Synthetic Aperture Radar Technology for Policies Contributing to Natural Disaster Mitigation and Food Security Issues in Indonesia

Food security and hunger are age-old problems that endure today. More than 820 million people are chronically undernourished because they are unable to obtain sufficient food by any means. Chronic malnutrition results from a continuously inadequate diet, reducing physical capacity, lowering productivity, stunting growth, and inhibiting learning. Over time, chronic malnutrition kills, blinds, and debilitates. Yet, enough food is produced worldwide to provide adequate food for all. The current global population of some 6 billion people have 15 percent more food available per capita than had the world's 3 billion people some four decades ago. After fifty years of substantial economic growth, steady progress in agricultural productivity, remarkable increases in per capita food availability, and numerous international and national efforts to address hunger, food security remains a formidable global problem. Food security implies an individual has access at all times to enough food for an active and healthy life. Food security has numerous interrelated dimensions. Availability of food and access to food are the two most common defining characteristics of food security. Availability and access to food are affected by population growth, demographic trends, economic development, government policies, income levels, health, nutrition, gender, environmental degradation, natural disasters, refugees, migration disease, and concentrated resource ownership. Nations increasingly understand that many of these problems cannot be resolved by one country or group; they transcend national borders, spreading starvation, instability and environmental degradation throughout the region and around the world. During the early 1990s, food security issues pushed their way back onto a crowded international agenda. Not since the "world food crisis" of the early 1970s had the international community focused so much attention on the seemingly never ending race between food production and population growth. Record-low levels of global food reserves in the mid 1990s, weather-related crop failures, financial and economic crisis, policy-induced declines in food production, and doubts about the long-term sustainability of the Earth's resource base to meet future global demands focused increasing attention on food security. In addition, many of yesterday's issues are back on today's agenda because of renewed concerns over declining growth rates for cereal yields, falling investment levels in agricultural research, and the persistence of large numbers of malnourished people throughout the developing world. Moreover, economic liberalisation, privatisation efforts, government spending reductions and the globilisation of investment and manufacturing began raising new concerns about agriculture's ability to compete for resources. Stabilisation policies, structural adjustment programmes and transitions from socialist to market-oriented economies influence sectoral and regional growth patterns, modify incentive structures, shift relative factor prices and reshape economic and social institutions. These far reaching national-level reforms in economic, financial and political systems alter agriculture's capacity to attract or retain land, water, labour and investment. Regional and multilateral trade agreements as well as international conventions on biological diversity, forestry, wetlands, fisheries and climate change have important implications for food production, consumption and trade, further complicating food security policy choices. Because food security is fundamental to national security and economic growth, agriculture gradually began to play a more dominant role in the policy debates about how to restructure domestic economies, reorganise public sector activities, and expand regional and global trade and environmental agreements. This chapter reviews food security issues in developing countries. The following section explores the evolving nature, characteristics and conceptual issues associated with food security, focusing on the various policy approaches used to address hunger and how those policies have changed over time. Section III discusses how food security is measured, providing and overview of regional experiences. Section IV examines the relationship between food security, economic development and poverty. Section V assesses the topical issue of environmental sustainability. Section VI attempts to explain why the too often ignored relationship between gender and food security is so crucial to a successful reduction in food insecurity. The final section provides some concluding remarks.

Wetlands play an important role in bio-geochemical cycling, flood control and recharging of aquifers. They serve as a major source and net sink of carbon and a potential site for aquaculture and the breeding of waterfowls. The wetlands of Sundarban and its adjoining areas support a variety of flora and fauna and they are currently being used for fish culture. Precise information of their nature, extent and spatial distribution is a pre-requisite for their optimal utilization. Being a coastal region, the cloud-free optical remote sensing data for the area is not very often available. Synthetic aperture radar, which has the ability to penetrate cloud, permits regular and repetitive observation of the wetlands. A study was made to evaluate the potential of the ERS-1 SAR data for delineating wetlands in part of the Sundarban delta and its adjoining areas of West Bengal. ERS-1 SAR data was analysed/interpreted in conjunction with optical data, i.e., Indian Remote Sensing Satellite (IRS-1B) data, acquired simultaneously or very close to the SAR data collection, collateral information and satellite overpass-synchronous ground truth. After filtering digital SAR data for removing speckles, wetlands were mapped through density slicing and using a parallelopiped algorithm. An effort was also made to correlate DN values of SAR data with various natural and cultural features of the terrain. The synergistic information contained in the SAR data was evaluated by digitally merging SAR data with the concurrent or near real-time IRS-1B LISS data. The false colour composite, thus prepared, was found to have an edge over either of the data sets in terms of the delineation of wetlands. The cloud penetration capability was also demonstrated through a data set comprising SAR and IRS-1B LISS-II data that were acquired on the same day virtually at the same time. Monitoring of wetlands using temporal SAR and optical data is being attempted.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has emerged as a pivotal technology in geosciences, offering unparalleled insights into Earth's surface. Indeed, its ability to provide high‐resolution, all‐weather, and day‐night imaging has revolutionized our understanding of various geophysical processes. Recent advancements in SAR technology, that is, developing new satellite missions, enhancing signal processing techniques, and integrating machine learning algorithms, have significantly broadened the scope and depth of geosciences. Therefore, it is essential to summarize SAR's comprehensive applications for geosciences, especially emphasizing recent advancements in SAR technologies and applications. Moreover, current SAR‐related review papers have primarily focused on SAR technology or SAR imaging and data processing techniques. Hence, a review that integrates SAR technology with geophysical features is needed to highlight the significance of SAR in addressing challenges in geosciences, as well as to explore SAR's potential in solving complex geoscience problems. Spurred by these requirements, this review comprehensively and in‐depth reviews SAR applications for geosciences, broadly including various aspects in air‐sea dynamics, oceanography, geography, disaster and hazard monitoring, climate change, and geosciences data fusion. For each applied field, the scientific advancements produced because of SAR are demonstrated by combining the SAR techniques with characteristics of geophysical phenomena and processes. Further outlooks are also explored, such as integrating SAR data with other geophysical data and conducting interdisciplinary research to offer comprehensive insights into geosciences. With the support of deep learning, this synergy will enhance the capability to model, simulate, and forecast geophysical phenomena with greater accuracy and reliability.

Food Security Under The Era Of Climate Change Threat

The Indonesian construction industry is one of the main sectors to support the economic growth in the country. According to a report published by the World Economic Forum, the construction industry currently accounts for about 6% of the world’s GDP. It is expected to reach around 14.7% by 2030. However, on the other hand, the image experienced by the construction sector is dominated by something low-tech, still relying on craft-based methods, characterized by poor performance and low quality. Therefore, it is essential that to better support the nation’s development, it is necessary for the Indonesian construction industry to invest more in the adoption, development, and application of technology. Material technology plays an essential role in construction projects. Based on a survey conducted to 40 Indonesian contractors, it was found that the priority of using concrete and steel materials ranked at the top during normal conditions and the covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, data about the history of development, utilization, and potential of construction technology, especially concrete and steel materials in Indonesia, is almost non-existent. This study aims to present the technological landscape of concrete and steel construction material, providing an overall view of the historical development of the utilization, contribution, and strategy for developing future construction material technology in Indonesia. In contrast, the information data is considered essential to help formulate policies regarding developing and utilizing construction technology in Indonesia. Therefore, this study will map the landscape of technology material in Indonesia. The methodology to be used is literature studies, interviews, and questionnaires.

In the context of the Russіa’s war agaіnst Ukraіne, the issue of food security has become quite acute not only for Ukraine, but for the whole world. The Russian Federation is a terrorist state carrying out food terrorism with the aim of destroying the world (global) food security system and thus influencing the entire free world. The actions and war crimes of the Russian Federation during the war in Ukraine negatively affected the world economy, global food security, as well as the budgets of individual countries that were largely dependent on Ukrainian export of agricultural products. Considering the above, the purpose of the article is to study trends and issues (some aspects) of food security of Ukraine in the war conditions. Based on an analytical review and analysis, it was noted that more than 400 million people in the world depend on grain supplies from Ukraine, and the total amount of losses to the Ukrainian agricultural industry as a result of the Russіa’s war agaіnst Ukraіne, as of June 14, 2022, is already amounted to $4.29 billion. It is also stated that it is impossible even in the next 3-5 years to find alternative suppliers in the world (among the countries) and replace such volumes of agricultural products from Ukraine. In the context of this, is presented a plan of measures to ensure food security in the conditions of martial law, approved by the order of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine No. 327-p dated April 29, 2022. It has been established that in order to protect and support Ukrainian agricultural production and ensure the sustainability of Ukraine's food security in a war (martial law), as well as to minimize any manifestations of the global food crisis, it is necessary to use all the tools and opportunities for Ukraine to influence global food policy, based on experience and real achievements of the leading positions in the global agricultural economy received by Ukraine, as well as to intensify and strengthen cooperation with partner countries, international and intergovernmental organizations, in particular with the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), on the transformation of food systems. The conclusion formulated that the Russian Federation is both a terrorist state and a state sponsor of terrorism.

The study conducted a content analysis of four selected Nigerian daily newspapers namely; Daily Trust, Leadership, the Nation and Vanguard Newspapers in order to assess the coverage of food security and climate change issues/stories by these newspapers. The study covered a period of three years (2020, 2021 and 2022). The objectives of the study were to determine the volume of coverage of food security and climate change issues by the selected Nigerian newspapers, compare the total coverage of food security and climate change issues amongst them. The four selected newspapers were purposively chosen based on popularity in four regions, a total of 4380 issues of the 4 newspapers were obtained. Descriptive statistics was used to describe the coverage while Paired t-test was used to compare differences between the total coverage of climate change and food security issues by each newspaper. The findings of the research revealed that coverage of food security and climate change information by selected newspapers in the study area is generally low with 1,247 (31%) articles and 611 articles (15%) respectively. Leadership newspaper had the highest number of coverages with 187 issues/stories on climate change while Daily Trust had the highest coverage of food security issues/stories with 365. It was therefore recommended that the newspaper publishers should increase innovative coverage and passing of food security and climate change issues including engaging Journalist in climate summits, workshops and conferences.

Since last few years, ISRO has embarked upon the development of two complex Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) missions, viz. Spaceborne Radar Imaging Satellite (RISAT) and Airborne SAR for Disaster Mangement (DMSAR), as a capacity building measure under country's Disaster Management Support (DMS) Program, for estimating the extent of damage over large areas (~75 Km) and also assess the effectiveness of the relief measures undertaken during natural disasters such as cyclones, epidemics, earthquakes, floods and landslides, forest fires, crop diseases etc. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has an unique role to play in mapping and monitoring of large areas affected by natural disasters especially floods, owing to its unique capability to see through clouds as well as all-weather imaging capability. The generation of SAR images with quick turn around time is very essential to meet the above DMS objectives. Thus the development of SAR Processors, for these two SAR systems poses considerable challenges and design efforts. Considering the growing user demand and inevitable necessity for a full-fledged high throughput processor, to process SAR data and generate image in real or near-real time, the design and development of a generic SAR Processor has been taken up and evolved, which will meet the SAR processing requirements for both Airborne and Spaceborne SAR systems. This hardware SAR processor is being built, to the extent possible, using only Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) DSP and other hardware plug-in modules on a Compact PCI (cPCI) platform. Thus, the major thrust has been on working out Multi-processor Digital Signal Processor (DSP) architecture and algorithm development and optimization rather than hardware design and fabrication. For DMSAR, this generic SAR Processor operates as a Quick Look SAR Processor (QLP) on-board the aircraft to produce real time full swath DMSAR images and as a ground based Near-Real Time high precision full swath Processor (NRTP). It will generate full-swath (6 to 75 Kms) DMSAR images in 1m / 3m / 5m / 10m / 30m resolution SAR operating modes. For RISAT mission, this generic Quick Look SAR Processor will be mainly used for browse product generation at NRSA-Shadnagar (SAN) ground receive station. RISAT QLP/NRTP is also proposed to provide an alternative emergency SAR product generation chain. For this, the S/C aux data appended in Onboard SAR Frame Format (x, y, z, x', y', z', roll, pitch, yaw) and predicted orbit from previous days Orbit Determination data will be used. The QLP / NRTP will produce ground range images in real / near real time. For emergency data product generation, additional Off-line tasks like geo-tagging, masking, QC etc needs to be performed on the processed image. The QLP / NRTP would generate geo-tagged images from the annotation data available from the SAR P/L data itself. Since the orbit & attitude information are taken as it is, the location accuracy will be poorer compared to the product generated using ADIF, where smoothened attitude and orbit are made available. Additional tasks like masking, output formatting and Quality checking of the data product will be carried out at Balanagar, NRSA after the image annotated data from QLP / NRTP is sent to Balanagar. The necessary interfaces to the QLP/NRTP for Emergency product generation are also being worked out. As is widely acknowledged, QLP/NRTP for RISAT and DMSAR is an ambitious effort and the technology of future. It is expected that by the middle of next decade, the next generation SAR missions worldwide will have onboard SAR Processors of varying capabilities and generate SAR Data products and Information products onboard instead of SAR raw data. Thus, it is also envisaged that these activities related to QLP/NRTP implementation for RISAT ground segment and DMSAR will be a significant step which will directly feed into the development of onboard real time processing systems for ISRO's future space borne SAR missions. This paper describes the design requirements, configuration details and salient features, apart from highlighting the utility of these Quick Look SAR processors for RISAT and DMSAR, for generation of emergency products for Disaster management.

We exploit along-track offset estimation techniques applied to Optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data to constrain the co-seismic slip induced by the M w 7.5 earthquake occurred on September, 2018 in Sulawesi island, Indonesia. Such seismic event nucleated along the left-lateral NNW-SSE trending Palu-Koro strike-slip fault and strongly affected Palu Bay causing several effects such as tsunamis and soil liquefactions. Preliminary results show a deformation of more 1.5m along an approximately NS direction both on Optical and SAR data. Moreover, both techniques clearly highlight the surface rupture induced by the earthquake. Further analysis will be focused on accurate comparison and validation of the retrieved results.

Background: Nigeria is abundant in numerous agro-ecological resources, which should make it a major exporter of food items in the world. Regrettably, it has become a major food importer as a result of food scarcity. The state of food production in the country is worsened by the phenomena of climate change and global warming. These developments have deleterious effects on agricultural activities in general and food production in particular. While there are policies and agencies in the country to combat these developments, it appears they have proved ineffective in the face of increasing inconsistency in government policies, climate change and global warming. The effect of all these phenomena on human development cannot be overemphasised. A nation that cannot feed its population cannot promote development.Aim: It is against this background that this article, within the framework of dependency theory, examines the issues of climate change, food security and sustainable human development in Nigeria.Setting: This research is descriptive in nature in the sense that it provides a detailed account of policies on climate change and food production in Nigeria. It is also exploratory because over 29 research studies were consulted and analysed in order to establish the relationship between climate change, food security and sustainable human development in Nigeria.Methods: This article utilises qualitative, descriptive research methods. This article, which is theoretical in nature, drew its arguments on both primary and secondary data, which included textbooks, journal publications and internet sources.Results: This article argues that unless concrete efforts are made to mitigate the effects of climate change and ensure increased food production, the country may experience worse cases of food crisis and human underdevelopment.Conclusion: Consequently, the article recommends, among others, environmental impact assessments before, during and after industrial production activities.

Food Security in <scp>COVID</scp>‐19: Insights from Indigenous Fijian Communities

Climate change in the global perspective has increased the occurrence of natural disasters, which subsequently decreased agricultural production and intensified the issue of food security. Developing countries, such as Pakistan, are facing severe food security issues, where most of the population still experiences poverty and hunger in their daily lives. Flood disasters ruin valuable land, cause agricultural production losses, and interrupt livelihood routines as expected household livelihood becomes more vulnerable. This research work focused on investigating the flood hazards vulnerability and risk of food security in the Bait community flood-prone areas of Punjab, Pakistan, with a broader aspect in contrast to previous research work. A constructed food security index composed of several IPCC and FAO factors with correlated dimensions of food security was used for the empirical estimation in this study. A composite food security index was developed through polychoric principal component analysis. To estimate the influence on the overall food security condition in the study area, a food security index was regressed on various independent variables. Estimates of the study indicated that three-fourths of household respondents in the study area are confronted with the issue of food security with changeable scale. Financing schemes, physical assets, and family type illustrated the positive influence on respondents' food security level, whereas respondents suffering property losses owing to floods had a negative influence. The study findings suggested integrated strategies must be adopted to effectively deal with issues of food security in the scenario of increasing severity of flood disasters. Policymakers and disaster-concerned institutions need to develop disaster risk mitigation strategies by constructing new water reserves and clearing river encroachments to deal with flood disasters. Agricultural research and development authorities need to provide climate friendly seed varieties and promote particular food crops for flood prone areas to ensure food security and reduce livelihood vulnerability, specifically for the flood-prone communities.

High resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data have important research significance and application prospects in crop fine classification. In order to make full use of high resolution SAR data, this paper introduced the deep learning semantics segmentation methods, which have already achieved tremendous success in the field of computer vision, into the corn fine classification using SAR images. Therefore, a corn fine classification method, based on U-Net network for high resolution SAR data, was proposed in this paper. Experiments were carried out using one scene high resolution GF-3 SAR data covering Fuyu City, Jilin Province, China. The experimental result shows that the proposed crop fine classification method based on deep learning semantics segmentation method can achieve a satisfactory classification result.

Food insecurity is a global issue, with higher prevalence of hunger in developing countries. Low crop yield and food production - due to difficult topography and traditional farming methods - combined with lower income; fluctuations in prices and supply, and low quality of food have been causing food insecurity in Nepal. This research examines food (in)security situation in Upper-Mustang, Nepal. The results are derived from the data collected through face–to-face interviews with the heads of 66 households, in-depth interviews conducted with 22 key informants, and discussions with the group of local people in different (6) places. The household food system was studied from livelihood perspectives and food (in)security was assessed in relation to self-sufficiency or production sufficiency, access, utilization, and stability of food. Households in the Trans-Himalaya acquire food from multiple sources such as farming and livestock ranching, buy food from the market, and also receive food aid for the sake of survival during the food crisis. Food security situation in terms of self-production in Upper-Mustang is at worst stage that many households are facing severe to chronic food insecurity. Studied households access marketed food, though the price they pay is very high. The worrisome issue is that there is no significant improvement in food security situation over time in the Trans-Himalaya. Study found that not the household size but dependency ratio in the household increases food insecurity. On the other hand, quality of farmland in terms of cropping intensity and availability of irrigation rather than the farm-plot size contribute for food security. The issue of food security is still a valid development policy goal for Nepal in general and for the Trans-Himalaya in particular. Accordingly, food security interventions are important. Yet, policy for interventions should look into all components of food systems, particularly providing irrigation, promoting local food varieties, and provisioning for food subsidies and food aid together with subsidies in food transport.

The growth of the Indonesian population has led to an increase in the demand for rice, which the country has yet to satisfy. Indonesia needs a comprehensive strategy that integrates meaningful efforts to increase its agricultural production. This study aims to review the examined trends in rice yield in Indonesia for 70 years after Indonesia’s independence (1945–2016) followed by the identification of the application technology and factors that contribute to increasing rice yields to forecast sustainable food security scenarios up to 2030. This article reviews the results of research on rice production technology in Indonesia from 1945 to 2016, and the outlook for 2030. This paper examines the main points of the Indonesian transformation of rice technology: improvement of rice varieties, integrated crop management, innovations in agricultural machinery, and the Integrated Cropping Calendar Information System (ICCIS). We found that transformation has helped Indonesia increased its rice yields from 3 t ha−1 prior to 1961 to 4.6 t ha−1 in 1985, stagnated in 1990, and increased again in 2017 to 5.46 t ha−1. The increase in yield was sustained by an increase in the harvested area owing to cropping index (CI) innovation. Food security and sustainable development remain the primary goals of Indonesia’s agricultural sector. The application of appropriate technologies and institutional innovations can assist Indonesia in achieving its food security. Therefore, the transformation of technological innovations will continue to be an essential driver of future agricultural growth, including greater use of crop varieties, machinery, and land/institutional reforms.