scholarly journals Assessing the Performance of a Vulnerability Index during Oppressive Heat across Georgia, United States

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Maier ◽  
Andrew Grundstein ◽  
Woncheol Jang ◽  
Chao Li ◽  
Luke P. Naeher ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Vulnerability Index ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Extreme Heat ◽  
Dominant Factor ◽  
Rural Counties ◽  
Heat Vulnerability ◽  
Heat Vulnerability Index

Abstract Extreme heat is the leading weather-related killer in the United States. Vulnerability to extreme heat has previously been identified and mapped in urban areas to improve heat morbidity and mortality prevention efforts. However, only limited work has examined vulnerability outside of urban locations. This study seeks to broaden the geographic context of earlier work and compute heat vulnerability across the state of Georgia, which offers diverse landscapes and populations with varying sociodemographic characteristics. Here, a modified heat vulnerability index (HVI) developed by Reid et al. is used to characterize vulnerability by county. About half of counties with the greatest heat vulnerability index scores contain the larger cities in the state (i.e., Athens, Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, Macon, and Savannah), while the other half of high-vulnerability counties are located in more rural counties clustered in southwestern and east-central Georgia. The source of vulnerability varied between the more urban and rural high-vulnerability counties, with poverty and population of nonwhite residents driving vulnerability in the more urban counties and social isolation/population of elderly/poor health the dominant factor in the more rural counties. Additionally, the effectiveness of the HVI in identifying vulnerable populations was investigated by examining the effect of modification of the vulnerability index score with mortality during extreme heat. Except for the least vulnerable categories, the relative risk of mortality increases with increasing vulnerability. For the highest-vulnerability counties, oppressively hot days lead to a 7.7% increase in mortality.

Desert Traffic: The Dynamics of the Drug Trade in Northwestern Mexico

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric P. Perramond
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Cannabis Sativa ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Drug Industry ◽  
Total Output ◽  
Northern Mexico ◽  
Mountainous Regions ◽  
Northwestern Mexico

The semiarid expanses of northern Mexico have long been a haven for drug trafficking and shipment into the southwestern United States. During the past 3 decades, a more specialized and dedicated drug industry has used the long U.S.-Mexican border to move illicit narcotics. Northern Mexico is not a heavily indigenous zone, and yet some native populations have been adversely affected by this recent industry, and not just a few have taken a role in it. Two states in northern Mexico that still have indigenous peoples are Sonora and Chihuahua. Both of these semiarid states are more sparsely populated than the rest of Mexico, yet both share a long, expansive border with the United States. Thus, neither state has escaped the activities of the drug industry, and some of the major drug cartels are located in this region (figure 8.1), the largest in urban areas such as Ciudad Juarez in the state of Chihuahua and Culiacán in the state of Sinaloa. Although these urban areas are the economic and logistical centers of two large cartels, an aspect frequently ignored in the literature, and certainly in policy circles, is the variety of scales of production in this industry. Aside from these giant cartels, drug cultivation, production, and transportation are also common at lesser scales, and the difficulties and dangers associated with drug production and trafficking extend to these small farmers. Small plots of marijuana (Cannabis sativa) and poppies (Papaver somniferum) dot the northern Mexican landscape, especially in the foothills and high peaks of the Sierra Madre. Most of the poppy production lies further south, in the states of Michoacan, Guerrero, and Oaxaca. Marijuana (Cannabis) is by far the more common of the two illicit crops grown in Mexico, partly because of its longer history of cultivation in the country’s mountainous regions and partly because of its greater ease of integration into agriculture. Poppy fields are a lot harder to hide, both from neighbors and from more interested authorities. Marijuana is also more easily intercropped with more common agricultural crops. Intercropping is the practice of growing two or more crops in the same field or parcel of land, and it is common when farmers need to maximize total output per unit of area (Wilken 1987: 248). I have seen marijuana integrated with corn, bean, squash, sunflower, and tomato plants.

scholarly journals Heat Vulnerability and Heat Island Mitigation in the United States

Atmosphere ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jungmin Lim ◽  
Mark Skidmore
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Heat Waves ◽  
Fold Increase ◽  
The United States ◽  
Extreme Heat ◽  
Mitigation Measures ◽  
Heat Island ◽  
Weather Extremes ◽  
Heat Vulnerability

Heat waves are the deadliest type of natural hazard among all weather extremes in the United States. Given the observed and anticipated increase in heat risks associated with ongoing climate change, this study examines community vulnerability to extreme heat and the degree to which heat island mitigation (HIM) actions by state/local governments reduce heat-induced fatalities. The analysis uses all heat events that occurred over the 1996–2011 period for all United States counties to model heat vulnerability. Results show that: (1) Higher income reduces extreme heat vulnerability, while poverty intensifies it; (2) living in mobile homes or rental homes heightens susceptibility to extreme heat; (3) increased heat vulnerability due to the growth of the elderly population is predicted to result in a two-fold increase in heat-related fatalities by 2030; and (4) community heat island mitigation measures reduce heat intensities and thus heat-related fatalities. Findings also show that an additional locally implemented measure reduces the annual death rate by 15%. A falsification test rules out the possibility of spurious inference on the life-saving role of heat island mitigation measures. Overall, these findings inform efforts to protect the most vulnerable population subgroups and guide future policies to counteract the growing risk of deadly heat waves.

scholarly journals Mapping Urban Heat Vulnerability of Extreme Heat in Hangzhou via Comparing Two Approaches

Complexity ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xue Liu ◽  
Wenze Yue ◽  
Xuchao Yang ◽  
Kejia Hu ◽  
Wei Zhang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Capacity Planning ◽  
Central Area ◽  
Principal Component ◽  
Vulnerability Index ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Extreme Heat ◽  
Equal Weight ◽  
Heat Vulnerability ◽  
Heat Vulnerability Index ◽  
The Relationship

Extreme heat is the leading cause of heat-related mortality around the world. Extracting heat vulnerability information from the urban complexity system is crucial for urban health studies. Using heat vulnerability index (HVI) is the most common approach for urban planners to locate the places with high vulnerability for intervention and protection. Previous studies have demonstrated that HVI can play a vital role in determining which areas are at risk of heat-related deaths. Both equal weight approach (EWA) and principal component analysis (PCA) are the conventional methods to aggregate indicators to HVI. However, seldom studies have compared the differences between these two approaches in estimating HVI. In this paper, we evaluated the HVIs in Hangzhou in 2013, employing EWA and PCA, and assessed the accuracies of these two HVIs by using heat-related deaths. Our results show that both HVI maps showed that areas with high vulnerability are located in the central area while those with low vulnerability are located in the suburban area. The comparison between HVIEWA and HVIPCA shows significantly different spatial distributions, which is caused by the various weight factors in EWA and PCA. The relationship between HVIEWA and heat-related deaths performs better than the relationship between HVIPCA and deaths, implying EWA could be a better method to evaluate heat vulnerability than PCA. The HVIEWA can provide a spatial distribution of heat vulnerability at intracity to direct heat adaptation and emergency capacity planning.

scholarly journals A Heat Vulnerability Index: Spatial Patterns of Exposure, Sensitivity and Adaptive Capacity for Urbanites of Four Cities of India

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 283
Author(s):  
Suresh Kumar Rathi ◽  
Soham Chakraborty ◽  
Saswat Kishore Mishra ◽  
Ambarish Dutta ◽  
Lipika Nanda
Keyword(s):  
Adaptive Capacity ◽  
Heat Waves ◽  
Vulnerability Index ◽  
Extreme Heat ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Great Loss ◽  
Household Vulnerability ◽  
Heat Vulnerability ◽  
Heat Vulnerability Index ◽  
The Impact

Extreme heat and heat waves have been established as disasters which can lead to a great loss of life. Several studies over the years, both within and outside of India, have shown how extreme heat events lead to an overall increase in mortality. However, the impact of extreme heat, similar to other disasters, depends upon the vulnerability of the population. This study aims to assess the extreme heat vulnerability of the population of four cities with different characteristics across India. This cross-sectional study included 500 households from each city across the urban localities (both slum and non-slum) of Ongole in Andhra Pradesh, Karimnagar in Telangana, Kolkata in West Bengal and Angul in Odisha. Twenty-one indicators were used to construct a household vulnerability index to understand the vulnerability of the cities. The results have shown that the majority of the households fell under moderate to high vulnerability level across all the cities. Angul and Kolkata were found to be more highly vulnerable as compared to Ongole and Karimnagar. Further analysis also revealed that household vulnerability is more significantly related to adaptive capacity than sensitivity and exposure. Heat Vulnerability Index can help in identifying the vulnerable population and scaling up adaptive practices.

Writing Revolution

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Social Equality ◽  
Spanish Speaking

Writing Revolution examines the ways in which Spanish-language anarchist print culture established and maintained transnational networks from the late 19th through 20th centuries. Organized both chronologically and thematically, the chapters in this book explore how Spanish-speaking anarchists based in the United States, Latin America, and Spain promoted comprehensive social and economic reform, that is, the social revolution, while confronting an aggressively industrializing world that privileged authority vested in the state, capital, and church over the working class, specifically, and individual freedoms, generally. These chapters make it clear that anarchism—despite politically motivated attempts to define it differently—was not simply an ideology devoted to violently overthrowing the state but a movement that actively promoted free thought, individual liberty, and social equality. We show how Spanish-speaking anarchists developed a pervasive and vibrant transnational print network in which the United States was a major hub that enabled worker solidarity reinforced by a continuing emphasis on well-established enlightenment-era concepts of freedom, personal liberty, and social equality, through journalism and literature. Within this historical context of activism and culture production from below, the essays in this volume show how anarchist periodicals connected, fostered, and maintained Spanish-speaking radicals and groups in major metropolises including Barcelona, Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Havana, Los Angeles, Madrid, and New York City among many others, but also smaller urban areas such as Detroit, New Orleans, Tampico (México), Steubenville (Ohio), and Tampa.

Developing an applied extreme heat vulnerability index utilizing socioeconomic and environmental data

2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 23-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel P. Johnson ◽  
Austin Stanforth ◽  
Vijay Lulla ◽  
George Luber
Keyword(s):  
Vulnerability Index ◽  
Extreme Heat ◽  
Environmental Data ◽  
Heat Vulnerability ◽  
Heat Vulnerability Index
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