An approximate dynamic programming approach to food security of communities following hazards

Food security can be threatened by extreme natural hazard events for households of all social classes within a community. To address food security issues following a natural disaster, the recovery of several elements of the built environment within a community, including its building portfolio, must be considered. Building portfolio restoration is one of the most challenging elements of recovery owing to the complexity and dimensionality of the problem. This study introduces a stochastic scheduling algorithm for the identification of optimal building portfolio recovery strategies. The proposed approach provides a computationally tractable formulation to manage multi-state, large-scale infrastructure systems. A testbed community modeled after Gilroy, California, is used to illustrate how the proposed approach can be implemented efficiently and accurately to find the near-optimal decisions related to building recovery following a severe earthquake.Comment: As opposed to the preemptive scheduling problem, which was addressed in multiple works by us, we deal with a non-preemptive stochastic scheduling problem in this work. Submitted to 13th International Conference on Applications of Statistics and Probability in Civil Engineering, ICASP13 Seoul, South Korea, May 26-30, 201

CGIAR Research Program 4: Agriculture for Improved Nutrition and Health

This research program aims to accelerate progress in improving the nutrition and health of poor people by exploiting and enhancing the synergies between agriculture, nutrition, and health through four key research components: value chains, biofortification, control of agriculture-associated diseases, and integrated agriculture, nutrition, and health development programs and policies. With IFPRI and ILRI as co-Lead Centers, this program will also involve 10 other CGIAR Centers. It has an initial 3-year budget of US$191.4 million. The program was approved in December 2011

Cash-based interventions to enhance dignity in persistent humanitarian refugee crises: a system dynamics approach

Cash-based interventions (CBIs) as one form of aid have recently received substantial interest from humanitarian organizations in persistent humanitarian crises. This article proposes a system dynamics (SD) approach to study the CBIs' impact factors on all aspects of the beneficiaries' dignity in longstanding refugee crises, such as the case of Syrian refugees in Turkey. Reviewing the humanitarian management literature,we first develop a set of holistic causal loops to better understand the building boxes of refugees’ dignity and their interactions. Then, an SD model is proposed and calibrated by field data from humanitarian organizations. The result of CBI amount sensitivity and payment time periods shows that CBIs are significantly more effective in diminishing child labor rates and to improve in health and accommodation service reception by the refugees in short terms, but to be as much effective in longer terms, humanitarian organizations must be more directly contribute to service capacity-building activities that are strategies by the hosting governments and supported by the international bodies, such as EU and UN.Otherwise, long-term or enhanced CBI supports can only lead to accelerated service capacity saturation and thus put extra pressure on already strained services and cause tensions between hosting and refugee communities