Natural Hazards Governance in India

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anshu Sharma ◽  
Sunny Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Natural Hazards ◽  
Natural Hazard ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Storm Events ◽  
The Past ◽  
Governance Systems ◽  
Response Systems ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
The Times

India faces a very broad range of hazards due to its wide geoclimatic spread. This, combined with deep-rooted social, economic, physical, and institutional vulnerabilities, makes India one of the highest disaster-affected countries in the world. Natural hazards have gained higher visibility due to an increasing frequency and magnitude of their impact in recent decades, and efforts to manage disasters have been largely unable to keep pace with the growing incidences, scale, and complexities of disaster events. A number of mega events between 1990 and 2005, including earthquakes, cyclones, floods, and a tsunami, created momentum in decision making to look at disasters critically and to push for a shift from response to mitigation and preparedness. While efforts were put in place for appropriate legislation, institution building, and planning, these processes were long drawn out and time and resource intensive. It has taken years for the governance systems to begin showing results on the ground. While these efforts were being formulated, the changing face of disasters began to present new challenges. Between 2005 and 2015, a number of unprecedented events shook the system, underscoring the increasing variability and thus unpredictability of natural hazards as a new normal. Events in this period included cloudbursts and flash floods in the deserts, droughts in areas that are normally flood prone, abnormal hail and storm events, and floods of rare fury. To augment the shifting natural hazard landscape, urbanization and changing lifestyles have made facing disasters more challenging. For example, having entire cities run out of water is a situation that response systems are not geared to address. The future will be nothing like the past, with climate change adding to natural hazard complexities. Yet, the tools to manage hazards and reduce vulnerabilities are also evolving to unprecedented levels of sophistication. Science, people, and innovations will be valuable instruments for addressing the challenges of natural hazards in the times ahead.

scholarly journals Natural hazard fatalities in Switzerland from 1946 to 2015

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandre Badoux ◽  
Norina Andres ◽  
Frank Techel ◽  
Christoph Hegg
Keyword(s):  
Natural Hazards ◽  
Causes Of Death ◽  
Natural Hazard ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Fatal Accidents ◽  
Female Victims ◽  
The Past ◽  
Common Causes ◽  
Male To Female

Abstract. A database of fatalities caused by natural hazard processes in Switzerland was compiled for the period between 1946 and 2015. Using information from the Swiss flood and landslide database and the Swiss destructive avalanche database, the data set was extended back in time and more hazard processes were added by conducting an in-depth search of newspaper reports. The new database now covers all natural hazards common in Switzerland categorized into seven process types: flood, landslide, rockfall, lightning, windstorm, avalanche, and other processes (e.g. ice avalanches, earthquakes). Included were all fatal accidents associated with natural hazard processes where victims did not expose themselves to an important danger on purpose or wilfully. The database contains information on 635 natural hazard events causing 1023 fatalities, which corresponds to a mean of 14.6 victims per year. The most common causes of death were snow avalanche (37 %), followed by lightning (16 %), flood (12 %), windstorm (10 %), rockfall (8 %), landslide (7 %) and other processes (9 %). About 50 % of all victims died in one of the 507 single-fatality events; the other half of victims were killed in the 128 multi-fatality events. The number of natural hazard fatalities that occurred annually during our 70-year study period ranged from two to 112 and exhibited a distinct decrease over time. While the number of victims during the first three decades (until 1975) ranged from 191 to 269 per decade, it ranged from 47 to 109 in the four following decades. This overall decrease was mainly driven by a considerable decline in the number of avalanche and lightning fatalities. About 75 % of victims were males in all natural hazard events considered together, and this ratio was roughly maintained in all individual process categories except landslides (lower) and other processes (higher). The ratio of male to female victims was most likely to be balanced when deaths occurred at home (in or near a building), a situation that mainly occurred in association with landslides and avalanches. The average age of victims of natural hazards was 35.9 years, and accordingly, the age groups with the largest number of victims were the 20–29 and 30–39 year-old groups, which in combination represented 34% of all fatalities. It appears that the natural hazard fatality rate in Switzerland during the past 70 years has been relatively low in comparison to rates in other countries or rates of other types of fatal accidents in Switzerland.

scholarly journals ERMi esemekogud ja -analüüs

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-143
Author(s):  
Liisi Jääts
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Museum Collection ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Individual Item ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Times ◽  
Objective Representation ◽  
The Mind

Human artifacts are part of a culture. Whatever aspect we consider—their material, manufacture, ritual use or meaning—the world of human-made objects is closely intertwined with technological, social, economic, religious and other fields. An artifact can be a valuable source of study for a scholar delving into either the past or contemporary culture. Insofar as objects from past cultures are concentrated in museum collections, several questions arise in the mind of a researcher regarding the object as a source material: both at the level of describing and analysing an individual item and more broadly, at the level of the museum collection. A museum’s collection of artifacts is not a neutral and objective representation of real life. Nor is any other ethnographic source preserved in our museum’s collections a neutral and objective representation of life. Field diaries, reports, photographs, descriptions of objects and collections reflect the theoretical views of the times, or the understanding of the mission of ethnography/ethnology and the Estonian National Museum. Source criticism must always take into account the background, which in the case of object research will also involve the museum context.

Graubündens Wald im Fokus | Focus on the Grisons forest

2009 ◽  
Vol 160 (7) ◽  
pp. 195-200
Author(s):  
Reto Hefti
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
Natural Hazards ◽  
Positive Attitude ◽  
Production Costs ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Intensive Use ◽  
Form Part ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
The Government

In the mountainous canton Grisons, much visited by tourists, the forest has always had an important role to play. New challenges are now presenting themselves. The article goes more closely into two themes on the Grisons forestry agenda dominating in the next few years: the increased use of timber and climate change. With the increased demand for logs and the new sawmill in Domat/Ems new opportunities are offered to the canton for more intensive use of the raw material, wood. This depends on a reduction in production costs and a positive attitude of the population towards the greater use of wood. A series of measures from the Grisons Forestry Department should be of help here. The risk of damage to infrastructure is particularly high in a mountainous canton. The cantonal government of the Grisons has commissioned the Forestry Department to define the situation concerning the possible consequences of global warming on natural hazards and to propose measures which may be taken. The setting up of extensive measurement and information systems, the elaboration of intervention maps, the estimation of the danger potential in exposed areas outside the building zone and the maintenance of existing protective constructions through the creation of a protective constructions register, all form part of the government programme for 2009 to 2012. In the Grisons, forest owners and visitors will have to become accustomed to the fact that their forests must again produce more wood and that, on account of global warming, protective forests will become even more important than they already are today.

A Deep Pocket for the Truth of the Times

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Germana
Keyword(s):  
Music Criticism ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical View ◽  
Sense Of Time ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
The Times ◽  
Musical Forms

Chapter 5 treats Ellison’s music criticism as an expression of his commitment to durational time and a critique of cultural forms like bebop that, in Ellison’s estimation, lend form to a discontinuous present. Rather than suggest, as many critics have, that Ellison was simply nostalgic for danceable swing music or hostile toward emerging musical forms, this chapter shows that Ellison’s primary criticism of bebop is that it formalizes a discontinuous sense of time and thereby affirms an historical view of the past structured by an analogous, sequentially static sense of time. Ellison’s problem with bebop, in other words, is neither musicological nor sociological, but temporal. Folk jazz and the blues, by contrast, affirm a durational view of time in the form of a “pocket” or groove entirely unlike the spatialized groove of history described in Invisible Man. In short, Ellison finds in musical grooves antidotes to the groove of history.

scholarly journals Assessing the Prospects of Transboundary Multihazard Dynamics: The Case of Bhotekoshi—Sunkoshi Watershed in Sino—Nepal Border Region

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 3670
Author(s):  
Suraj Lamichhane ◽  
Komal Raj Aryal ◽  
Rocky Talchabhadel ◽  
Bhesh Raj Thapa ◽  
Rabindra Adhikari ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Natural Hazards ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Individual Case ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Multiple Hazards ◽  
The Past ◽  
Transboundary Watersheds ◽  
Underlying Causes

The impacts of multihazards have become more pronounced over the past few decades globally. Multiple hazards and their cascading impacts claim enormous losses of lives, livelihoods, and built environment. This paradigm prompts integrated and multidisciplinary perspectives to identify, characterize, and assess the occurrence of multihazards and subsequently design countermeasures considering impending multihazard scenarios at the local level. To this end, we considered one of the most egregious transboundary watersheds, which is regarded as a multihazard hotspot of Nepal, to analyze the underlying causes and cascade scenarios of multihazards, and their associated impacts. In this paper, geophysical, hydrometeorological, and socioeconomic perspectives are formulated to characterize the watershed from the dimension of susceptibility to multihazard occurrence. To characterize the complex dynamics of transboundary multihazard occurrence, insights have been presented from both the Nepali and the Chinese sides. Individual case studies and the interrelation matrix between various natural hazards are also presented so as to depict multihazard consequences in the transboundary region. The sum of the observations highlights that the watershed is highly vulnerable to a single as well as multiple natural hazards that often switch to disasters.

Colab Again

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Spampinato
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
East Side ◽  
Art Exhibitions ◽  
Massage Parlor ◽  
Art Gallery ◽  
Times Square ◽  
The Real Estate ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Year’S Eve ◽  
The Times

During the past few years, New York has seen the restaging of two groundbreaking underground art exhibitions, originally organized in 1980 by Lower East Side-based collective Colab: The Real Estate Show and The Times Square Show. The former, which took place illegally on New Year’s Eve in a vacant, city-owned building at 125 Delancey Street—and was shut down by the police after few hours—was restaged in Spring 2014 at four Downtown venues: James Fuentes Gallery, Cuchifritos, The Lodge Gallery, and ABC No Rio. The latter was organized in a disused Times Square massage parlor and restaged in Fall 2012 at Hunter College’s Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery.

scholarly journals The Effect of Service Quality on Satisfaction apropos Service Recipients of Divisional Secretariats in Colombo District in Sri Lanka

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
Nayanananda Nilwala ◽  
Kennedy Gunawardana ◽  
R. S. Lalitha Fernando
Keyword(s):  
Regression Analysis ◽  
Correlation Analysis ◽  
Service Quality ◽  
Service Provider ◽  
Sampling Method ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Relative Impact ◽  
Vast Array ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past

A vast array of knowledge has been accumulated on the effect of service quality on customer satisfaction, particularly with a large number of studies over the past few years. However, the effect of service quality on satisfaction of service recipients in Divisional Secretariats in the Public Sector is relatively an unattended area by researchers. Hence, this study was carried out to evaluate the effect of service quality on satisfaction of service recipients of divisional secretariats. This particular organization was selected for the study as it is considered to be the most significant service provider in terms of statutory, social, economic and development in the country. A questionnaire survey and personal interviews were conducted to collect data by using the purposive sampling method. A modified questionnaire was prepared based on SERVQUAL instruments with two additional questions. A sample of 520 service recipients from 13 Divisional Secretariats in Colombo was drawn and it was represented by 40 from each division. Correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis were used to examine the relative impact of the service quality on satisfaction of service recipients. The study revealed that all the service quality attributes positively related to satisfaction of the service recipients. The findings of the study show that satisfaction of service recipients in terms of service quality has not met the expected level, which a divisional secretariat is deemed to provide for. 

Pipeline Vulnerability to Natural Hazards

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Vicente Amórtegui
Keyword(s):  
Stress State ◽  
Risk Analysis ◽  
Natural Hazards ◽  
Natural Hazard ◽  
Weather Conditions ◽  
Monitoring Systems ◽  
System Vulnerability ◽  
Preventive Actions ◽  
Strength And Stiffness ◽  
External Forces

The strength and stiffness of the pipelines allow them to tolerate the effects of natural hazards for some period of time. The amount of time depends on the strength and deformability, the stress state, the age, the conditions of installation and operation of the pipeline and their geometric arrangement with regard to the hazardous process. Accordingly, some of the hazards due to weather conditions and external forces would not be time independent. In consequence the designing of monitoring systems to predict the behavior of the pipelines against natural hazards is required in order to carry out the preventive actions which are necessary to avoid failure of the pipes due to the exposition to those hazards. In this paper a method for assessing the transport system vulnerability is developed, a function for risk analysis is proposed (which is determined by the probability of the natural hazard, the pipeline’s vulnerability to the hazard and the consequences of the pipe rupture). The elements that are part of that evaluation are presented and illustrated by means of examples.

That the Past May Yet Have Another Future: Gesture in the Times of Hands Up

2018 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Schneider
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
The Times

scholarly journals Historiographical traditions and modern imperatives for the restoration of global history

2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Global History ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
The World ◽  
The Times

This essay has been written to serve as a prolegomenon for a new journal in Global History. It opens with a brief depiction of the two major approaches to the field (through connexions and comparisons) and moves on to survey first European and then other historiographical traditions in writing ‘centric’ histories up to the times of the Imperial Meridian 1783–1825, when Europe’s geopolitical power over all other parts of the world became hegemonic. Thereafter, and for the past two centuries, all historiographical traditions converged either to celebrate or react to the rise of the ‘West’. The case for the restoration of Global History rests upon its potential to construct negotiable meta-narratives, based upon serious scholarship that will become cosmopolitan in outlook and meet the needs of our globalizing world.

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