Climate change is exacerbating natural disasters, and extreme weather events increase with intensity and frequency. This requires an in-depth evaluation of locations across the various U.S. climates where natural hazards, vulnerabilities, and potentially damaging impacts will vary. At the local building level within the built environment, private residences are crucial shelter systems to protect against natural disasters, and are a central component in the greater effort of creating comprehensive disaster resilient environments. In light of recent disasters such as Superstorm Sandy, there is an increased awareness that residential buildings and communities need to become more resilient for the changing climates they are located in, or will face devastating consequences. There is a great potential for specific high-performance building technologies to play a vital role in achieving disaster resilience on a local scale. The application of these technologies can not only provide immediate protection and reduced risk for buildings and its occupants, but can additionally alleviate disaster recovery stressors to critical infrastructure and livelihoods by absorbing, adapting, and rapidly recovering from extreme weather events, all while simultaneously promoting sustainable building development. However, few have evaluated the link between residential high-performance building technologies and natural disaster resilience in regards to identifying and prioritizing viable technologies to assist decision-makers with effective implementation. This research developed a framework for a process that prioritizes residential building technologies that encompass both high-performance and resilience qualities that can be implemented for a variety of housing contexts to mitigate risks associated with climate induced natural hazards. Decision-makers can utilize this process to evaluate a residential building for natural disaster risks, and communicate strategies to improve building performance and resilience in response to such risks. / Ph. D.

The relationship between social experience and action in the context of recurrent disasters is often thought of in terms of adaptation. This study problematises this assumption from an anthropological perspective by analysing the memoryscape that mediates past experiences of disasters. The inquiry is based on translocal and transtemporal ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2004-2011 in the flood-prone city of Santa Fe in Argentina. The study examines how past flooding is remembered by flood victims in the middle- and low-income districts and by activists of the protest movement that emerged in the wake of the 2003 flood. It deals with flood memory in the local bureaucracy, in local historiography, myths and popular culture. The analysis reveals that the Santafesinian flood memoryscape is dynamically configured by evocative, reminiscent and commemorative modes of remembering, which are expressed in multiple forms, ranging from memorials and rituals to bureaucratic documents, infrastructure and everyday practices. The study addresses the relationship between memory, morality and social inequality and discusses the implications for questions regarding vulnerability, resilience and adaptation.

Thesis (PhD (Civil Engineering))--Stellenbosch University, 1986. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation presents the development process of a wind damage and disaster management support model for South Africa. Several aspects of wind damage are analysed. The impact of wind disasters on human habitat is highlighted by providing selected data of loss due to such events. This is followed by a comprehensive review of relevant research, carried out locally and internationally. The role and relevance of wind loading codification is discussed. The factors influencing wind damage are identified and their applicability to South African conditions is evaluated. An outline of a database of wind damage in South Africa which has been developed during the course of the project is presented. Selected statistics derived from this database are presented. A probabilistic model for assessing wind damage in South Africa is proposed. The model is based on the spatial principle of occurrence of strong wind events. A 'first approximation' division of the country into zones where various types of wind events occur and the characteristics of their generic footprints (i.e. distribution of wind speeds) are developed. The risk model procedure also takes the distribution of wealth, and the vulnerability of the built environment into account. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie verhandeling bied die ontwikkelingsproses vir 'n hulpmodel vir windskade en rampbestuur vir Suid-Afrika aan. Verskeie aspekte van windskade word ontleed. Die invloed van windskade op woongebiede word beklemtoon deur die aanbieding van geselekteerde data oor relevante plaaslike en internasionale navorsing. Die rol en toepaslikheid van windbelasting in ontwerpkodes word bespreek. Die faktore wat windskade beinvloed, word geidentifiseer en die aanwendbaarheid onder Suid-Afrikaanse omstandighede word beoordeel. 'n Beskrywing van n databasis vir windskade in Suid'-Afrika, wat tydens die projek saamgestel is, word aangebied. Sekere statistiek wat uit die databasis afgelei is, word voorgelê. n Statistiese model vir die beraming van windskade in Suid-Afrika word voorgestel. Die model is gebaseer op die ruimtelike beginsel van voorkoms van sterk-wind-gebeurlikhede. 'n "Eerste benadering" - indeling van die land in streke waar verskillende soorte windgebeurlikhede voorkom en hulle karakteristieke kenmerke (bv. verspreiding van windspoed) is ontwikkel. Die werkwyse vir die risikomodel neem die verdeling van rykdom en die kwesbaarheid van die beboude omgewing in ag.

The recent emergencies on college campuses including the Virginia Tech massacre of April, 2007, the Northern Illinois University shootings and the Union University tornado highlight the importance of disaster preparedness within the university community. This study is a survey exploring the daily rhythms of student life, the communication channels open to students and students composition and characteristics. This survey finds that students have frequent access to communication technologies which can be utilized as warning channels. The study also concludes that many students do not actively seek out information relative to emergency preparedness and the gaps in the populations knowledge require increased disaster education by the university.

The interest in the use of fiscal policy as an effective economic policy tool has been revived recently, since the global recession of 2008 hit the world. In spite of a large empirical literature, there remains substantial uncertainty about the size and even the direction of the effects of discretionary fiscal policy. This thesis seeks to investigate the macroeconomic effects of discretionary fiscal policy in the short term, highlighting several methodologies for identifying discretionary fiscal policy. In Chapters 2 and 3, we suggest a new instrument based on the narrative approach for identifying exogenous government spending shocks: natural disaster damages and the subsequent government emergency spending. While applying our methodology to the Korean and the U.S data, we find that our instrument is not only powerful but also superior to military build-ups used by most of the literature. The relief expenditure in the wake of natural disaster has several advantages such as the similarity in scope to general government activity and the easy applicability beyond the U.S. compared to military build-ups. In the analysis of Korean fiscal policy, using our narrative method and the Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model, we find that government spending shocks increase GDP, consumption, and real wage, which is in line with the New Keynesian model. We also find that the timing is crucial in identifying government spending shocks due to the anticipation effects of fiscal policy. Furthermore, while analyzing the U.S. fiscal policy both at the state as well as national level, we estimate two kinds of non-defense spending multipliers: federal (1.4~1.7) and state (1.5~2.5), which exceed the defense spending multiplier obtained in the literature using military building-ups. In Chapter 4, in regard to the study of effects of fiscal adjustment, we develop the approach based on changes in cyclically adjusted primary balance (CAPB) by including fluctuations of asset price in the CAPB measure and allowing for individual country heterogeneity in the definition of fiscal adjustment. Using our new CAPB in 20 OECD countries, we find that fiscal adjustments have contractionary effects on economic activity in the short term, which is consistent with the result based on the narrative approach. Nevertheless, our results suggest that fiscal adjustments that rely predominantly on spending cuts are less contractionary than those involving tax increases.

No description available.

There are three main purposes for this thesis; the first is to distinguish the possible violations that can occur in time of natural disasters. The second is to analyze if there is a correlation between political systems and how the effected country handles the aftermath of a natural disaster. The third purpose is to determine the role of the global community and what responsibility lies with them. The issue is often that the aid becomes the main object for discussion and analysis, but the focus rarely shifts to the effected State. Therefore the focus in this essay is the political system and how they cope with the human rights violations that can occur in a time of natural disaster. The questions are; what human rights are at risk of being violated during a natural disaster? What general impact do the different political systems have on how they handle the human rights violations that arises? In which ways can other countries assist in a natural disaster and what responsibility do the global communities have?To be able to discuss human rights, it is necessary to know one perspective of how they came to be. For this purpose, this thesis will explain human rights from the perspectives of Jack Donnelly and Ronald Dworkin. They speak about rights and obligations; Donnelly means to say that all rights are universal and Dworkin put rights in a perspective of equal respect and concern. Some of the rights violated in the aftermath of the natural disaster were the right to a family life, the right to personal security and the right to ones property. When analyzing the political systems and the responsibility of the world in the consequences of a natural disaster, I applied Ulla Erikson-Zeterqvists explanation of early institutional theory that implies tree conditions that make an organization successful. The first condition is where the administrative control lays, second the commitment of grassroots organizations and third, the participation of the local community. In this analysis the conclusion is that the political system is not the main factor in upholding human rights. The main factor is the stability of the State and what the State is willing to do for its citizens. The stability of the States determines the standard for what human rights mean and how the aid is structured. If the State is corrupted it makes it harder for the global community to assist. The countries history affects their behavior and in a time of crisis, the States true commitment is shown.

Blockchain is described as a trustworthy distributed service for parties that do not fully trust each other. It enables business transactions to be handled without a third party or central governance. For this distributed and concurrent communication to work, a consensus mechanism needs to be implemented into the blockchain protocol. This mechanism will dictate how and when new blocks can be added and in some cases, by whom. The medical industry suffers from many informational inefficiencies. Data is scattered across many different databases and the lack of coordination often results in mishandling of the data. This is especially clear when a natural disaster hits and time is of the essence. The purpose of this thesis is to assess how much a blockchain solution and its consensus mechanism can resist unusual behavior before they behave erratically. This involves analyzing design parameters and translating parameters from a disaster into a simulation to run tests. Overall, this thesis will explore if blockchain is a compatible solution to the difficulties in natural disaster response. This was obtained by conducting a qualitative study and developing a prototype and simulating disaster parameters in the prototype blockchain network. A set of test cases was created. The results show that the resilience differs significantly depending on consensus mechanism. Key parameters include consensus finality, scalability, byzantine tolerance, performance and blockchain type. Blockchain is well suited to handle typical challenges in natural disaster response: it results in faster allocation of medical care and more accurate information collection, as well as in a system which allows seamlessly for the integration of external organizations in the blockchain network.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T19:16:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 4926.pdf: 2459491 bytes, checksum: ae9872c8422d0b91edb6095934c95b77 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-02-07 / Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos / This research presents the topic of Natural Disasters and how it has been treated in Brazil and around the world, especially regarding the preparation stage for this confrontation and response, where there are possibilities for logistics support to better serve society affected for such an event. There is much to logistics is being developed in various sectors, from military to business in which they are applied his concepts and techniques to ensure the best balance between the costs of industrial operations, commercial and transportation and customer satisfaction. Currently, several studies have been developed to suit the limited resources to care for victims of disasters being named Humanitarian Logistics. With regard to disaster response operations, many researchers point out that one of the biggest difficulties for logistics activities is the identification of the necessary information, such as demand and its features, which makes the response time inadequate to meet the needs of affected population. This research proposes a starting point for the solution of this issue through the preparation, organization and provision of appropriate information. We performed a literature review about the topic of Natural Disasters and their particularities imply that their phases of pre-impact, impact and post impact, as well as the typical approach front of them related to the various actors responsible. Were exposed to the key concepts and techniques of logistics, humanitarian logistics and information processing. Various data were collected in the literature in order to get a clearer understanding of logistics activities and information that would be useful to decrease the response time, some of the cases studied. It reached a preliminary classification of the main information needs that impact on demand as well as in preparing to meet the same that led to the adaptation of an information flow that enables the provision of information at the initiation stage of the response to policy decision. The integration and provision of appropriate information to administrators Disaster directs better preparation of necessary logistics to respond to natural disasters by reducing the time for the initial collection of information, making the triggering of the response faster, thus improving the quality of care victims. / A presente pesquisa apresenta o tema dos Desastres Naturais e como ele vem sendo tratado no Brasil e no mundo, especialmente com relação as etapa de preparação para o seu enfrentamento e resposta, onde se encontram possibilidades de suporte da logística para um melhor atendimento da sociedade afetada por um evento dessa natureza. Há muito a logística vem sendo desenvolvida em diversos setores, do militar ao empresarial no qual são aplicados seus conceitos e técnicas a fim de garantir o melhor equilíbrio entre os custos das operações industriais, comerciais e de transporte e a satisfação dos clientes. Atualmente, diversos estudos vêm sendo desenvolvidos a fim de adequar a limitação de recursos ao atendimento das vítimas de Desastres recebendo a denominação de Logística Humanitária. No que concerne às operações de resposta a desastres, muitos pesquisadores apontam que uma das maiores dificuldades encontradas às atividades logísticas é a identificação das informações necessárias, como a demanda e suas características, o que torna o tempo de resposta inadequado ao atendimento das necessidades da população afetada. Esta pesquisa vem propor um ponto de partida para a solução desta questão através da preparação, organização e disponibilização das informações adequadas. Foi realizada a revisão bibliográfica a cerca do tema dos Desastres Naturais e suas particularidades que implicam em suas fases de pré-impacto, impacto e pós impacto, bem como a abordagem típica frente a elas relacionada aos diversos atores responsáveis. Foram expostos os principais conceitos e técnicas da logística, da logística humanitária e do processamento de informações. Diversas informações foram coletadas na literatura, a fim de buscar uma compreensão mais clara das atividades logísticas e das informações que seriam úteis à diminuição do tempo de resposta, de alguns casos estudados. Chegou-se a uma classificação preliminar das principais informações que impactam nas necessidades da demanda bem como na preparação para o atendimento da mesma que levaram a adaptação de um fluxo informacional que possibilita a disponibilização das informações no momento do início da etapa de resposta aos tomadores de decisão. A integração e disponibilização das informações adequadas para os administradores de Desastres direciona uma melhor preparação da logística necessária à resposta aos desastres naturais através da diminuição no tempo para a coleta inicial de informações, tornando o desencadeamento da resposta mais rápido, melhorando assim a qualidade do atendimento as vítimas.

Les travaux présentés s’inscrivent dans le cadre des études menées par la Caisse centrale de réassurance (CCR) pour modéliser les événements catastrophes naturelles et en particulier le péril sécheresse. La sécheresse est le nom utilisé couramment pour désigner les dommages aux bâtiments causés par le phénomène de retrait-gonflement des argiles. Les recherches effectuées sont en lien avec un modèle d’estimation du coût annuel d’un événement sécheresse conçu en interne à CCR. Celui-ci croise des données assurantielles et des données d’humidité du sol pour estimer le coût d’un événement survenu. CCR souhaite faire évoluer ce modèle vers une version probabiliste qui consiste à concevoir un générateur d’événements fictifs, non nécessairement survenus mais possibles d’un point de vue physique. Ce générateur doit permettre notamment d’estimer la distribution de probabilité du coût d’une sécheresse potentielle. Afin de concevoir un générateur d’événements fictifs pour le modèle sécheresse de CCR, nous avons étudié puis mis en oeuvre différents outils mathématiques permettant de modéliser la dépendance de variables aléatoires spatio-temporelles. La méthode choisie consiste à étudier et modéliser séparément la dépendance spatiale et la dépendance temporelle. Pour modéliser la dépendance temporelle, les modèles retenus sont des modèles classiques utilisés pour les séries temporelles. Nous décomposons les séries temporelles des observations en identifiant tendance et saisonnalité puis en ajustant un modèle autorégressif aux résidus. Pour modéliser la dépendance spatiale, notre choix s’est porté sur le krigeage et sur la théorie des copules. Les copules permettent de générer du bruit spatial pour ensuite lui appliquer les modèles de séries temporelles univariées. Le krigeage nous sert à interpoler spatialement les données générées dans le cas où une sélection de sites a été effectuée pour diminuer la dimension spatiale du problème. L’exploitation du générateur, pour laquelle nous donnons quelques résultats, va servir à CCR pour ses politiques de provisionnement et de tarification, et s’intègre également dans l’estimation de la charge deux-centennale liée aux catastrophes naturelles dans le cadre de la directive européenne Solvabilité II. / This work was performed at CCR, a French reinsurance company, within the studies that are conducted to model natural disasters, and particularly the drought hazard. Drought is the word used to denote the shrink-swell clay phenomenon that damages individual houses. These researches are related to an internal model that estimates the annual cost of a drought. This model crosses insurance data and soil moisture data to evaluate the cost of a occured event. CCR wants this model to be improved towards a probabilistic version by conceiving a generator of drought events that have to be realistic, although they are fictive. This generator will allow the estimation of the probability distribution of the drought cost. In order to conceive a fictive event generator for CCR’s drought model, mathematical tools have been used to model dependence between spatio-temporal random variables. The chosen method consists of studying and modeling separately spatial dependence and temporal dependence. Temporal dependence is modelized with time series models such as classical decomposition and autoregressive processes. Spatial dependence is modelized with kriging and copula theory. Spatial random noise is generated with a copula and then time series models are applied to rebuild original process. Kriging is used when generated data need to be interpolated, for example when data are generated only on a subset of the main grid. Results of the generator exploitation are given. They will be used by CCR for provisionning and pricing. These results will also be used for the estimation of the two-hundred-year cost of natural disasters within the new European Solvency II Directive.