Scaling Success: Lessons from Adaptation Pilots in the Rainfed Regions of India

"Scaling Success" examines how agricultural communities are adapting to the challenges posed by climate change through the lens of India's rainfed agriculture regions. Rainfed agriculture currently occupies 58 percent of India's cultivated land and accounts for up to 40 percent of its total food production. However, these regions face potential production losses of more than $200 billion USD in rice, wheat, and maize by 2050 due to the effects of climate change. Unless action is taken soon at a large scale, farmers will see sharp decreases in revenue and yields.Rainfed regions across the globe have been an important focus for the first generation of adaptation projects, but to date, few have achieved a scale that can be truly transformational. Drawing on lessons learnt from 21 case studies of rainfed agriculture interventions, the report provides guidance on how to design, fund and support adaptation projects that can achieve scale

Pediatric Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension

Our understanding of pediatric IIH has been refined since Dr. Lessell's review in 1992. Recent studies use of rigorous methodologies and standard definitions has elucidated distinct demographic trends. Specifically, the incidence of IIH seems to be increasing among adolescent children, and within older children its clinical picture is similar to that of adult IIH

Mainstreaming Photo- and Video-Based Documentation as Method for Establishing a Level of Service Framework for the Mumbai Suburban Railway System

The city of Mumbai has grown at an unprecedented rate, increasing the burden of mobility on its core public transport system, the Mumbai suburban railway network. The system is likely failing from “over-optimization,” with stations not designed to cater to the needs of a rapidly growing city, which has led to a steady surge in fatalities over the years, primarily in the metropolitan region beyond the city limits. Besides fatalities, research indicates that crowding has led to extreme fear and insecurity, especially in women and young commuters, with inappropriate behavior by fellow passengers causing them extreme discomfort. There is a need to decongest the Mumbai suburban rail network across the system and to gain a better measure of the extent of crowding in and around transit facilities. Concepts such as level of service (LOS) from the vantage point of crowding science can be used to address this need. However, there are two critical challenges. First, concepts developed in the Global North are inadequate to deal with the kind of commuter densities and complexities typical of cities like Mumbai. Secondly, conventional data gathering methods have proved to be time consuming, costly, and too inflexible to capture dynamic commuter behavior critical to the science of crowd management. This paper aims to address these two challenges by articulating a set of “inquiries” that can inform a localized framework and share learnings from the application of basic video and image processing. Thus, it proposes dynamic data capture methods that inform and enable a scientific planning process

Urban Dynamics for Environmental Action

Urban growth and urbanization processes have accelerated globally, especially in the last 45 years (United Nations Population Fund [UNFPA] 2007; United Nations 2019a). This has improved the quality of life of many people. Urban life provides some groups with access to better jobs, better services like drinking water and sanitation, better education, housing and health care, resulting in longer life expectancies (Vardoulakis and Kinney 2019). For others, however, urban life is characterized by the challenges of poverty and inequality, congestion, poor health and feelings of isolation or dislocation. Significant portions of the urban population still struggle to access the basic services required for a dignified human life (Satterthwaite et al. 2020) and feel trapped within harsh living conditions. At the same time, urbanization, along with biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation and pollution, are central drivers of environmental change (United Nations 2019b and see chapter 3). As highlighted in the GEO-6 report, urban inequality and environmental sustainability are deeply intertwined. This report argues, so are their solutions. This chapter, along with chapter 3, sets out the context through which deep urban transformation objectives and pathways can be understood. It outlines the deeply rooted and persistent challenges of inequality, pollution, environmental degradation, resource depletion and biodiversity loss faced by the majority of cities. All these problems have intensified in recent decades, despite global, national and local efforts to facilitate sustainable urban transitions. Rising to the challenge of necessary urban transformations first requires us to identify and understand these persistent challenges, referred to here as “lock-ins”. For the purposes of this chapter this term is defined as complex, structural barriers that are deeply rooted in the political economy and the governance web particular to each city and that, combined, contribute to ”business-as-usual” urban planning visions and practices. Effectively, lock-ins refer to sociopolitical and behavioral processes that lead to physical lock-ins of energy use and carbon emissions in built infrastructure and urban form, biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation and pollution. This interconnected set of lock-ins is ultimately slowing down the pace of urban transformation. This account of the systemic failures to deliver transformation – or at the very least to slow the pace of change in most cities (section 2.3) – is developed after a description of larger global urbanization trends (section 2.2). These trends include the diversity of cities and urban areas in terms of population, size, urbanization, their relationship to the environment and ecosystems, and their varying capacities to respond to the growing and interconnected challenges of urbanization in the twenty-first century. In particular, many of the rapidly urbanizing cities of the Global South are poorly equipped to deal with these challenges. They are also the most affected by deepening inequality, the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation. Most cities are currently on unsustainable trajectories. This contributes to multiple dimensions of ecological, social and economic damage, although this can take different forms, with different impacts and in ways that are yet to be fully grasped. Finally, the chapter explores ways in which a growing number of cities are already experimenting with transformative actions to overcome intersecting sociopolitical, behavioural and physical lock-ins, positioning them as drivers of environmentally sustainable, low-carbon, resilient, healthy and inclusive futures (section 2.4). This section shows that disruption to “business as usual” can occur on different scales, can come from multiple sources and agents, and is often pioneered by singular, even small catalytic actions, as is explained in more detail in chapter 5. However, for the large-scale systemic change that is urgently called for and described in chapter 4 to happen, local authorities and urban communities will need support and must share risks beyond their boundaries. Setting and maintaining cities on transformative pathways will mean reinforcing networks of learning and support, from the level of key communities all the way to national governments