Showing papers by "Luke Parry published in 2018"

Social vulnerability to climatic shocks is shaped by urban accessibility

Abstract: Despite growing interest in urban vulnerability to climatic change, there is no systematic understanding of why some urban centers have greater social vulnerability than others. In this article, we ask whether the social vulnerability of Amazonian cities to floods and droughts is linked to differences in their spatial accessibility. To assess the accessibility of 310 urban centers, we developed a travel network and derived measures of connectivity and geographical remoteness. We found that 914,654 people live in roadless urban centers (n = 68) located up to 2,820 km from their state capital. We then tested whether accessibility measures explained interurban differences in quantitative measures of social sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and an overlooked risk area, food system sensitivity. Accessibility explained marked variation in indicators of each of these dimensions and, hence, for the first time, we show an underlying spatial basis for social vulnerability. For instance, floods pose a greater disease ...

Amazonian peasant livelihood differentiation as mutuality-market dialectics

Abstract: Economistic approaches to the study of peasant livelihoods have considerable academic and policy influence, yet, we argue, perpetuate a partial misunderstanding – often reducing peasant livelihood to the management of capital assets by rational actors. In this paper, we propose to revitalize the original heterodox spirit of the sustainable livelihoods framework by drawing on Stephen Gudeman’s work on the dialectic between use values and mutuality on the one hand, and exchange values and the market on the other. We use this approach to examine how historically divergent mutuality-market dialectics in different Amazonian regions have shaped greater prominence of either extractivism or agriculture in current livelihoods. We conclude that an approach centered on the mutuality-market dialectic is of considerable utility in revealing the role of economic histories in shaping differential peasant livelihoods in tropical forests. More generally, it has considerable potential to contribute to a much needed re-pluralization of approaches to livelihood in academia and policy.

Spatial Item Factor Analysis With Application to Mapping Food Insecurity

Abstract: Item factor analysis is widely used for studying the relationship between a latent construct and a set of observed variables. One of the main assumptions of this method is that the latent construct or factor is independent between subjects, which might not be adequate in certain contexts. In the study of food insecurity, for example, this is likely not true due to a close relationship with socio-economic characteristics, that are spatially structured. In order to capture these effects, we propose an extension of item factor analysis to the spatial domain that is able to predict the latent factors at unobserved spatial locations. We develop a Bayesian sampling scheme for providing inference and illustrate the explanatory strength of our model by application to a study of the latent construct `food insecurity' in a remote urban centre in the Brazilian Amazon. We use our method to map the dimensions of food insecurity in this area and identify the most severely affected areas. Our methods are implemented in an R package, spifa, available from Github.