1,128 research outputs found
Flood Impact Assessment Literature Review
This report is a literature review on flood damage approaches and models with suggestion for model
adaption, including the report on assessed damages in case study cities.The work described in this publication was supported by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme through the grant to the budget of CORFU
Collaborative Research on Flood Resilience in Urban Areas, Contract 244047
Flood Damage Model Guidelines
This report outlines the framework for the damage model that should be applied in the project.
The intended readership of the report is project partners who will be assessing flood damage in the
different case study cities.
The model outlined in the report deals with direct tangible damage, and indirect tangible and
intangible damage will be described in detail in other deliverables.
This report outlines the general principles that should be adhered to in assessing flood damage.
Recommendations are provided on the appropriate scale of modelling that should be adopted. The
report then goes on to outline the categories of assets that should be considered in assessing direct
tangible damage. The report also provides recommendations on the data that should be sought to
estimate the value of the assets at risk and the damage functions, which relate to the
characteristics of the flooding.
Finally, the report concludes with recommendations on how to estimate the Expected Annual
Damage.
An appendix is included, which provides the technical details of the modelling tool that has been
developed on a trial site in Dhaka in Bangladesh. This tool can be applied on a GIS software
platform. The details of the algorithms have been provided so that they can be applied in different
software packages, if necessary. The tool will be updated as further progress is madeThe work described in this publication was supported by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme through the grant to the budget of CORFU
Collaborative Research on Flood Resilience in Urban Areas, Contract 244047
Human agency in disaster planning: a systems approach
This is the final version of the article. Available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.Current approaches to risk management place insufficient emphasis on the system
knowledge available to the assessor, particularly in respect of the dynamic behaviour of
the system under threat, the role of human agents and the knowledge availability to
those agents.
In this paper, we address the second of these issues. We are concerned with a class of
systems containing human agents playing a variety of roles as significant system
elements - as decision makers, cognitive agents or implementers. i.e. Human Activity
Systems (Checkland, 1999). Within this family of HASs we focus upon safety and
mission critical systems, referring to this sub-class as critical human activity systems or
CHASs.
Identification of the role and contribution of these human elements to a system is a nontrivial
problem whether in an engineering context, or, as is the case here, in a wider
social and public context. Frequently they are treated as standing apart from the system
in design or policy terms. Regardless of the process of policy definition followed,
analysis of the risk and threats to such a CHAS requires a holistic approach, since the
effect of undesirable, uninformed or erroneous actions on the part of the human
elements is both potentially significant to the system output and inextricably bound
together with the non-human elements of the system.
We present a procedure for identifying the potential threats and risks emerging from
the role(s) and activity of those human agents, using the 2014 flooding in SW England
and the Thames Valley as a contemporary example.The project was partially supported the EU-CIRCLE (A pan-European framework for
strengthening critical infrastructure resilience) project, funded by the European Union’s
Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No 653824)
Flood impacts on road transportation using microscopic traffic modelling technique
The research presented in this paper proposes a novel methodology for modelling the
impacts of floods on traffic. Often flooding is a complex combination of various causes
(coastal, fluvial and pluvial). Further, transportation systems are very sensitive to external
disturbances. There is insufficient knowledge on the interactions in these complex and
dynamic systems. This paper proposes a methodology for integrating a flood model (MIKE
Flood) and a traffic model (SUMO). Traffic on inundated roads will be interrupted or delayed
according to the manner of flood propagation. As a consequence, some trips will be
cancelled or rerouted and other trips will be indirectly affected. A comparison between the
baseline and a flood scenario yields the impacts of that flood on traffic, estimated in terms
of lost business hours, additional fuel consumption, and additional CO2 emissions. The
outcome suggests that the proposed methodology can help to quantify the flood impact on
transportation.Research on the PEARL (Preparing for Extreme And Rare events in coastaL regions) project is
funded by the European Commission through Framework Programme 7, Grant Number 603663
Prevalence, Concordance, and Heritability of Vitreomacular Interface Abnormalities in a Twin Study
PURPOSE: The relative importance of genetic factors in common vitreomacular interface (VMI) abnormalities is unknown. The aim of this classical twin study is to determine the prevalence case wise concordance between monozygotic and dizygotic twin pairs, and heritability of common VMI abnormalities, including epiretinal membrane (ERM), posterior vitreous detachment (PVD), vitreomacular adhesion (VMA), vitreomacular traction (VMT), lamellar macular holes (LMHs), and full-thickness macular holes (FTMHs). METHODS: This is a single-center, cross-sectional classical twin study of 3406 TwinsUK participants over the age of 40 years who underwent spectral domain macular optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) scans which were graded for signs of VMI abnormalities. Case wise concordance was calculated and the heritability of each VMI abnormality was estimated using OpenMx structural equation modeling. RESULTS: In this population (mean age = 62.0 years [SD = 10.4 years], range = 40–89 years) the overall prevalence of ERM was 15.6% (95% confidence interval [CI] = 14.4–16.9) and increased with age, posterior vitreous detachment affected 21.3% (20.0–22.7), and VMA was diagnosed in 11.8% (10.8–13.0). Monozygotic twins were more concordant for all traits than dizygotic twins, and age, spherical equivalent refraction (SER), and lens status-adjusted heritability was estimated at 38.9% (95% CI = 33.6–52.8) for ERM, 53.2% (95% CI = 41.8–63.2) for PVD, and 48.1% (95% CI = 33.6–58) for VMA. CONCLUSIONS: Common VMI abnormalities are heritable and therefore have an underlying genetic component. Given the sight-threatening potential of VMI abnormalities, further genetic studies, such as genomewide association studies, would be useful to identify genes and pathways implicated in their pathogenesis
Health Impacts Model
This report presents the draft outline of the CORFU Health Impacts Model. The model consists
of assessing the risk to human health in four steps:
Hazard identification
Hazard characterisation (or dose-response assessment)
Exposure assessment
Risk characterisation
The health impacts model has four components. The first of these is the risk to human life
component, and adapts a model developed in the FLOODsite project to estimate the number
of deaths and injuries that could be caused by flooding. The next component relates to
waterborne diseases and illnesses that can be assessed by means of a Quantitative Microbial
Risk Assessment. Thirdly, the model takes account of other diseases (such as those
transmitted by vectors) and suggests the use of relative risk information to estimate the
impact of this disease. A similar approach is suggested to consider the mental health impacts
of flooding.
Finally, the report describes how the health risks could be characterised using the Disability
Adjusted Life Year (DALY).The work described in this publication was supported by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme through the grant to the budget of CORFU
Collaborative Research on Flood Resilience in Urban Areas, Contract 244047
A new flood risk assessment framework for evaluating the effectiveness of policies to improve urban flood resilience
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record.To better understand the impacts of flooding such that authorities can plan for adapting measures to
cope with future scenarios, we have developed a modified Drivers-Pressures-State-Impact-Response
(DPSIR) framework to allow policy makers to evaluate strategies for improving flood resilience in cities.
We showed that this framework proved an effective approach to assessing and improving urban flood
resilience, albeit with some limitations. This framework has difficulties in capturing all the important
relationships in cities, especially with regards to feedbacks. There is therefore a need to develop
improved techniques for understanding components and their relationships. While this research
showed that risk assessment is possible even at the mega-city scale, new techniques will support
advances in this field. Finally, a chain of models engenders uncertainties. However, the resilience
approach promoted in this research, is an effective manner to work with uncertainty by providing the
capacity to cope and respond to multiple scenariosResearch on the CORFU (Collaborative research on flood resilience in urban areas) project was funded
by the European Commission through Framework Programme 7, Grant Number 244047. The work in
this paper was partially funded by the PEARL (Preparing for Extreme And Rare events in coastaL
regions) project, supported by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme under Grant
Agreement No 603663
Quantification of both the area-at-risk and acute myocardial infarct size in ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction using T1-mapping
BACKGROUND: A comprehensive cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) in reperfused ST-segment myocardial infarction (STEMI) patients can be challenging to perform and can be time-consuming. We aimed to investigate whether native T1-mapping can accurately delineate the edema-based area-at-risk (AAR) and post-contrast T1-mapping and synthetic late gadolinium (LGE) images can quantify MI size at 1.5 T. Conventional LGE imaging and T2-mapping could then be omitted, thereby shortening the scan duration. METHODS: Twenty-eight STEMI patients underwent a CMR scan at 1.5 T, 3 ± 1 days following primary percutaneous coronary intervention. The AAR was quantified using both native T1 and T2-mapping. MI size was quantified using conventional LGE, post-contrast T1-mapping and synthetic magnitude-reconstructed inversion recovery (MagIR) LGE and synthetic phase-sensitive inversion recovery (PSIR) LGE, derived from the post-contrast T1 maps. RESULTS: Native T1-mapping performed as well as T2-mapping in delineating the AAR (41.6 ± 11.9% of the left ventricle [% LV] versus 41.7 ± 12.2% LV, P = 0.72; R(2) 0.97; ICC 0.986 (0.969-0.993); bias -0.1 ± 4.2% LV). There were excellent correlation and inter-method agreement with no bias, between MI size by conventional LGE, synthetic MagIR LGE (bias 0.2 ± 2.2%LV, P = 0.35), synthetic PSIR LGE (bias 0.4 ± 2.2% LV, P = 0.060) and post-contrast T1-mapping (bias 0.3 ± 1.8% LV, P = 0.10). The mean scan duration was 58 ± 4 min. Not performing T2 mapping (6 ± 1 min) and conventional LGE (10 ± 1 min) would shorten the CMR study by 15-20 min. CONCLUSIONS: T1-mapping can accurately quantify both the edema-based AAR (using native T1 maps) and acute MI size (using post-contrast T1 maps) in STEMI patients without major cardiovascular risk factors. This approach would shorten the duration of a comprehensive CMR study without significantly compromising on data acquisition and would obviate the need to perform T2 maps and LGE imaging
Flood impact assessment under climate change scenarios in central Taipei area, Taiwan
Providing effective information regarding flood control for responding climate change is essential to
future flood risk management for cities. This study simulated and assessed the impacts of flooding for
future climate change scenarios in Taipei city, Taiwan. We modelled rainfall events, generated by
general circulation models, with different return periods. The flood extents and damage in the Central
Taipei Area for the A1B climate change scenarios were compared to the ones, caused by the rainfall
events with same return periods, without climate change (baseline scenario). The proposed approach
provides potential flooding maps and flood damage assessment for climate change scenarios as
useful information for flood risk management in urban areas.The work is supported by the National Science Council, Taiwan (NSC 99-2915-I-002-120) and the
CORFU project, funded by the European Commission through Framework Programme 7, Grant
Number 244047
A tri-dimensional approach for auditing brand loyalty
Over the past twenty years brand loyalty has been an important topic for both marketing practitioners and academics. While practitioners have produced proprietary brand loyalty audit models, there has been little academic research to make transparent the methodology that underpins these audits and to enable practitioners to understand, develop and conduct their own audits. In this paper, we propose a framework for a brand loyalty audit that uses a tri-dimensional approach to brand loyalty, which includes behavioural loyalty and the two components of attitudinal loyalty: emotional and cognitive loyalty. In allowing for different levels and intensity of brand loyalty, this tri-dimensional approach is important from a managerial perspective. It means that loyalty strategies that arise from a brand audit can be made more effective by targeting the market segments that demonstrate the most appropriate combination of brand loyalty components. We propose a matrix with three dimensions (emotional, cognitive and behavioural loyalty) and two levels (high and low loyalty) to facilitate a brand loyalty audit. To demonstrate this matrix, we use the example of financial services, in particular a rewards-based credit card
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