Can Forest-Related Adaptive Capacity Reduce Landslide Risk Attributable to Climate Change?—Case of Republic of Korea

Recent cases of climate disasters such as the European floods in 2021 and Korea’s longest rainy season in 2020 strongly imply the importance of adaptation to climate change. In this study, we performed a numerical prediction on how much climate change adaptation factors related to forest policy can reduce climate disasters such as landslides. We focused on the landslide in Korea and applied a machine learning model reflecting adaptive indicators in the representative concentration pathway 8.5 climate scenario. The changes in the landslide probability were estimated using the Random Forest model, which estimated the landslide probability in the baseline period (2011) with excellent performance, and the spatial adaptation indicators used in this study contributed approximately 20%. The future landslide risk predicting indicated a significant increase in the Very High and High risk areas, especially in 2092. The application of the forest-related adaptation indices based on the policy scenario showed that in 2050, the effect was not pronounced, but in 2092, when the risk of landslides was much higher, the effect increased significantly. In particular, the effect was remarkable in the Seoul metropolitan and southern coastal regions. Even with the same adaptive capacity, it exerted a larger effect on the enhanced disasters. Our results suggest that the enhancement of adaptive capacity can reduce landslide risk up to 70% in a Very High risk region. In conclusion, it implies an importance to respond to the intensifying climate disasters, and abundant follow-up studies are expected to appear in the future.

Gender and Disaster: The Impact of Natural Disasters on Violence Against Women in Nepal

In April 2015, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit the Gorkha district of Nepal. This was followed in May by a second earthquake. Nepal experienced another natural disaster in 2017. Floods affected large swathes of the country from east to west. Using both qualitative and quantitative data, this article examines the impact of these climate disasters on violence against women. In doing so, it adds to a small but growing and fundamentally important body of literature that explores the intersections of gendered violence and natural disaster. It is well-established that 35% of women worldwide have experienced physical and/or sexual violence. What we know much less about is how other events impact on these figures. Given the growing intensity of climate change and the reality that adverse impacts are here to stay, understanding the detrimental legacy of natural disasters is now more urgent than ever.

Falling Towers: A Letter to my Child’s Teacher

Using the epistolary genre, this editorial is embedded in a fictional letter written to a teacher. The discussion is spurred by a teacher writing a mark in bold felt pen directly on a student’s drawing of the Eiffel Tower. This reflexive inquiry laments the deep wounding of the joy of learning by metrics, measurements and efficiency, while registering the imperative to change this path. Using the metaphor of the “tower” to theorize current damaging curricular practices, this editorial questions how, amidst the uncontrol and fear in a global pandemic, the challenging truths of unmarked graves, devastating climate disasters, global food insecurity, among other sufferings, teachers can imagine hope-inspired, healing-centred pedagogies and ”assertive mutuality . . . [through] co-action, interconnection . . . [and] the capacity to act and implement as opposed to the ability to control others” (Kreisberg, 1992, p. 86). The task of recognizing, naming and dismantling towers—in essence, leaving one’s home, and building new relational frames, while the world is falling—requires extraordinary hope, as shown in the articles in this issue.

Overemphasis on recovery inhibits community transformation and creates resilience traps

Building community resilience in the face of climate disasters is critical to achieving a sustainable future. Operational approaches to resilience favor systems’ agile return to the status quo following a disruption. Here, we show that an overemphasis on recovery without accounting for transformation entrenches ‘resilience traps’–risk factors within a community that are predictive of recovery, but inhibit transformation. By quantifying resilience including both recovery and transformation, we identify risk factors which catalyze or inhibit transformation in a case study of community resilience in Florida during Hurricane Michael in 2018. We find that risk factors such as housing tenure, income inequality, and internet access have the capability to trigger transformation. Additionally, we find that 55% of key predictors of recovery are potential resilience traps, including factors related to poverty, ethnicity and mobility. Finally, we discuss maladaptation which could occur as a result of disaster policies which emphasize resilience traps.

Klimapflanzen und biologische Wege zu negativen Kohlendioxidemissionen

Climate plants are critical to prevent global warming as all efforts to save carbon dioxide are too slow and climate disasters on the rise. For best carbon dioxide harvesting we compare algae, trees and crop plants and use metagenomic analysis of environmental samples. We compare different pathways, carbon harvesting potentials of different plants as well as synthetic modifications including carbon dioxide flux balance analysis. For implementation, agriculture and modern forestry are important.

Perspektywa globalna i jej implikacje w kontekście wielowymiarowego kryzysu społeczno-gospodarczego

The author assumes that today we are dealing with a multidimensional crisis, one of the components of which is the pandemic. This crisis, as well as the countermeasures undertaken in connection with it, are creating a new shape of global socio-economic reality. The key issue here are the multilateral links between seemingly separate phenomena such as migration, climate disasters and ocean contamination. All these links have an economic dimension that can be fully tangible only with a global perspective. Facing crisis challenges requires cooperation on a global scale – between countries, international organizations and large corporations. Due to the unreliability of traditional prediction, it becomes necessary to formulate scenarios of events that may occur as a result of crisis phenomena.

Social determinants of conflict management – theoretical analysis

Conflict management is a situation of contradictory interests, where one party wants to subordinate the opposite side. People are social beings because they create diverse human relations and are lost by the idea of being safe and the belief it will always be this way. War is a socio-political phenomenon that involves a decision about fight. Lack of water supply, selective pandemics, environmental and climate disasters are the result of poverty and government’s faulty security management. Lack of security creates a constant necessity for conducting research on the development of science that deals with conflict management. In contemporary society, conflict management means to keep control over it by its policy makers, which, as a result, guarantees the effective solution. “Recognition, strategy and attack” (i.e. effective actions that can ensure security) is the motto of politicians and the military. It should be kept in mind that conflict management is connected with the implementation of the intended goals, where, for example, war is a social phenomenon and a political tool. Excessive exploitation of the arms industry may be called by some a strategy for peace. The idolatry of politicians, including advanced technology, causes individuals to trust in material things. Pope Francis warns that one should not blindly follow the image advisers who sell death.

The Politics of Climate Disasters, Social Inequality, and Perceptions of Government Assistance

This chapter addresses a central research question of the politics of climate disaster: Who do citizens believe responsible for aftermath relief? The authors examine the issue of responsibility attribution in federal disaster assistance—and the related question of who voters believe deserves government disaster relief—against three devastating 2017 hurricanes, with a special focus on the impact of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico. The authors begin to answer the questions of responsibility and deservingness with survey data collected by them in a pilot study on the Island of Puerto Rico in 2019. They conclude by identifying fruitful links of comparative analysis between climate disaster politics and distributive and welfare politics.