289 research outputs found
Addressing Land Issues in Disaster Risk Management in the Pacific Island Countries
The Pacific region is one of the most disaster-prone in the world. Rapid urbanization, conflict over land, and the establishment of informal settlements on hazardous sites further exacerbate the problems. These issues present a significant challenge for government agencies, which require capacity building to respond adequately. Customary land predominates in many Pacific island countries and is central to decisions about land. In this paper we review previous disasters in the Pacific island countries to identify land issues that have emerged, and consider how land tenure and disaster management are administered. We conclude that land and national disaster management office agencies must work together to address land issues in the context of natural disasters and that customary groups should be involved in disaster risk reduction activities and efforts to improve tenure security for all legitimate landholders. Capacity strengthening would benefit all groups involved
Mining Urban Performance: Scale-Independent Classification of Cities Based on Individual Economic Transactions
Intensive development of urban systems creates a number of challenges for
urban planners and policy makers in order to maintain sustainable growth.
Running efficient urban policies requires meaningful urban metrics, which could
quantify important urban characteristics including various aspects of an actual
human behavior. Since a city size is known to have a major, yet often
nonlinear, impact on the human activity, it also becomes important to develop
scale-free metrics that capture qualitative city properties, beyond the effects
of scale. Recent availability of extensive datasets created by human activity
involving digital technologies creates new opportunities in this area. In this
paper we propose a novel approach of city scoring and classification based on
quantitative scale-free metrics related to economic activity of city residents,
as well as domestic and foreign visitors. It is demonstrated on the example of
Spain, but the proposed methodology is of a general character. We employ a new
source of large-scale ubiquitous data, which consists of anonymized countrywide
records of bank card transactions collected by one of the largest Spanish
banks. Different aspects of the classification reveal important properties of
Spanish cities, which significantly complement the pattern that might be
discovered with the official socioeconomic statistics.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, to be published in the proceedings of ASE
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