Three Essays On Climate Change Adaptation In Rural African Communities

Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the present era, bringing new risks and exacerbating existing vulnerabilities across the world. While there is a broad recognition that solutions around climate change will require coordination and support across borders and governments, a large body of scholarship has focused on the local-level realities of climate change and the disproportionate impacts on the most vulnerable populations. The climate vulnerable poor do not have the privilege of waiting for global policy and commitment to emission reduction targets. They need planned and proactive adaptation support to build resilience to the changing climate and to address the threat on their livelihoods. However, the conditions that render populations vulnerable are the same factors that constrain their ability to adapt to climate change through autonomous actions. Acknowledging the need for pro-poor support, there is an increased focus on funding and supporting climate action and adaptation. In this dissertation, I evaluate both government and development practitioners’ interventions to help vulnerable populations adapt to the changing climate. More specifically, I evaluate a bottom-up community driven approach to climate change adaptation funded by the United Kingdom Department for International Development in Senegal and Mali, and a social safety net program implemented at a national scale in Ethiopia. In the first chapter, I evaluate the Decentralized Climate Funds (DCF) project in Senegal and Mali. DCF aims to support locally led climate change adaptation, encouraging participatory processes at the community level to identify and prioritize public goods investments in adaptation. This chapter explores the impacts of the DCF project on household-level social capital, one of the goals of the project and a necessary condition for strengthening household’s overall adaptive capacity. I take advantage of a unique panel dataset in Mali and Senegal that was gathered from surveys conducted through the four years of the project. I use propensity score matching to compare treatment and control households on a broad range of household characteristics and social capital measures. Further, I leverage the household panel data collected before and after the first cycle of the project to analyze whether changes in the social capital measures can be attributed to DCF through a difference-in-differences approach, controlling for time-invariant unobservables. The results suggest that the DCF project led to increases in household level social capital. The findings indicate that receiving funding through the project increased the likelihood of participating in collective action and providing help to other community members in Mali, with mixed results in Senegal. In the second chapter, I further examine the results from the first chapter by conducting a qualitative study to gain insight into who benefits from a bottom-up, community driven project. I draw on semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions to explore the involvement and inclusion of women in participatory spaces in community-based adaptation, using the DCF pilot project in Senegal as a case study. The analysis and findings demonstrate that women’s participation in decision-making about community adaptation and development varies in levels and depends on a complex, interlinked set of factors across community, household, and individual levels. The findings suggest that the participatory approach to adaptation only encouraged active and empowered participation of women in sites where there was an existing precedent for women’s participation, encouraged by social capital and networks, recognition of women’s role in income generation, and favorable intrahousehold power dynamics. The chapter concludes that even gender aware community-based adaptation initiatives struggle to engage with issues of unequal power relations, failing to ensure that women’s voices are actively considered and included in community decisions. In my final chapter, I use panel data from the 2011 to 2015 Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey to evaluate whether low-income households, when faced with a positive income shock through the public works or direct support components of the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), feel more food secure and improve the quality of their household’s food consumption. I utilize propensity score matching and difference-in-differences estimation to evaluate whether the beneficiaries of the program are benefiting relative to non-beneficiaries who have similar socio-economic characteristics. I find that that being a beneficiary of the PSNP has different effects on a household’s food security depending on the type of cash transfer. For those participating in the public works component of the program, PSNP increased the likelihood of households reporting that they do not have sufficient food to meet their household’s needs through the year. For the direct support component, the results suggest that recipients don’t experience a statistically significant change in their food security outcomes relative to those who did not receive PSNP. However, for both components, if PSNP payments were coupled with agricultural extension services, households realized a statistically significant increase in the number of unique food groups consumed. The contradictory findings that indicate that PSNP public works recipients are more likely to report food insecurity suggests that there may be concerns of biased strategic reporting to remain in the program. The chapter concludes that the program may not be sufficient by itself to benefit participants and help shift them out of food insecurity

Behavioral Science Interventions Could Increase SNAP Comprehension and Awareness Among Military Families

Food insecurity is more common among military families than the general population, and the transition from active service to civilian life is a time of heightened risk. The Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) is designed to support food security among low-income families. Many eligible military and veteran families do not enroll in SNAP due to a lack of information, stigma, and administrative barriers. This brief highlights findings from a survey experiment conducted in 2022 and 2023 to assess how small changes to SNAP informational flyers, such as simplifying information provided about SNAP, highlighting that other veterans use SNAP, and emphasizing how much monetary support veterans may be foregoing, to improve SNAP uptake among military families transitioning to civilian life. Results of the study show that making these small changes to informational flyers increased veterans’ awareness and comprehension of SNAP, while also reducing the cognitive load placed on veterans and their families

Divergent clonal evolution of blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm and chronic myelomonocytic leukemia from a shared TET2-mutated origin

From Springer Nature via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: received 2020-11-25, rev-recd 2021-02-15, accepted 2021-03-11, registration 2021-03-12, pub-electronic 2021-04-08, online 2021-04-08, pub-print 2021-11Publication status: PublishedFunder: Oglesby Charitable TrustFunder: Pickering family donationFunder: Blood Cancer UK Clinician Scientist Fellowship (15030) Oglesby Charitable Trus

Psychometric Properties and Correlates of Precarious Manhood Beliefs in 62 Nations

Precarious manhood beliefs portray manhood, relative to womanhood, as a social status that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and proven via public action. Here, we present cross-cultural data on a brief measure of precarious manhood beliefs (the Precarious Manhood Beliefs scale [PMB]) that covaries meaningfully with other cross-culturally validated gender ideologies and with country-level indices of gender equality and human development. Using data from university samples in 62 countries across 13 world regions (N = 33,417), we demonstrate: (1) the psychometric isomorphism of the PMB (i.e., its comparability in meaning and statistical properties across the individual and country levels); (2) the PMB’s distinctness from, and associations with, ambivalent sexism and ambivalence toward men; and (3) associations of the PMB with nation-level gender equality and human development. Findings are discussed in terms of their statistical and theoretical implications for understanding widely-held beliefs about the precariousness of the male gender role

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Does Community-Based Adaptation Enhance Social Capital? Evidence from Senegal and Mali

Climate change and extreme climate shocks pose a significant threat to resource-dependent rural communities. Successfully supporting households to anticipate and adapt to climate variability and shocks, as well as build long term climate resilience, is essential to facing these changes. Given the importance of social capital in facilitating collective action and adaptation, the development community has focused on bottom-up, participatory adaptation projects. This article explores the social capital impacts of a pilot community-based adaptation project in Senegal and Mali that aims to encourage inclusive decision making around public goods investments. The analysis uses both difference-in-differences and propensity score matching estimates to evaluate whether households that participated in the project realized enhanced social capital, as measured through participation in community development, and acts of reciprocity and community support. The findings indicate that engaging in the participatory process through the project increased the likelihood of future collective action and providing help to other community members in Mali.</p

Behavioral Science Interventions Could Increase SNAP Comprehension and Awareness Among Military Families

Food insecurity is more common among military families than the general population, and the transition from active service to civilian life is a time of heightened risk. The Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) is designed to support food security among low-income families. Many eligible military and veteran families do not enroll in SNAP due to a lack of information, stigma, and administrative barriers. This brief highlights findings from a survey experiment conducted in 2022 and 2023 to assess how small changes to SNAP informational flyers, such as simplifying information provided about SNAP, highlighting that other veterans use SNAP, and emphasizing how much monetary support veterans may be foregoing, to improve SNAP uptake among military families transitioning to civilian life. Results of the study show that making these small changes to informational flyers increased veterans’ awareness and comprehension of SNAP, while also reducing the cognitive load placed on veterans and their families

Partnered implementation of the veteran sponsorship initiative: protocol for a randomized hybrid type 2 effectiveness—implementation trial

BackgroundThe USA is undergoing a suicide epidemic for its youngest Veterans (18-to-34-years-old) as their suicide rate has almost doubled since 2001. Veterans are at the highest risk during their first-year post-discharge, thus creating a "deadly gap." In response, the nation has developed strategies that emphasize a preventive, universal, and public health approach and embrace the value of community interventions. The three-step theory of suicide suggests that community interventions that reduce reintegration difficulties and promote connectedness for Veterans as they transition to civilian life have the greatest likelihood of reducing suicide. Recent research shows that the effectiveness of community interventions can be enhanced when augmented by volunteer and certified sponsors (1-on-1) who actively engage with Veterans, as part of the Veteran Sponsorship Initiative (VSI).Method/designThe purpose of this randomized hybrid type 2 effectiveness-implementation trial is to evaluate the implementation of the VSI in six cities in Texas in collaboration with the US Departments of Defense, Labor and Veterans Affairs, Texas government, and local stakeholders. Texas is an optimal location for this large-scale implementation as it has the second largest population of these young Veterans and is home to the largest US military installation, Fort Hood. The first aim is to determine the effectiveness of the VSI, as evidenced by measures of reintegration difficulties, health/psychological distress, VA healthcare utilization, connectedness, and suicidal risk. The second aim is to determine the feasibility and potential utility of a stakeholder-engaged plan for implementing the VSI in Texas with the intent of future expansion in more states. The evaluators will use a stepped wedge design with a sequential roll-out to participating cities over time. Participants (n=630) will be enrolled on military installations six months prior to discharge. Implementation efforts will draw upon a bundled implementation strategy that includes strategies such as ongoing training, implementation facilitation, and audit and feedback. Formative and summative evaluations will be guided by the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance (RE-AIM) framework and will include interviews with participants and periodic reflections with key stakeholders to longitudinally identify barriers and facilitators to implementation.DiscussionThis evaluation will have important implications for the national implementation of community interventions that address the epidemic of Veteran suicide. Aligned with the Evidence Act, it is the first large-scale implementation of an evidence-based practice that conducts a thorough assessment of TSMVs during the "deadly gap."Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov ID number: NCT05224440 . Registered on 04 February 2022