Climate change hotspots mapping: what have we learned?

In the past 5 years there has been a proliferation of efforts to map climate change “hotspots” — regions that are particularly vulnerable to current or future climate impacts, and where human security may be at risk. While some are academic exercises, many are produced with the goal of drawing policy maker attention to regions that are particularly susceptible to climate impacts, either to mitigate the risk of humanitarian crises or conflicts or to target adaptation assistance. Hotspots mapping efforts address a range of issues and sectors such as vulnerable populations, humanitarian crises, conflict, agriculture and food security, and water resources. This paper offers a timely assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current hotspots mapping approaches with the goal of improving future efforts. It also highlights regions that are anticipated, based on combinations of high exposure, high sensitivity and low adaptive capacity, to suffer significant impacts from climate change

Capacity Building Workshop on Genetic Resource Policies for CGIAR Scientists and Partners in East Africa, 4 - 7 June 2019, ILRI Campus, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

The CGIAR Genebank Platform Policy Module, in coordination with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), organized the ‘Capacity building workshop on genetic resource policies for CGIAR scientists and partners in East Africa’. The workshop was held from 4 - 7 June 2019, at the ILRI campus in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This event brought together 30 staff members from 6 CGIAR Centres and 10 participants from national agricultural research organizations in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe. The workshop was designed to increase participants’ understanding of the CGIAR Centres’ and national research organizations’ obligations vis-à-vis international treaties and conventions dealing with access and benefit-sharing, and how these international instruments influence the day-to-day management of the collections. The workshop included participatory analyses of practical case studies and hypothetical scenarios where the interface between the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing and the ITPGRFA (Plant Treaty) can raise legal and procedural issues. It also addressed the management of information associated with genetic resources including digital sequence information

Unemployment and AIDS: The Social-Democratic Challenge for South Africa

There are two major economic and social security challenges facing South Africa: addressing large-scale unemployment and the AIDS pandemic. As of 2003, an estimated 14% of all South Africans were HIV-positive, with over a thousand people dying each day of AIDS. According to the government household and labour-force surveys conducted from the mid-1990s onwards, about a third of the labour force is without work (Nattrass, 2000a). This amounts to about 4.7 million people and it is, without question, a socio-economic crisis of major proportions. The life-chances and living-standards of entire households are compromised when working-age adults cannot find employment (Seekings, 2003b). Households burdened by AIDS are in an especially difficult position (Desmond et al 2000, Steinberg et al 2002a, 2002b; Booysen, 2002; Booysen et al, 2002). Addressing AIDS and unemployment poses major challenges for social solidarity in South Africa. Over the past decade, the labour-market and industrial-policy environment has benefited relatively high-productivity firms and sectors (Nattrass, 2001). Business thus had strong incentives to reduce dependence on unskilled labour, and once the price of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) started to fall from 2001 onwards, to supply it, either directly or indirectly through medical aids, to their increasingly skilled workforce (Nattrass, 2003). Those without jobs had neither access to earned income nor life-prolonging medication.

State of New Hampshire annual report of Coos county for the year ending December 31, 2013.

This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a county in the state of New Hampshire

HRM and Performance: What’s Next?

The last decade of empirical research on the added value of human resource management (HRM), also known as the HRM and Performance debate, demonstrates evidence that ‘HRM does matter’ (Huselid, 1995; Guest, Michie, Conway and Sheehan, 2003; Wright, Gardner and Moynihan, 2003). Unfortunately, the relationships are often (statistically) weak and the results ambiguous. This paper reviews and attempts to extend the theoretical and methodological issues in the HRM and performance debate. Our aim is to build an agenda for future research in this area. After a brief overview of achievements to date, we proceed with the theoretical and methodological issues related to what constitutes HRM, what is meant by the concept of performance and what is the nature of the link between these two. In the final section, we make a plea for research designs starting from a multidimensional concept of performance, including the perceptions of employees, and building on the premise of HRM systems as an enabling device for a whole range of strategic options. This implies a reversal of the Strategy-HRM linkage

Antidote application: an educational system for treatment of common toxin overdose

Poisonings account for almost 1% of emergency room visits each year. Time is a critical factor in dealing with a toxicologic emergency. Delay in dispensing the first antidote dose can lead to life-threatening sequelae. Current toxicological resources that support treatment decisions are broad in scope, time-consuming to read, or at times unavailable. Our review of current toxicological resources revealed a gap in their ability to provide expedient calculations and recommendations about appropriate course of treatment. To bridge the gap, we developed the Antidote Application (AA), a computational system that automatically provides patient-specific antidote treatment recommendations and individualized dose calculations. We implemented 27 algorithms that describe FDA (the US Food and Drug Administration) approved use and evidence-based practices found in primary literature for the treatment of common toxin exposure. The AA covers 29 antidotes recommended by Poison Control and toxicology experts, 19 poison classes and 31 poisons, which represent over 200 toxic entities. To the best of our knowledge, the AA is the first educational decision support system in toxicology that provides patient-specific treatment recommendations and drug dose calculations. The AA is publicly available at http://projects.met- hilab.org/antidote/

Social assistance strategies as means of addressing poverty: lessons for South Africa

Poverty is a daily reality which a majority of South Africans live with. Social security in the form of cash grants has been the main poverty reduction instrument, albeit with limited success. The thesis aims to propose improvements which can be made in the government’s current social protection system and formulate alternative directions towards reducing poverty. An overview of the three most researched social security strategies around the world (i.e. Nordic, Latin American, and U.S. models) revealed two dominant instruments: conditionality and universalism. If applied in South Africa, universalism may be costly and unsustainable unless the right funding method is used. Attaching education and health attainment conditions to an adult grant would be inefficient and even burdensome to recipients. In terms of child grants, there is little evidence to suggest that the demand for and private levels of investment in education and health are insufficient. Therefore attaching health and education conditions to social grants may only serve to highlight the severe supply side inefficiencies in South Africa. Attaching marriage as an alternative condition may disadvantage poor and needy beneficiaries as marriage is an expensive institution in South Africa. Furthermore, enforcing the marriage condition would violate the constitutional rights of recipients who do not necessarily place a high value on the institution. To strengthen the poverty reduction efficiency of social grants and reduce dependency, the thesis suggests that social cash grants, regardless of whether universal and/or conditional or neither, should be temporary and used in conjunction with other strategies which encourage inclusive economic growth. Social assistance alone will not reduce poverty and ultimately, inclusive economic growth remains a more viable approach to reducing poverty. How to achieve the required inclusive economic growth in South Africa therefore provides further research opportunities

HRM and Performance: What’s Next?

The last decade of empirical research on the added value of human resource management (HRM), also known as the HRM and Performance debate, demonstrates evidence that ‘HRM does matter’ (Huselid, 1995; Guest, Michie, Conway and Sheehan, 2003; Wright, Gardner and Moynihan, 2003). Unfortunately, the relationships are often (statistically) weak and the results ambiguous. This paper reviews and attempts to extend the theoretical and methodological issues in the HRM and performance debate. Our aim is to build an agenda for future research in this area. After a brief overview of achievements to date, we proceed with the theoretical and methodological issues related to what constitutes HRM, what is meant by the concept of performance and what is the nature of the link between these two. In the final section, we make a plea for research designs starting from a multidimensional concept of performance, including the perceptions of employees, and building on the premise of HRM systems as an enabling device for a whole range of strategic options. This implies a reversal of the Strategy-HRM linkage