Sustainable disaster supply chain management for relief operations in Bangladesh

PurposeNumber of disastrous events are rising globally, and it is important to manage the humanitarian supply chain management process to assist the disaster affected individuals in terms of relief operations. Effective relief operations can help to recover the materialistic loss due to any disaster. But there is a paucity of studies regarding this issue for developing countries. This study, hence, inspected the factors that affect the disaster supply chain management (DSCM) processes for relief operations in Bangladesh.Design/methodology/approachThis study examined the factors affecting relief operations through a qualitative analysis. This study used thematic analysis. Interviews were conducted with related supply chain individuals who were triangulated by data from related publications and blogs.FindingsThe study showed that sustainable DSCM for relief operations in Bangladesh require addressing few factors as organizational capabilities, warehousing locations and inventory management, infrastructure facility, coordination among partners, government and local authority support to create a transparent, efficient, effective and sustainable DSCM process for relief operations in Bangladesh. The system loopholes can be identified and rectified on the base of these factors.Research limitations/implicationsThe number of interview respondents was limited to twenty who were selected randomly from four organizations. To create a sustainable disaster supply chain management (SCM) for relief operations few factors were considered as predominant factors in Bangladesh context to generalize the developing country contexts and other factors were not considered. Therefore, for farther humanitarian research, the model of this study can be used for quantitative research and the hypotheses can be tested empirically to get more acute findings.Practical implicationsAs this study identifies the factors which can help to create a sustainable DSCM system for relief operations, hence practically, Bangladesh humanitarian SCM agencies will be beneficial from this study. They can easily recognize the factors need to be considered to create a sustainable DSCM process for relief operations.Originality/valueThis is a unique study carried out to examine the factors affecting DSCM process for relief operations in Bangladesh.

Children in a disaster: health protection and intervention

Children are disproportionately affected by disasters. They have greater physiological, psychological and sociological vulnerabilities, often exacerbated by the fact that their unique needs can be overlooked during relief efforts. This article provides an overview of disasters, including how they are categorised, and the factors that need to be considered by military and civilian healthcare teams that respond to them. Information is drawn from a variety of previous disasters, with the effects considered across a range of different populations and communities. The lessons learnt from previous disasters need to inform the ongoing discussions around how to best train and supply both individual healthcare workers and the wider teams that will be expected to respond to future disasters. The importance of role-specific training incorporating caring for children, consideration of paediatric casualties during planning exercises and teaching scenarios, and the requirement for paediatric equipment and medications cannot be overemphasised. While provision of paediatric care may not be the primary role of an individual healthcare worker or their broader team, it still remains their ethical and often legal duty to plan for and deliver care for children when responding to a disaster. This is a paper commissioned as part of the Humanitarian and Disaster Relief Operations special issue of BMJ Military Health.

Cooking Commoning Subjectivities: Guerrilla Narrative in the Cooperation Birmingham Solidarity Kitchen

In this chapter, we explore the recently developed concept of guerrilla narrative as a tool that offers great potential for militant research. “Guerrilla narrative” emerged from the politicization of the oral history tradition; it was developed by Marco Armiero as a research tool to explore histories of contamination and resistance in subaltern communities. In this chapter, we broaden the scope of guerrilla narrative and explore its role in the reclamation/invention of the urban commons. Particularly, we look closely at the tools that contribute to the creation of commoning subjectivities. We focus on the mutual aid relief operations led by the grassroots organization Cooperation Birmingham during the COVID-19 pandemic, analysing both their solidarity kitchen and newsletter. We argue that both are manifestations of guerrilla narrative in the sense that both produce counter-hegemonic narratives while fostering commoning practices. This means that guerrilla narrative goes beyond the wording, textual or even artistic paradigms to incorporate more embodied forms of storytelling, such as the practice or running a solidarity kitchen or other forms of material commoning practices.

Modelling Robust Delivery Scenarios for a Fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Disaster Relief Missions

Besides commercial and military applications, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are now used more commonly in disaster relief operations. This study proposes a novel model for proactive and reactive planning (different scenarios) that allow for a higher degree of realism, thus a higher likelihood for a mission of being executed according to the plan even when weather forecasts are changing. The novelty of this study results from the addition of a function of resistance of UAVs mission to changes in weather conditions. We link the influence of weather conditions on the UAV’s energy consumption. The goal is to ensure the completion of planned deliveries by a fleet of UAVs under changing weather conditions before their batteries discharge and to identify the emergency route for returned if the mission cannot be completed. An approach based on constraint programming is proposed, as it has proven to be effective in various contexts, especially related to the nonlinearity of the system’s characteristics. The proposed approach has been tested on several instances, which have allowed for analyzing how the plan of mission is robust to the changing weather conditions with different parameters, such as the fleet size, battery capacity, and distribution network layout.

Humanizing siege warfare: Applying the principle of proportionality to sieges

Siege warfare and its devastating humanitarian consequences have been one of the defining features of contemporary armed conflicts. While the most apparent restriction of siege warfare appears to be provided by the prohibition against starvation of the civilian population as a method of warfare, the prevailing restrictive interpretation of this prohibition has left civilians remaining in a besieged area unprotected from the hardships they endure. This article demonstrates that shifting the focus from the prohibition against starvation to the rules regulating humanitarian relief operations does not seem helpful due to the ambiguities regarding the requirement of consent and the right of control of the besieging party. In remedying this protection gap, this article examines whether and how the principle of proportionality applies in the context of a siege. After analyzing whether the encirclement and isolation aspect of a siege can be considered an attack in the sense of Article 49(1) of Additional Protocol I (AP I), to which the proportionality principle applies, the article investigates how this principle operates in the context of a siege. It will be demonstrated that Article 57(2)(b) of AP I requires that the proportionality of a siege must be continuously monitored.

Optimum transportation of relief materials aftermath the disaster

Purpose: Natural disasters disrupt not only the lives of individuals but also the functioning of society. Given the unpredictability of disasters and the uncertainty associated with them, preparation is the best way to mitigate and reduce the effects of the disaster. Design/methodology/approach: The study presents a mathematical model in the form of a multi-objective linear programming problem for the relief distribution from the airports which minimizes the total operational cost as well as travel time. Further, the solution approach and analytical results have also been discussed. Findings: The main aims at the preparedness stage are to identify and build infrastructures that might function as useful operation centres during a disaster. The study also provides decisions that include the type and number of vehicles for each affected location. Research limitations/implications: Airports can function as centres for relief collection and distribution. However, relief operations carried out through airports are often subject to problems such as stockpiling. Further, various modes are available for the transport of relief supplies- air, water, and land transport modes primarily. While aircraft and helicopters are faster, their costs of operation are too high. Instead, trucks are economical but very slow as compared to aircraft. Practical implications: The choice of model depends on many factors including the availability of vehicles, availability of routes, and criticality of situations. The choices made in turn affect the costs and the time of operations. Originality/value: The model converts a disaster scenario into a demand-supply problem with the aim being to decide allocations at specified intervals of time.

Fairness in ambulance routing for post disaster management

Disaster management generally includes the post-disaster stage, which consists of the actions taken in response to the disaster damages. These actions include the employment of emergency plans and assigned resources to (i) rescue affected people immediately, (ii) deliver personnel, medical care and equipment to the disaster area, and (iii) aid to prevent the infrastructural and environmental losses. In the response phase, humanitarian logistics directly influence the efficiency of the relief operation. Ambulances routing problem is defined as employing the optimisation tools to manage the flow of ambulances for finding the best ambulance tours to transport the injured to hospitals. Researchers pointed out the importance of equity and fairness in humanitarian relief services: managing the operations of ambulances in the immediate aftermath of a disaster must be done impartially and efficiently to rescue affected people with different priority in accordance with the restrictions. Our research aim is to find the best ambulance tours to transport the patients during a disaster in relief operations while considering fairness and equity to deliver services to patients in balance. The problem is formulated as a new variant of the team orienteering problem with hierarchical objectives to address also the efficiency issue. Due to the limitation of solving the proposed model using a general-purpose solver, we propose a new hybrid algorithm based on a machine learning and neighbourhood search. Based on a new set of realistic benchmark instances, our quantitative analysis proves that our algorithm is capable to largely reduce the solution running time especially when the complexity of the problem increases. Further, a comparison between the fair solution and the system optimum solution is also provided.

Ecology, Gender and Social Crises: North Bengal in 1896–1897 Famine

The present article deals with the ecology and social aspects of famine of 1896–1897 in north Bengal. Ecological issues were no less important to convert the drought or scarcities into famines, even though the human agencies played a crucial role towards the intensification of the famines in colonial India. Famines had provided a major blow to the social ecology of dependency and survival, which were critically manifested through the transformation of existing social norms and cultural values, especially for the women. The responses of women towards the emerging social crises and to the government relief operations were mixed with hesitancy and desperateness, which was further influenced by changing norms of feminine ‘modesty’ and ‘values’. Thus the gendering of famine is deeply rooted in the cultural response of women to the natural disasters, and north Bengal remained as a principal site of gendered response where the women attitude towards the 1896–1897 famine can be best understood.