143 research outputs found
The Female Work Ethos in Carl Hauptmann’s Late Prose: “Das Kostümgenie and Wer sah je diese arme Marthe?”
No full textDer vorliegende Aufsatz thematisiert das weibliche Arbeitsethos in den letzten Erzählungen Carl Hauptmanns: Das Kostümgenie (1920) und Wer sah je diese arme Marthe? (1920). Mit diesen Texten schreibt sich der Autor in die aktuelle Diskussion über die Frau im Beruf ein und leistet einen wichtigen Beitrag zum Geschlechterdiskurs der Zwischenkriegszeit.This essay addresses the female work ethic in Carl Hauptmann’s last stories: The Costume Genius (1920) and Who ever saw this poor Marthe? (1920). With these texts, the author inscribes himself into the current discussion about women in the labor market and makes an important contribution to the gender discourse of the interwar period
Marthe Engelborghs-Bertels Prize for Sinology
No full textThe prize named “Marthe Engelborghs-Bertels Prize for Sinology” is awarded to the author of a memoir of great scientific value, unpublished or published for less than five years, written in English, French, Dutch or German, on a subject related to the Chinese world in the broader sense of the word, i.e. continental China, Taiwan and Chinese diaspora. The Prize is intended for scientists coming from a European country who know Chinese or a language of the minorities living in China. These scientists should either have completed higher education studies in Belgium or in a member state of the European Union, or be attached to a higher education or research establishment located in a member state of the European Union. The Prize temporarily amounts to 12,500 EUR. It will be awarded every five years and for the first time in 2018
Farmers facing droughts: Capturing adaptation dynamics in disaster risk models
Get PDFDrought disaster risk models have long neglected the potential of people and communities to adapt to the serious hazard posed by droughts. Failing to account for the dynamic nature of individual human adaptive behaviour leads to incomplete risk estimates. Therefore, this thesis explored how to integrate heterogeneous individual adaptive behaviour in drought disaster risk assessments. It acknowledges the unique characteristics of droughts and details how to deal with adaptation decisions and their interaction with drought disaster risk. This thesis proposes a conceptual framework to guide modellers to address the dynamic nature of drought disaster risk in time and space. Applying the framework, multiple data collection activities were conducted to disentangle the complexities of drought adaptive behaviour, and with this, a novel drought disaster risk adaptation model, ADOPT, was developed. It combines a crop-water model with an agent-based decision model and simulates small-scale agricultural adaptation decisions in response to drought disaster risk. ADOPT was used to simulate how smallholder farmers respond to pro- and reactive drought policy interventions and (future) drought events. This research contributes to drought disaster risk science through exploring the potential of explicitly including the adaptation decisions of smallholder farmers in agricultural drought disaster risk assessments. The presented conceptual framework and the ADOPT model are by no means an ultimate and exclusive solution but are mainly intended to demonstrate how drought disaster risk dynamics should be modelled with an interdisciplinary approach. This thesis demonstrates a practical example of how to improve understanding of possible evolutions of drought disaster risk under climate change and risk reduction policies. In addition, it showcases ways to support the heterogeneous smallholder farmers in Kenya’s drylands to adopt effective adaptation measures in order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals ‘no poverty’ and ‘zero hunger’
An Agent-based approach to evaluating sustainable drought adaptation policy
Get PDFDroughts are an increasingly prevalent and costly hazard that impact urban populations, agricultural production, and natural ecosystems. As climate becomes more variable, drought-prone regions are working to adapt through policy measures that address the diverse needs of urban centers, irrigation districts, farmers, governments, and NGOs. Developing policy pathways is a useful way to design such drought policies, however, their development requires an understanding of how human and biophysical systems interact and respond to a variety of climate and policy scenarios. In our research, we link a distributed hydrologic model with an agent based model to simulate the emergent, heterogeneous drought adaptation decisions of different stakeholders. This technique supports the evaluation of long-term water management options such as groundwater pumping restriction, urban use reductions, variable water pricing schemes, and subsidies in the face of increasing climate variability. Further we evaluate the impacts of such policies on food production, economic well-being, and measures of environmental health. To ensure congruence, key variables such as groundwater depth, evapotranspiration rates, and adaptation measures have been validated against historic data. The preliminary findings indicate this technique can provide an effective approach for evaluating and designing drought adaptation policy pathways
Survey report Kitui, Kenya:Expert evaluation of model setup and preparations of future fieldwork
Get PDFSustainability nexus analytics, informatics, and data (AID): Drought
Get PDFDrought occurs globally and can have deleterious effects on built and natural systems and societies. With the increasing human footprint on our planet, so has increased the anthropogenic influence on drought and water scarcity, leading to the development of notions of “anthropogenic drought” and “water bankruptcy”. Understanding the human dimension of drought is complex and requires a data-driven nexus approach to better understand the involved processes and address the implications of water deficits around the world. Just as it transcends scales and geographical boundaries, drought is neither restricted to a single hydrologic state in the water cycle nor are its effects confined to one sector. Drought impacts the water, energy, and food sectors, ecosystem services, socioeconomics, public policy, politics, etc. from local to regional and global scales. We argue that drought mitigation strategies and policy developments must be addressed with a multidisciplinary perspective that benefits from a nexus approach rooted in analytics, informatics, and data (AID). The United Nations University (UNU) Sustainability AID Programme employs such an approach to aid the monitoring, forecasting, and projection of drought, both from climatic and anthropogenic perspectives, and its multifaceted impacts across a variety of sectors and spatiotemporal scales. After a broad overview of this UNU Programme’s vision, and to support stakeholders and decision-makers, we present a drought resource database for drought-related information, data, and analysis tools. Our aim is not to compile an exhaustive list of all available data and tools. Instead, we prioritize mature datasets and AID tools while actively highlighting opportunities to develop new data and tools, fostering nexus research
European Drought Risk Atlas
No full textIn recent years, droughts have had substantial impacts on nearly all regions of the EU, affecting several critical systems such as agriculture, water supply, energy, river transportation, and ecosystems. These impacts are projected to further increase due to climate change. While some of the drivers of drought risk are well known for some systems and regions, drought risks and impacts remain hard to assess and quantify.The European Drought Risk Atlas is a considerable step towards impact-based drought assessment and can support the development and implementation of drought management and adaptation policies and actions. It characterises how drought hazard, exposure and vulnerability interact and affect different but interconnected systems: agriculture, public water supply, energy, river transportation, freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems.The atlas presents both a conceptual and quantitative approach to drought risk for these systems. The conceptual drought risk models (impact chains) are the result of a review of the literature in Europe and consultations with experts to construct visualisations of the most relevant drivers and how they interact to determine risk and impacts. The quantitative estimate of drought risk, based on machine learning techniques, maps drought risk at national and sub-national level in terms of annual average loss and probable maximum losses at specific return periods, both for current climate conditions, and for projections under different levels of global warming (+1.5 °C, +2 °C, +3 °C)
Survey report Kitui, Kenya:Results of a questionaire regardings usbsistence farmers'drought risk and adaptation behaviour
Get PDFDrought resilience demands urgent global actions and cooperation
No full textThe global drought community and policy representatives gathered at the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification’s 16th Conference of the Parties (UNCCD COP16) in Riyadh in December 2024 to discuss the urgent need for improvements in assessing and quantifying drought risks, in developing and implementing transformative solutions, and in boosting policy actions and investments. Only through unprecedented global cooperation can we facilitate pathways towards drought-resilient futures
Simulating dynamic drought adaptation behaviour of agricultural stakeholders using Agent-Based Models
Get PDFIncreasing climate variability and changing socio-economic conditions are expected to exacerbate agricultural drought risk in many parts of the world. Current risk assessments, however, do not elegantly incorporate emergent adaptation strategies and therefore fall short in their representation of vulnerability dynamics. Adopting a socio-hydrological framework allows modelers to simultaneously consider the temporal and spatial extents of meteorological and hydrological factors and dynamic human behavior. In our research, we use spatially-explicit agent-based models to investigate how humans respond to perceived drought risk and ultimately impact the hydrological system, in hopes of deriving a clearer understanding of future agricultural drought risk. Agent-based models offers a promising analytical tool to simulate autonomous, nonlinear, dynamic human decision making within an evolving hydrological or bio-physical model. Our research focuses on the application of three socio-hydrologic agent-based models: (1) in rural Kenya (2) in California’s Central Valley and (3) in northern Italy. These case studies illustrate not only how this strategy can be implemented in unique locations with varying data accessibility, adaptive capacity, and institutional values, but also how explicit inclusion of local behavior results in widely variable adaptive strategies and resulting risk
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