has a high‐nutritional potentiality and is claimed to have favourable medicinal and cosmetic properties.

No such research has been carried out on the argan oil extracted from Argania spinosa (L.) of Algeria. The present work was undertaken to study the physicochemical and nutritional properties of the argan oil.

The Millennium Declaration and the Hyogo Framework for Action point towards the need for methods to identify urban vulnerability to disaster risk as a pre-cursor for the development of benchmarks with which to track policy progress for urban sustainability and risk reduction. This paper responds to this call by assessing the state of the art in urban vulnerability and risk assessment tools. It presents a review of the conceptual frameworks, methodologies and comparative advantages of ten tools. These are categorised into deductive and inductive approaches, with inductive approaches in turn separated into those that use social-survey and participatory methods. The tools examined vary in the focus of their interests between those concerned with the vulnerability of places (cities or buildings) and people (either as predefined vulnerable social groups or identified through household livelihood sustainability).

The paper calls for a deeper conversation between the emerging community of practitioners working on urban disaster risk management and the existing urban development community. For example, disasters are typically defined as exceptionally large, single events, which adds to analytical clarity, but misses the cumulative impact of multiple small, local events on household sustainability and urban infrastructure, ultimately distorting planning guidance. There is also a need for natural hazard specific vulnerability assessment tools to be interpreted alongside, or to incorporate social, economic and political sources of danger to livelihoods and human health. For forward looking policy relevance, tools are also needed that can assess adaptive or coping capacity. This is essential for the building of a holistic approach to urban risk management. An approach that coherently tackles the multiple hazards and vulnerabilities faced by urban dwellers, and seeks to avoid the shifting of risk burdens between populations and the movement of people from one kind of threat to another.

Insurance‐linked securities can benefit both issuers and investors; they supply insurance and reinsurance companies with additional risk capital at reasonable prices (with little or no credit risk), and supply excess returns to investors that are uncorrelated with the returns of other financial assets. This article explains the terminology of insurance and reinsurance, the structure of insurance‐linked securities, and provides an overview of major transactions. First, there is a discussion of how stochastic catastrophe modeling has been applied to assess the risk of natural catastrophes, including the reliability and validation of the risk models. Second, the authors compare the risk‐adjusted returns of recent securitizations on the basis of relative value. Compared with high‐yield bonds, catastrophe (“CAT”) bonds have wide spreads and very attractive Sharpe ratios. In fact, the risk‐adjusted returns on CAT bonds dominate high‐yield bonds. Furthermore, since natural catastrophe risk is essentially uncorrelated with market risk, high expected excess returns make CAT bonds high‐alpha assets. The authors illustrate this point and show that a relatively small allocation of insurance‐linked securities within a fixed income portfolio can enhance the expected return and simultaneously decrease risk, without significantly changing the skewness and kurtosis of the return distribution.

This paper aims to present an actuarial model of takaful to cover death and permanent total deficit of contributors benefiting from Mourabaha financing for real estate, taking into account modern takaful systems around the world. The main goal of this paper is to design an optimization program that helps to obtain a marketable and profitable takaful product by using the retakaful as a safety and technical support tool.

The study adopts an actuarial approach for determining takaful contributions and optimal choice of an adequate form of retakaful to maximize the technical surplus of a takaful company. A resolution method based on genetic algorithms is also developed to solve the optimization program.

This actuarial model allows to provide high added-value support to takaful and Islamic finance and also reassures clients of purchasing real estate through the Mourabaha product.

It should be noted that the choice of an effective Islamic borrower insurance product (takaful borrower) obviously depends on the strategy adopted by the takaful operator (type of takaful, pricing, experience and statistics observed, etc.), the form of retakaful, the behavior of the participants and the nature of the portfolio. Moreover, the program developed in this paper is suitably affordable and is closely linked to the hypotheses.

The strong point of the present program relies on the case where the reinsurer establishes itself as a partner of choice and to enrich the takaful fund. In addition, the actuarial tools used in agreement with genetic algorithms have made it possible to optimize with efficiency and ease of calculation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of planners and designers in supporting residents to negotiate the challenges of rebuilding after wildfire on the urban fringe. The research seeks to understand how planning and design professionals, in providing professional services, comprehend the changing expectations of residents transitioning from emergency to the slow process of achieving a post fire normal state through the project of redesigning their homes.

This paper uses semi-structured interviews to examine the role of planners and designers employed to facilitate and assess, or provide design services for residents who rebuilt houses after the 2003 bushfires in Canberra, Australia’s Capital City. Narrative analysis was used to identify emerging themes based on their professional experiences during the redevelopment of the suburb.

Case analysis shows that external influences were significant contributing factors in determining the design of houses rebuilt after the fires. The goal for both the designers and residents was to design a more sustainable built form; however, this was not achieved as external social and cultural influences came into the decision-making process.

The paper provides a different perspective on the competing goals planners and designers face in supporting residents to rebuild after disasters such as wild fires. It highlights the changing nature of the relationship between professionals and community. In particular, the research suggests planners can play an important role as observers and facilitators of long-term change occurring in the years after wildfire. The research provides insights into how planners and building designers may better serve the community by gaining a better understanding of the changing nature of redevelopment over time.

The research provides a novel approach to understanding the challenges facing planners and building designers working with residents to rebuild houses after wildfire. The paper makes the case for a better understanding of the temporal dynamics and external influences affecting decision making in post disaster redevelopment of homes.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce to scientific community a new optimization technique and its application to the radiation synthesis case.

The immunity tactic is a new powerful optimization tool inspired by immune system. It was used with success to achieve the conformal antenna radiation synthesis in an acceptable processing time.

Radiation synthesis of conformal antenna arrays based on immunity tactic generates very good results compared with other optimization methods. The comparison is very satisfactory as regards accuracy and processing time.

The improvement of convergence and accuracy will be done certainly by use of other variants of the technique or combination with others.

The paper exposes with details a new optimization technique based on immune system and its behavior. The results, for the special case of conformal antenna arrays radiation synthesis, are very satisfactory and very encouraging. The impact of the new technique will be, without doubt, positive on optimization field.

Cities have been exposed to a variety of natural disasters such as flooding, extreme temperatures, storms, earthquakes, and other natural shocks, and have had to respond and adapt to such pressures over time. In the context of global climate change, natural disasters have increased across the globe. Apart from climate change, many urban environments in Latin America are experiencing significant transformations in land use patterns, socio-demographic change, changing labor markets, and economic growth, resulting from recent decades of globalization. Such transformations have resulted in the internal fragmentation of cities. In this context, the purpose of the present chapter is to demonstrate the importance in both theoretical and methodological terms, of integrating the concept of socio-environmental fragmentation into urban vulnerability research in order to make progress toward higher degrees of local sustainability in those areas of the city that suffer natural disasters and fragmentation.

A mixed methods approach is used in order to combine different technical issues from urban and climate change studies.

The findings are related to the importance of an integrated approach, regarding the complexity of urban life, and the relationship between the urban, the social, and the environmental phenomenon.

This chapter relates to the revisit of the current state of preparedness and to determine whether further adaptations are required. The authors understood that these kinds of mixed approaches are necessary in order to understand the new complexity of urban processes.

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a pandemic with unique regional logistics management (RLM) challenges to respond to the chaos created by the crisis and to restore normality for operations and supply chains in home nations. The purpose of this article is to explore RLM in times of crisis from the perspective of public authorities responsible for combating the COVID-19 pandemic. The article also discusses the significance of crisis-driven RLM for humanitarian logistics and supply chain (HLSC) management.

Grounded on an inductive case study logic and guided by a constructivist perspective, this research involves semi-structured interviews with 15 managers and strategists responsible for the RLM of COVID-19 to capture lessons learnt so far from mitigating the transmission and spread of COVID-19. Underpinning the research is a conceptual RLM model premised on coordination, communication, and containment mechanisms (the 3Cs of crisis-driven logistics), as crisis response.

The study finds that the triggering of regional logistics in times of crisis for the COVID-19 case involves taskforce teams with centralisation for crisis readiness, information infrastructure with digitalisation for crisis protocols, and capacity calculations with orchestration for crisis scenarios. The study also finds that navigating the challenges for the 3Cs of crisis-driven logistics entails forward-thinking leadership for culture-based commitments, first-hand clarity for compliance-based campaigns, and far-reaching solidarity for compassion-based contributions.

This article addresses the gap in knowledge on RLM and potential priorities that underpin crisis-driven RLM strategies for HLSCs. The research is original in its argument for regional perspectives on logistics strategies that contribute to the “viability” and “integrity” of HLSCs. The research also uniquely focuses on RLM in times of crisis and proposes a conceptual RLM model of strategies for enhancing HLSCs.

Although, a number of initiatives have been taken after the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami to institutionalise disaster risk reduction (DRR), gaps still exist in the Sri Lankan local government sector. Even after ten years, local governments are still struggling to overcome a number of challenges in relation to making resilience in the built environment. DRR has not yet been properly integrated into the local government system and, as a result, poses a significant challenge. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to discover the hindrances for local governments in creating disaster resilient built environment within cities and to propose ways of overcoming the identified limitations.

In total, 15 semi-structured interviews were conducted among experts from Sri Lanka who are involved in disaster management, local governments and built environment fields of study. The interviews were conducted with the intention of gaining expert knowledge pertaining to this field of study. The interviews were mainly designed to capture the current practices for instigating DRR initiatives within Sri Lanka, the role of local governments in creating a disaster resilient built environment and the associated challenges, and ways of overcoming such challenges to ensure an effective contribution to city resilience.

Primary data discovered 36 challenges along with some associated sub-challenges. The challenges were categorised under eight main themes: legal framework; lack of adequate tools, techniques and guidelines; human resource constraints; funding constraints; weaknesses in the internal systems and processes; weaknesses in the external systems; community engagement; and other challenges. The paper analyses these challenges in detail and proposes a set of recommendations to overcome the challenges in order to create disaster resilient built environments within cities.

The paper provides a descriptive analysis of how the Sri Lankan local government sector could overcome the underpinning challenges of contributing to disaster resilience in the built environment and no comparative studies were conducted with in other tsunami affected regions. Furthermore, the paper analyses partial findings of a broader research, which was aimed at developing a framework to empower local governments in creating a disaster resilient built environment.

The paper provides an extensive analysis of the challenges faced by local governments in contributing to the resilience of their built environment and proposes how these challenges could be overcome while making a worthwhile contribution to both theory and practice. Accordingly, the paper recommends major changes in policy and practice with respect to bringing local governments into DRR.