Assessing the financial vulnerability to climate-related natural hazards

National governments are key actors in managing the impacts of extreme weather events, yet many highly exposed developing countries -- faced with exhausted tax bases, high levels of indebtedness, and limited donor assistance -- have been unable to raise sufficient and timely capital to replace or repair damaged infrastructure and restore livelihoods after major disasters. Such financial vulnerability hampers development and exacerbates poverty. Based on the record of the past 30 years, this paper finds many developing countries, in particular small island states, to be highly financially vulnerable, and experiencing a resource gap (net disaster losses exceed all available financing sources) for events that occur with a probability of 2 percent or higher. This has three main implications. First, efforts to reduce risk need to be ramped-up to lessen the serious human and financial burdens. Second, contrary to the well-known Arrow-Lind theorem, there is a case for country risk aversion implying that disaster risks faced by some governments cannot be absorbed without major difficulty. Risk aversion entails the ex ante financing of losses and relief expenditure through calamity funds, regional insurance pools, or contingent credit arrangements. Third, financially vulnerable (and generally poor) countries are unlikely to be able to implement pre-disaster risk financing instruments themselves, and thus require technical and financial assistance from the donor community. The cost estimates of financial vulnerability -- based on today's climate -- inform the design of"climate insurance funds"to absorb high levels of sovereign risk and are found to be in the lower billions of dollars annually, which represents a baseline for the incremental costs arising from future climate change.Hazard Risk Management,Debt Markets,Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Banks&Banking Reform,Climate Change Economics

A Tick from a Prehistoric Arizona Coprolite

Ticks have never been reported in archaeological analyses. Here, we present the discovery of a tick from a coprolite excavated from Antelope Cave in extreme northwest Arizona. Dietary analysis indicates that the coprolite has a human origin. This archaeological occupation is associated with the Ancestral Pueblo culture (Anasazi). This discovery supports previous hypotheses that ticks were a potential source of disease and that ectoparasites were eaten by ancient people

A NEW HIGH-RESOLUTION BI-CENTENNIAL (1800–2003) PRECIPITATION DATASET FOR THE GREATER ALPINE REGION

A new precipitation dataset for the Greater Alpine Region (GAR; 4°E–19°E, 43°N–49°N) has been developed. It provides monthly precipitation totals for the 1800–2003 period on a 10-min resolution grid. The new ‘HISTALP 10-min-grid’ dataset is based on long-term homogenized precipitation series from meteorological stations across the study domain and a high-resolution precipitation climatology dataset for the 1971–1990 period. The effective coverage of the dataset depends on the observations available in the station network which progressively decline back to the early 19th Century (from 192 to 5 stations). To aid the use of these data in other studies, an accompanying dataset has also been developed, which provides a measure of quality of each monthly precipitation estimate over the grid: the explained variance, relative to the 1931–2000 (maximum data availability) period. The computed quality score illustrates the comparatively poorer accuracy of the dataset for regions and months with less coherent precipitation fields (i.e., over the Alps and in summer) and when the number of stations is reduced, particularly before 1840. The derived gridded field has been compared with other independently-developed datasets and is found to provide a similar description of the precipitation in the GAR for places and periods of common coverage

IRISS (Increasing Resilience in Surveillance Societies) FP7 European Research Project, Deliverable 4.2: Doing privacy in everyday encounters with surveillance.

The main idea of IRISS WP 4 was to analyse surveillance as an element of everyday life of citizens. The starting point was a broad understanding of surveillance, reaching beyond the narrowly defined and targeted (nonetheless encompassing) surveillance practices of state authorities, justified with the need to combat and prevent crime and terrorism. We were interested in the mundane effects of surveillance practices emerging in the sectors of electronic commerce, telecommunication, social media and other areas. The basic assumption of WP 4 was that being a citizen in modern surveillance societies amounts to being transformed into a techno-social hybrid, i.e. a human being inexorably linked with data producing technologies, becoming a data-leaking container. While this “ontological shift” is not necessarily reflected in citizens’ understanding of who they are, it nonetheless affects their daily lives in many different ways. Citizens may entertain ideas of privacy, autonomy and selfhood rooted in pre-electronic times while at the same time acting under a regime of “mundane governance”. We started to enquire about the use of modern technologies and in the course of the interviews focussed on issues of surveillance in a more explicit manner. Over 200 qualitative interviews were conducted in a way that produced narratives (stories) of individual experiences with different kinds of technologies and/or surveillance practices. These stories then were analysed against the background of theoretical hypotheses of what it means in objective terms to live in a surveillance society. We assume that privacy no longer is the default state of mundane living, but has to be actively created. We captured this with the term privacy labour. Furthermore we construed a number of dilemmas or trade-off situations to guide our analysis. These dilemmas address the issue of privacy as a state or “good” which is traded in for convenience (in electronic commerce), security (in law enforcement surveillance contexts), sociality (when using social media), mutual trust (in social relations at the workplace as well as in the relationship between citizens and the state), and engagement (in horizontal, neighbourhood watch-type surveillance relations). For each of these dilemmas we identified a number of stories demonstrating how our respondents as “heroes” in the narrative solved the problems they encountered, strived for the goals they were pursuing or simply handled a dilemmatic situation. This created a comprehensive and multi-dimensional account of the effects of surveillance in everyday life. Each of the main chapters does focus on one of these different dilemmas

A Highly Accelerated Parallel Multi-GPU based Reconstruction Algorithm for Generating Accurate Relative Stopping Powers

Low-dose Proton Computed Tomography (pCT) is an evolving imaging modality that is used in proton therapy planning which addresses the range uncertainty problem. The goal of pCT is generating a 3D map of Relative Stopping Power (RSP) measurements with high accuracy within clinically required time frames. Generating accurate RSP values within the shortest amount of time is considered a key goal when developing a pCT software. The existing pCT softwares have successfully met this time frame and even succeeded this time goal, but requiring clusters with hundreds of processors. This paper describes a novel reconstruction technique using two Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) cores, such as is available on a single Nvidia P100. The proposed reconstruction technique is tested on both simulated and experimental datasets and on two different systems namely Nvidia K40 and P100 GPUs from IBM and Cray. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed reconstruction method meets both the timing and accuracy with the benefit of having reasonable cost, and efficient use of power.Comment: IEEE NSS/MIC 201

Topographic shelf waves control seasonal melting near Antarctic Ice Shelf grounding lines

The buttressing potential of ice shelves is modulated by changes in subshelf melting, in response to changing ocean conditions. We analyze the temporal variability in subshelf melting using an autonomous phase-sensitive radio-echo sounder near the grounding line of the Roi Baudouin Ice Shelf in East Antarctica. When combined with additional oceanographic evidence of seasonal variations in the stratification and the amplification of diurnal tides around the shelf break topography (Gunnerus Bank), the results suggest an intricate mechanism in which topographic waves control the seasonal melt rate variability near the grounding line. This mechanism has not been considered before and has the potential to enhance local melt rates without advecting different water masses. As topographic waves seem to strengthen in a stratified ocean, the freshening of Antarctic surface water, predicted by observations and models, is likely to increase future basal melting in this area. \ud Plain Language Summary Ice shelves (or the floating parts of the Antarctic ice sheet) lose primarily mass through melting at their bottom in contact with the ocean. This thins them and makes them more vulnerable to potential collapse. To understand the processes governing such thinning, direct and long-time measurements are essential. Here we report on the first high-resolution time series of direct melt measurements on the Roi Baudouin Ice Shelf in Dronning Maud Land during 2016. We find that subshelf melt varies on both seasonal and daily time scales. Temporal variations stem from topographical ocean waves that originate on the continental shelf and transfer ocean properties without time delay within the ice shelf cavity. Therefore, seasonal variations highly depend on the presence/absence of sea ice in front of the ice shelf, which impact the strength of topographical waves. This mechanism is highly efficient at increasing the ice-ocean exchanges and may explain regional differences in ice shelf melt