Water market actors in Dhaka: strengthening earthquake resilience and preparedness

"The Urban Crises Learning Partnership (UCLP) was a two-year (2015-17) learning initiative aimed at improving humanitarian preparedness and response in urban areas. It is a partnership between Habitat for Humanity GB, Oxfam GB, the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), and University College London (UCL). The project has carried out primary research in Haiti and Bangladesh through the National Offices of Habitat for Humanity in both countries, and Oxfam in Bangladesh. The UCLP has two primary objectives: to improve the way stakeholders in urban crises engage with each other to form new partnerships and make better decisions; and to improve disaster preparedness and response in urban areas by developing, testing, and disseminating new approaches to the formation of these relationships and systems. The project has addressed these objectives by exploring four related themes: the role of actors who are not part of the formal national or international humanitarian system; accountability to affected populations (AAP); urban systems; and coordinating urban disaster preparedness. This paper by Graeme English, Luiza Campos, and Jonathan Parkinson makes a valuable contribution to the last of these themes – coordinating urban disaster preparedness. By focusing on a specific and important sector – water – in the Bangladeshi capital, the paper draws attention to a range of preparedness measures that should take place prior to a major event such as an earthquake. The paper reviews current understanding of urban disaster risk reduction for domestic water resources and distribution. It indicates that stakeholders need to better understand water market systems in order to improve their responses and preparedness for an earthquake. It analyses the current situation related to resilience in the domestic water supply chain in Dhaka, and applies market-system mapping to highlight how stakeholders can work better with communities and market actors, as well as to highlight weak links in distribution chains. The paper serves as a useful companion piece to two other papers in this series – the Dhaka City Earthquake Simulation Report; and Partnership, Coordination, and Accountability in Urban Disaster Management: A Review of Policies in Bangladesh.

From Panic and Neglect to Investing in Health Security: Financing Pandemic Preparedness at a National Level

Deadly infectious pandemics will mark humanity's future, as they have shaped its past. Neither individual governmentsnorthe global community can entirely prevent the emergence ofinfectious threats. But we can bemuch betterprepared.This report by the International Working Group on Financing Preparedness (IWG) proposes ways in which national governments and development partners can finance investments in country and regional preparedness and response capacities for pandemics and other health emergencies.Preparedness for pandemics refers to health and non-health interventions, capabilities, and capacities at community, country, regional, and global levels. Their purpose is to prevent, detect, contain and respond to the spread of disease and other hazards, mitigating social disruptions and limiting risks to international travel and trade

Quantification of Risk for USAF Fire and Emergency Services Flights as a Result of Shortage in Manpower

The United States Air Force (USAF) is currently experiencing a period of high operations tempo and overseas deployments have become frequent. These deployments will leave home installations short manned. Some amount of risk is incurred by the home installation as a result of the short manning. For an organization, such as an USAF Fire and Emergency Services (FES) flight, whose primary responsibility is the protection of life and property, the incurred risk could be catastrophic. Still no attempt has been made to quantify risk in terms of manpower for the USAF FES flights. The primary purpose of this research was to develop and validate a methodology to quantify risk in terms of manpower for FES flights. This research develops a decision tool to provide insight to FES Fire Chiefs on the risk associated with specific manpower decisions. The methodology was validated using data from Dyess Air Force Base FES flight. A secondary goal of the research was to determine a cost/benefit relationship between the risk level and the cost to backfill deployed firefighter positions with contract labor. The result was a decision tree model and pareto optimal graphs for the risk to manpower level and the cost/benefit relationship

Master of Science

thesisMining and the related industries play an important role in the Korean economy. The Korean mining industry is relatively small. There are several mines in Korea but they are very small, and production is low in comparison with other countries' mines. Thus Korea must take part in mineral projects all over the world to secure essential minerals such as coal, copper, uranium, iron ore, zinc, and nickel to support its manufacturing industries. For that reason, the Korean government established K Company1 as a government corporation to invest in mineral deposits throughout the world. However there are several major entities, including BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Anglo American, Xstrata, Freeport McMoRan, Chinese government-run companies, and Japanese trading companies that have large foreign holdings, controlling deposits in most of the world's established and productive mining districts. As a relative newcomer, K Company is having difficulty breaking into these markets. In general, the mining industry considers the United States, Canada, Australia, and European countries to have good mining investment environments, but because the major companies have already achieved market dominance in those countries large investments are required. Thus K Company is increasingly turning to new areas like South America (Peru and Bolivia) and Africa. The competition among businesses to secure a share of the new market is intense but there are still good investment opportunities. However, because most of the countries in these areas are not well developed, there are several additional risks associated with participation in mining projects there. Risk is a major factor in all mining activities, arising from many internal and external variables. In this thesis, those variables are identified, and their effects evaluated, based on a survey of 31 experts. A statistical model to analyze the effect of risk on the economic feasibility of mine development and operation at a given location is presented, and validated using analysis from projects at K Company. The guidelines and model, as presented here, will enable K Company and other investors to make better investment decisions in the future

Food security, risk management and climate change

This report identifies major constraints to the adaptive capacity of food organisations operating in Australia. This report is about food security, climate change and risk management. Australia has enjoyed an unprecedented level of food security for more than half a century, but there are new uncertainties emerging and it would be unrealistic – if not complacent – to assume the same level of food security will persist simply because of recent history. The project collected data from more than 36 case study organisations (both foreign and local) operating in the Australian food-supply chain, and found that for many businesses,  risk management practices require substantial improvement to cope with and exploit the uncertainties that lie ahead. Three risks were identified as major constraints to adaptive capacity of food organisations operating in Australia:  risk management practices; an uncertain regulatory environment – itself a result of gaps in risk management; climate change uncertainty and projections about climate change impacts, also related to risk management

State of the art 2015: a literature review of social media intelligence capabilities for counter-terrorism

Overview This paper is a review of how information and insight can be drawn from open social media sources. It focuses on the specific research techniques that have emerged, the capabilities they provide, the possible insights they offer, and the ethical and legal questions they raise. These techniques are considered relevant and valuable in so far as they can help to maintain public safety by preventing terrorism, preparing for it, protecting the public from it and pursuing its perpetrators. The report also considers how far this can be achieved against the backdrop of radically changing technology and public attitudes towards surveillance. This is an updated version of a 2013 report paper on the same subject, State of the Art. Since 2013, there have been significant changes in social media, how it is used by terrorist groups, and the methods being developed to make sense of it.  The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 is an overview of social media use, focused on how it is used by groups of interest to those involved in counter-terrorism. This includes new sections on trends of social media platforms; and a new section on Islamic State (IS). Part 2 provides an introduction to the key approaches of social media intelligence (henceforth ‘SOCMINT’) for counter-terrorism. Part 3 sets out a series of SOCMINT techniques. For each technique a series of capabilities and insights are considered, the validity and reliability of the method is considered, and how they might be applied to counter-terrorism work explored. Part 4 outlines a number of important legal, ethical and practical considerations when undertaking SOCMINT work

Liberalizing Indian agriculture : an agenda for reform

In July 1991, India embarked on a program of economic decontrol that greatly speeded the previously slow process of liberalizing trade and domestic regulatory controls begun in 1978. But the focus of reform has been on manufacturing. Reform has barely touched agriculture, which accounts for two-thirds of employment in India and about 30 percent of India's GDP. Although some crops (notably oilseeds) receive heavy protection, the net effect of interventions to date is to heavily favor manufacturing over agriculture. In this agenda for reform, the authors offer recommendations: Remove all quantitative export and import controls on agriculture, except for special treatment (such as export taxes) when Indian exports would be substantial enough to depress world prices (most likely with rice). Further reduce protection on manufacturing, rather than bring protection for agriculture up to the same level. As a transitional measure, consider the use of variable tariffs based on weighted averages of past international prices as a way to partly insulate domestic prices from extreme fluctuations in world prices. Initially allow the export only of high quality high priced varieties of such commodities as cotton and rice, to limit upward pressures on domestic prices of lower quality varieties, which are important to consumption in low income Indian households. Liberalizing fertilizingr imports and deregulating domestic manufacturing and the distribution of fertilizingrs. Remove subsidies on irrigations, electricity, and credit (and create conditions to facilitate the trading of canal irrigation water rights). Deregulate the wheat, rice, oil and oilseed industries, and abolish compulsory government acquisition at below market prices of sugar, molasses, and milled rice. Reform the food security system to protect low income groups from the increase in the general level of food prices required by the liberalization of agriculture. This would involve better targeting of food subsidies and associated reforms of the public distribution system, or even its eventual replacement by a food stamp system.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Crops&Crop Management Systems,Agricultural Research,Markets and Market Access

Debt in just societies : a general framework for regulating credit.

Debt presents a dilemma to societies: successful societies benefit from a substantial infrastructure of consumer, commercial, corporate, and sovereign debt but debt can cause substantial private and social harm. Pre‐crisis and post‐crisis solutions have seesawed between subsidizing and restricting debt, between leveraging and deleveraging. A consensus exists among governments and international financial institutions that financial stability is the fundamental normative principle underlying financial regulation. Financial stability, however, is insensitive to equality concerns and can produce morally impermissible aggregations in which the least advantaged in a society are made worse off. Solutions based only on financial stability can restrict debt without accounting for the risk of harm to persons least able to bear the risk, worsen preexisting inequalities, destroy or impair the net worth of households, and impose unfavorable distributive consequences. This article offers a new approach to assist policymakers in developing and evaluating regulation to take criteria in addition to financial stability into account, but which do not undermine the aim of financial stability. It calls for a luck egalitarian approach, offering policymakers options to take the debtor's choices into account while still accounting for cognitive mistakes people often make in debt decisionmaking. It offers a general framework for the underlying principles for the regulation of debt: its focus is not on any particular forms of debt or its regulation but in structuring debt regulation more generally. It offers a set of recommendations on how regulators can take concerns about luck and equality into account in regulatory design