The authors propose a new climatic drought index: the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI). The SPEI is based on precipitation and temperature data, and it has the advantage of combining multiscalar character with the capacity to include the effects of temperature variability on drought assessment. The procedure to calculate the index is detailed and involves a climatic water balance, the accumulation of deficit/surplus at different time scales, and adjustment to a log-logistic probability distribution. Mathematically, the SPEI is similar to the standardized precipitation index (SPI), but it includes the role of temperature. Because the SPEI is based on a water balance, it can be compared to the self-calibrated Palmer drought severity index (sc-PDSI). Time series of the three indices were compared for a set of observatories with different climate characteristics, located in different parts of the world. Under global warming conditions, only the sc-PDSI and SPEI identified an...

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A Multiscalar Drought Index Sensitive to Global Warming: The Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index

Two studies investigated the tendency of people to be unrealistically optimistic about future life events. In Study 1, 258 college students estimated how much their own chances of experiencing 42 events differed from the chances of their classmates. Overall, they rated their own chances to be above average for positive events and below average for negative events, ps<.001. Cognitive and motivational considerations led to predictions that degree of desirability, perceived probability, personal experience, perceived controllability, and stereotype salience would influence the amount of optimistic bias evoked by different events. All predictions were supported, although the pattern of effects differed for positive and negative events. Study 2 tested the idea that people are unrealistically optimistic because they focus on factors that improve their own chances of achieving desirable outcomes and fail to realize that others may have just as many factors in their favor. Students listed the factors that they thought influenced their own chances of experiencing eight future events. When such lists were read by a second group of students, the amount of unrealistic optimism shown by this second group for the same eight events decreased significantly, although it was not eliminated.

http://psych415.class.uic.edu/Readings/Weinstein,%20Unrealistic%20optimism,%20JPSP,%201980.pdf

Unrealistic optimism about future life events

This paper reviews the concept of adaptation of human communities to global changes, especially climate change, in the context of adaptive capacity and vulnerability. It focuses on scholarship that contributes to practical implementation of adaptations at the community scale. In numerous social science fields, adaptations are considered as responses to risks associated with the interaction of environmental hazards and human vulnerability or adaptive capacity. In the climate change field, adaptation analyses have been undertaken for several distinct purposes. Impact assessments assume adaptations to estimate damages to longer term climate scenarios with and without adjustments. Evaluations of specified adaptation options aim to identify preferred measures. Vulnerability indices seek to provide relative vulnerability scores for countries, regions or communities. The main purpose of participatory vulnerability assessments is to identify adaptation strategies that are feasible and practical in communities. The distinctive features of adaptation analyses with this purpose are outlined, and common elements of this approach are described. Practical adaptation initiatives tend to focus on risks that are already problematic, climate is considered together with other environmental and social stresses, and adaptations are mostly integrated or mainstreamed into other resource management, disaster preparedness and sustainable development programs. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Adaptation, adaptive capacity and vulnerability

Global environmental change and sustainability science increasingly recognize the need to address the consequences of changes taking place in the structure and function of the biosphere. These changes raise questions such as: Who and what are vulnerable to the multiple environmental changes underway, and where? Research demonstrates that vulnerability is registered not by exposure to hazards (perturbations and stresses) alone but also resides in the sensitivity and resilience of the system experiencing such hazards. This recognition requires revisions and enlargements in the basic design of vulnerability assessments, including the capacity to treat coupled human–environment systems and those linkages within and without the systems that affect their vulnerability. A vulnerability framework for the assessment of coupled human–environment systems is presented.

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A framework for vulnerability analysis in sustainability science

There is considerable research interest on the meaning and measurement of resilience from a variety of research perspectives including those from the hazards/disasters and global change communities. The identification of standards and metrics for measuring disaster resilience is one of the challenges faced by local, state, and federal agencies, especially in the United States. This paper provides a new framework, the disaster resilience of place (DROP) model, designed to improve comparative assessments of disaster resilience at the local or community level. A candidate set of variables for implementing the model are also presented as a first step towards its implementation.

A place-based model for understanding community resilience to natural disasters

The Environment as Hazard offers an understanding of how people around the world deal with dramatic fluctuations in the local natural systems of air, water, and terrain. Reviewing recent theoretical and methodological changes in the investigation of natural hazards, the authors describe how research findings are being incorporated into public policy, particularly research on slow cumulative events, technological hazards, the role played by social systems, and the relation of hazards theory to risk analysis. Through vivid examples from a broad sample of countries, this volume illuminates the range of experiences associated with natural hazards. The authors show how modes of coping change with levels of economic development by contrasting hazards in developing countries with those in high income countries - comparing the results of hurricanes in Bangladesh and the United States, and earthquakes in Nicaragua and California. In new introductory and concluding chapters that supplement the original text, the authors present new global data sets, as well as a trenchant discussion of implications of hazards research for the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction and for attempts by the world community to come to grips with the threats of climate change.

The environment as hazard

Natural hazards, local, national, global

This book was written with the objectives of (1) providing a more nearly balanced and comprehensive basis for judging the social utility of allocating funds and personnel for various types of research of geophysical hazards, and (2) stimulating, in the process of that analysis, a more systematic appraisal of research needs by scientific investigators in cooperation with the users of their findings. Chapter contains a summary of the authors' findings. Two main facts are pointed out: (1) the all-important social, economic and political "people" factors involved in hazards reduction have been largely ignored; and (2) right now, only a small proportion of all hazard-related research findings ever reach the general public. The summary of findings is then presented under the following headings: current status of natural hazards research in the United Statews; how research can improve our current situation; recommended research efforts; research needs common to most natural hazards; and research opportunities for specific hazards. Specific details about how the recommendations which are pointed out in chapter 1 were arrived at, and how they can be expected to curb sharply national losses caused by natural hazards are found in the succeeding chapters.

Assessment of research on natural hazards

7. Total Social Costs ... THE INTERRELATION OF HEALTH AND IMPROVEMENTS The epidemiological basis for the prevention of infections related to water by improving supplies may be summarized in the following way. The general model is illustrated in figure 7.1. Under conditions of appalling water supply the amount of illness is A. Increasing the volume supplied will decrease the morbidity until a point is reached where no matter how much more water is supplied the situation will remain static with V units of disease. On the other hand, improving water quality alone will reduce the disease amount to level P. Improving all aspects of water supply will, at optimal purity and volume, reduce the disease level to M. This residual amount will be unaffected by changes in water supply. The values of A, M, P, and V will depend on the physical and social environment and on the disease being considered. An aggregate model for all disease in a particular area will have a particular form depending on the environment. A similar model for improvement costs may be constructed (fig. 7.2), and the two may be compared. Quantitative data for such disease models are unavailable, but qualitatively the position is as follows. [FIGURE 7 OMITTED] The waterborne diseases in the strict sense are due to polluted supplies. The classical waterborne diseases have a low infecting close of organisms and may produce dramatic epidemics following relatively light pollution of a large common source. They reach their greatest importance in urban areas where the number of households per source is highest and for their prevention require completely pure supplies. The nonclassical waterborne infections are those requiring a larger infecting dose of microbes and are usually commoner diseases than the preceding ones, though often not waterborne in more developed countries. They are transmitted under conditions of heavy pollution even when sources do not supply large groups of households, and they may produce sporadic disease. We know little about their extent but suspect that they are most important in urban areas with very heavy pollution of unimproved sources. They are prevented by moderate protection of sources short of absolute sterility. The water-washed diseases are of two types. The bulk of such diseases as seen in the outpatient clinic are superficial infections of the skin and eyes. These reach their peak in dry areas with both a scarcity of water for washing and a dusty environment, though a generally unsanitary habitat makes matters worse. These are clearly of the water-washed category and the prime need in most rural areas is for a more accessible supply of greater volume. Purity is a secondary consideration and should not delay attempts to increase the quantities available. The diarrheal diseases also seem to diminish when water supplies are made more accessible. Their precise etiology is still far from clear and other factors are important, so that there are variations in prevalence between areas with comparable water supplies. A hot, dry climate and an unsanitary environment are both associated with much diarrhea, which is therefore common both in crowded urban and arid rural areas. Where the population density rises, whether in towns or in some densely inhabited rural areas, purity becomes of greater relative importance, not only because more people use each common source but also because dense rural settlement tends to be in high-rainfall areas. On the basis of evidence presented elsewhere, gastroenteric disorders appear to have both water-washed and waterborne components and reach their peak in overcrowded periurban zones where, fortunately, most can be done about them, though so far municipal authorities have paid more attention to purity than to availability of improved supplies. The diarrheal diseases and typhoid cause hospital admissions and death far more often than the superficial water-washed infections; they affect treatment costs more and also provide the bulk of lost work time and the economic losses from premature death. …

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Gilbert F. White

Papers

The environment as hazard

Natural hazards, local, national, global

Assessment of research on natural hazards

Drawers of water;: Domestic water use in East Africa

Decision processes, rationality and adjustment to natural hazards