Download or read book Measuring resilience in a volatile world written by and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2014-04-30 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Substantial numbers of the world’s chronically poor and malnourished population live in an increasingly volatile world. The dangerous nexus of climate change, rapid population growth, conflict, and food price volatility already appears to have pushed several poor regions into states of permanent crisis, even as the rest of the world has seen unprecedented progress against poverty. This disturbing state of affairs, along with our expanded knowledge of the intimate interactions between short-term shocks and long-run development, has catalyzed widespread interest in resilience building, and in what such a framework implies for understanding the causes and consequences of acute vulnerability to natural and man-made disasters. In this paper we ask what this paradigm implies for the measurement and analysis of resilience. Resilience is fundamentally about complex dynamics. Slower-moving ecological, economic, demographic, and social stressors create vulnerability to short-run shocks, which in turn can have long-term consequences by reinforcing preexisting vulnerabilities. In our view, this basic conception of resilience has fundamental measurement implications. First, resilience can be measured and understood only through higher-frequency surveys that capture the causes and consequences of time-varying stressors and shocks, including seasonal shocks. Second, resilience can be understood only through surveys that capture the multidimensional complexity of stressors, shocks, and feedback loops, including the complex interactions between economic, social, and ecological forces. Third, the underlying stressors that create vulnerability, and the resilience-building interventions that reduce vulnerability, can be gauged and evaluated only over the longer term. This conceptualization of resilience motivates us to go a step further than existing research on resilience and on food and nutrition security measurement, by outlining a far more expansive strategy for improving and scaling up the monitoring, measurement, and analysis of the world’s most vulnerable populations. We propose the development of a multicountry system of high-frequency, long-term sentinel sites in the world’s most vulnerable regions. If implemented along the lines we conceive, this system could be a high-return investment for resilience-building efforts, since it would serve multiple purposes. This system offers the only rigorous means of monitoring vulnerability and resilience in the world’s most volatile regions. This system would bolster existing early-warning systems by complementing them with household-level indicators. This system would improve the targeting of emergency resources. This system would be instrumental for diagnosing the underlying sources of vulnerability, for identifying key thresholds of resilience, and for designing appropriate resilience-building strategies. And this system would provide a rigorous foundation for large-scale evaluations of resilience-building activities. While there are strong justifications for such a system, the devil is necessarily in the details, and much of this paper is concerned with those details. Largely to learn from existing experience, we first review existing measurement strategies that are similar in purpose or design to the sentinel system outlined above. When implemented, long-term, high-frequency measurement systems have often yielded great benefits but been hampered by cost, lack of institutional coordination, and insufficient dissemination and usage of data. The need to keep costs down and benefits widespread therefore motivates us to consider which countries in the world have the highest priority for the development of sentinel sites, based on indicators such as child nutrition and health outcomes, exposure to disasters, and past emergency assistance levels from the international community. We then turn to crucial issues of data collection design by outlining a hybrid sampling and survey design that will help achieve the various objectives outlined above while keeping costs down. We also argue that the proliferation of mobile phones and other information and communications technologies offers substantial scope for a cost-effective system of this kind, far more so than would have been available in the past. Finally, we consider who should lead and contribute to this ambitious effort. Since the principal advantage of this approach is that it can yield benefits for a wide range of institutions and purposes (relief and development, operations and research, social and biophysical sciences), and since the costs of a long-term commitment to these sentinel surveys would be large indeed for any single agency, we propose the need for a relatively broad consortium of international donors. This consortium should first focus on establishing partnerships with national governments and then commit to long-term resilience monitoring as well as domestic capacity building. With this essential commitment in place, this consortium would then need to secure implementing partners with a permanent presence on the ground, as well as the technical expertise of international organizations of various sorts. Ultimately, we argue, it is only this kind of long-term, cooperative commitment that will provide a scientific evidence base for diagnosing and resolving the world’s worst problems of hunger, poverty, and malnutrition. Only this kind of sentinel system can generate the data and evidence needed to inform actions to build resilience and to help the global community eliminate extreme poverty in the generation ahead. The status quo is simply not enough.

Download or read book Measuring resilience in a risky world written by Barrett, Christopher B. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2014-05-04 with total page 4 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the world’s chronically poor and malnourished population lives in an increasingly volatile world. The dangerous nexus of climate change, rapid population growth, conflict, and economic stagnation has already pushed several poor regions into states of permanent crisis, even as the rest of the world has enjoyed unprecedented progress against poverty. This disturbing state of affairs, along with our expanded knowledge of the intimate interactions between short-term shocks and long-run development, has catalyzed widespread interest in resilience building and in what a resilience framework implies for our understanding of the causes and consequences of acute vulnerability to natural and man-made disasters. We propose that the development community invest in a new multicountry system of sentinel sites to undertake long-term, high-frequency measurement and analysis of individual, household, and community resilience in the world’s most vulnerable regions.

Download or read book Optionality written by Richard Meadows and published by Thales Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not Sure What the Future Holds? No Problem. It's hard not to be worried about the future, especially if you just lost your job, are trying to plan your career, or are suddenly missing thousands of dollars from your retirement account. In Optionality, finance journalist Richard Meadows lays out a guide for not only becoming resilient to shocks, but positioning yourself to profit from an unpredictable world. Meadows takes us on a journey from quitting his office job at age 25, to lounging on tropical beaches living the early retirement dream, to finding and adopting an ancient philosophy for systematically pursuing the good life. Learn how to: • Find investment opportunities with open-ended upside, and maximise the chances of a 'moonshot' success • Make life-changing choices under conditions of uncertainty • Achieve the kind of financial freedom that lets you live life on your own terms • Protect against disaster, build support networks, and create a safety buffer of resilience in every area of life • Develop a systems approach to making your own luck Optionality is the key to navigating an uncertain world. In this entertaining and insightful debut, Meadows delivers a timely message: optionality has never been so valuable, and only those who have it will survive and thrive.

Download or read book Developing a Framework for Measuring Community Resilience written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2015-03-26 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2012 National Research Council report Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative highlighted the challenges of increasing national resilience in the United States. One finding of the report was that "without numerical means of assessing resilience, it would be impossible to identify the priority needs for improvement, to monitor changes, to show that resilience had improved, or to compare the benefits of increasing resilience with the associated costs." Although measuring resilience is a challenge, metrics and indicators to evaluate progress, and the data necessary to establish the metric, are critical for helping communities to clarify and formalize what the concept of resilience means for them, and to support efforts to develop and prioritize resilience investments. One of the recommendations from the 2012 report stated that government entities at federal, state, and local levels and professional organizations should partner to help develop a framework for communities to adapt to their circumstances and begin to track their progress toward increasing resilience. To build upon this recommendation and begin to help communities formulate such a framework, the Resilient America Roundtable of the National Academies convened the workshop Measures of Community Resilience: From Lessons Learned to Lessons Applied on September 5, 2014 in Washington, D.C. The workshop's overarching objective was to begin to develop a framework of measures and indicators that could support community efforts to increase their resilience. The framework will be further developed through feedback and testing in pilot and other partner communities that are working with the Resilient America Roundtable. This report is a summary of the one-day workshop, which consisted of a keynote address and two panel sessions in the morning and afternoon breakout sessions that began the discussion on how to develop a framework of resilience measures.

Download or read book Building and Measuring Community Resilience written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2019-04-26 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The frequency and severity of disasters over the last few decades have presented unprecedented challenges for communities across the United States. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed the complexity and breadth of a deadly combination of existing community stressors, aging infrastructure, and a powerful natural hazard. In many ways, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was a turning point for understanding and managing disasters, as well as related plan making and policy formulation. It brought the phrase "community resilience" into the lexicon of disaster management. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program summarizes the existing portfolio of relevant or related resilience measurement efforts and notes gaps and challenges associated with them. It describes how some communities build and measure resilience and offers four key actions that communities could take to build and measure their resilience in order to address gaps identified in current community resilience measurement efforts. This report also provides recommendations to the Gulf Research Program to build and measure resilience in the Gulf of Mexico region.

Download or read book Phone surveillance from scratch Novel sample design features of the nationally representative Myanmar Household Welfare Survey MHWS written by Myanmar Agriculture Policy Support Activity (MAPSA) and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2022-04-04 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first round of the Myanmar Household Welfare Survey (MHWS)–a nationwide phone panel consisting of 12,100 households–was implemented between December 2021 and February 2022. The objective of the survey was to collect data on a wide range of household and individual welfare indicators–including wealth, livelihoods, unemployment, food insecurity, diet quality, health shocks, and coping strategies–in a country exceptionally hard hit by conflict, severe economic collapse, and several damaging waves of COVID-19. The respondents interviewed in the MHWS were purposely selected from a large phone database aimed at being representative at the region/state level and urban/rural level in Myanmar. In this paper, we discuss two key steps taken to ensure that the MHWS is nationally and subnationally representative at the state/region and urban/rural level. First, we used a quota-based sampling strategy by setting survey quotas for respondents’ geography, education, farming status, gender, and rural/urban residence. This sampling strategy is used to address the well-known drawbacks of phone survey samples (e.g., the over-sampling of more educated respondents) and the survey’s particular interest in over-sampling farm households and equally sampling men and women. Second, we constructed household, population, and individual level weighting factors to further ensure that the survey generates nationally and subnationally representative statistics. To assess the effectiveness of these two strategies on achieving representativeness and consistency with previous surveys, we compare results from the MHWS to earlier nationally representative datasets, focusing on sample sizes of interviewed households for each state/region, and on education levels, farm/non-farm occupation, urban/rural residence, as well as respondents’ housing characteristics, which are unlikely to change substantially over short periods of time. We show that the phone-based MHWS has broader geographical coverage than previous national surveys, reaching 310 of Myanmar’s 330 townships. Moreover, our sampling approach was generally effective in reducing the education bias of phone surveys, except for a handful of states/regions. The MHWS is also unique in providing equal representation of male and female respondents. Additionally, the MHWS sampling and weighting strategies produce statistics on key indicators that closely mirror results from the two most recent national surveys in Myanmar. Overall, the results suggest that these strategies are successful in generating a subnationally representative phone survey that collected data on a rich array of household welfare indicators in exceptionally difficult political and economic circumstances.

Download or read book The impacts of the COVID 19 crisis on maternal and child malnutrition in Myanmar What to expect and how to protect written by Headey, Derek D. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The COVID-19 crisis in Myanmar poses a very serious risk to the nutritional status of vulnerable populations, notably women and children, as well as poor urban populations and internally displaced persons. The COVID-19 crisis will hit vulnerable groups through multiple mechanisms.

Download or read book The Big Pivot written by Andrew S. Winston and published by Harvard Business Review Press. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a fundamentally changed world. It’s time for your approach to strategy to change, too. The evidence is all around us. Extreme weather, driven by climate change, is shattering records all over the planet. Our natural resources are in greater demand than ever before as a billion more people enter the global middle class, wanting more of everything. Radical transparency is opening up company operations and supply chains to public scrutiny. This is not some futuristic scenario or model to debate, but today’s reality. We've passed an economic tipping point. A weakening of the foundations of our planetary infrastructure is costing businesses dearly and putting our society at risk. The mega challenges of climate change, scarcity, and radical transparency threaten our ability to run an expanding global economy and are profoundly changing “business as usual.” But they also offer unprecedented opportunities: multi-trillion-dollar markets are in play, and the winners of this new game will profit mightily. According to Andrew Winston, bestselling author (Green to Gold) and globally recognized business strategist, the way companies currently operate will not allow them to keep up with the current—and future—rate of change. They need to make the Big Pivot. In this indispensable new book, Winston provides ten crucial strategies for leaders and companies ready to move boldly forward and win in this new reality. With concrete advice and tactics, and new stories from companies like British Telecom, Diageo, Dow, Ford, Nike, Unilever, Walmart, and many others, The Big Pivot will help you, and all of us, create more resilient businesses and a more prosperous world. This book is the blueprint to get you started.

Download or read book Capacity development for resilient food systems written by Babu, Suresh Chandra and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2014-04-30 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Food systems face shocks varying in breadth and duration from a wide array of sources. These shocks can affect all aspects of a country’s food system, threatening the food security of its citizens. Low levels of capacity to address food system shocks are a major development challenge. This paper presents a conceptual framework for assessing the capacity of a food system to become more resilient, regardless of what kind of threat it faces. It suggests that food systems can be categorized into three subsystems: a policy system; markets, trade, and institutions; and a production system. Within each of these systems, three dimensions of capacity are analyzed: individual capacity, organizational capacity, and system capacity. The paper explores examples of building capacity within this framework and identifies key knowledge and research gaps. It also presents a typology as a possible tool for prioritizing investments in capacity building for resilience across countries.

Download or read book Resilience for food and nutrition security written by Fan, Shenggen and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic shocks including food price shocks, environmental shocks, social shocks, political shocks, health shocks, and many other types of shocks hit poor people and communities around the world, compromising their efforts to improve their well-being. As shocks evolve and become more frequent or intense, they further threaten people’s food and nutrition security and their livelihoods. How do we help people and communities to become more resilient, to not only bounce back from shocks but to also to get ahead of them and improve their well-being so that they are less vulnerable to the next shock? How do we get better at coping with—and even thriving—in the presence of shocks?

Download or read book Examining perceptions of food assistance on household food security and resilience in Malawi written by Margolies, Amy and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Improving social assistance programs is imperative to addressing problems of poverty and vulnerability in Malawi. Emergency aid has played an important role in alleviating hunger during humanitarian crises such as those in 2015-16 and 2016-17. However, the Government of Malawi and development partners recognize that emergency responses are not a sustainable solution to address vulnerability. This qualitative study examines the characteristics of resilient households and perceived effects of programs to improve food security and resilience from the perspectives of the beneficiaries and communities they serve. This beneficiary-centered approach explores socially-defined concepts of resilience, associated coping strategies, norms and political dynamics affecting programs. These findings can provide useful insights to improve the effectiveness of social assistance programs in this context.

Download or read book Handbook of Agricultural Economics written by and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2021-12-08 with total page 810 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Handbook of Agricultural Economics, Volume Five highlights new advances in the field, with this new release exploring comprehensive chapters written by an international board of authors who discuss topics such as The Economics of Agricultural Innovation, Climate, food and agriculture, Agricultural Labor Markets: Immigration Policy, Minimum Wages, Etc., Risk Management in Agricultural Production, Animal Health and Livestock Disease, Behavioral and Experimental Economics to Inform Agri-Environmental Programs and Policies, Big Data, Machine Learning Methods for Agricultural and Applied Economists, Agricultural data collection to minimize measurement error and maximize coverage, Gender, agriculture and nutrition, Social Networks Analysis In Agricultural Economics, and more. Presents the latest release in the Handbook of Agricultural Economics Written and contributed by leaders in the field Covers topics such as The Economics of Agricultural Innovation, Climate, Food and Agriculture, Agricultural Labor Markets, and more

Download or read book Resilient by Design written by Joseph Fiksel and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Resilient by design provides managers with a more complete approach to creating lasting success in a changing world. Rich with examples and case studies, it explains how to connect the external systems, stakeholders, communities, infrastructure, supply chains, and natural resources, to create innovative organisations that survive and prosper." --Publisher description.

Download or read book Resilience written by Andrew Zolli and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-07-09 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All systems break down. Some bounce back, others do not. This is a book about why. Covering business, economic, geographic and social systems, Zolli uncovers a wealth of absorbing examples--from the link between US oil prices and the recent 'tortilla riots' in Mexico to what was really happening when the U.S. government decided not to bail out Lehman Bros.

Download or read book The Nature of Business written by Giles Hutchins and published by New Society Publishers. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The business of biomimicry—companies the way nature intended.

Download or read book Public Libraries and Resilient Cities written by Michael Dudley and published by American Library Association. This book was released on 2013 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public libraries are keystone public institutions for any thriving community, and as such can be leaders in making cities better places to work, play, and live. Here, Dudley shows how public libraries can contribute to 'placemaking', or the creation and nurturing of vital and unique communities for their residents.

Download or read book The Science of Hormesis in Health and Longevity written by Suresh I. S. Rattan and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Science of Hormesis in Health and Longevity provides a comprehensive review of mild stress-induced physiological hormesis and its role in the maintenance and promotion of health. Coverage includes the underlying mechanisms of hormesis, including details of stress-response signaling, an enriched environment, positive challenges and dose-response mechanisms, amongst others. Research from top experts is presented to provide suggestions for developing novel therapeutic strategies, along with lifestyle interventions to promote health and homoeostasis. Researchers in aging and physiology, gerontologists, clinicians and medical students will find this a valuable addition for their work. Provides a comprehensive, scholarly review of the current state of hormesis in physiology, health, disease and aging Includes multiple perspectives and in-depth analysis by top experts involved in cutting-edge research to provide developing, novel therapeutic strategies, as well as lifestyle interventions Offers a clear understanding of hormesis’ underlying mechanisms, including details of stress-response signaling, an enriched environment, positive challenges, dose-response mechanisms, and more