Use Of Vulnerability Research Articles

Local practitioners’ use of vulnerability and resilience concepts in adaptation to flood hazards

Vulnerability and resilience are important ideas that are conceptualized in many different ways by researchers studying disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Four main conceptualizations of vulnerability in the literature include vulnerability as a threshold, as exposure to hazards, as a pre-existing condition, and as an outcome. Three main conceptualizations of resilience are resilience as resistance, as recovery, and as creative transformation. This study investigates how local practitioners in Metro Vancouver municipalities perceive and apply these concepts to reduce risk and adapt to flood hazards. Results from focus groups and surveys of practitioners find that the conceptualizations of vulnerability and resilience perceived as most valuable are often not applied in local risk reduction and adaptation efforts. Participants’ interpretations of how vulnerability and resilience concepts are applied to four main adaptation strategies—protect, accommodate, avoid, and retreat—reveal nuanced and complex challenges at the intersection of where theory meets practice. As currently operationalized, vulnerability and resilience appear unlikely to lead to anything more than incremental adaptation.

Med-CORDEX Initiative for Mediterranean Climate Studies

Abstract The Mediterranean is expected to be one of the most prominent and vulnerable climate change “hotspots” of the twenty-first century, and the physical mechanisms underlying this finding are still not clear. Furthermore, complex interactions and feedbacks involving ocean–atmosphere–land–biogeochemical processes play a prominent role in modulating the climate and environment of the Mediterranean region on a range of spatial and temporal scales. Therefore, it is critical to provide robust climate change information for use in vulnerability–impact–adaptation assessment studies considering the Mediterranean as a fully coupled environmental system. The Mediterranean Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (Med-CORDEX) initiative aims at coordinating the Mediterranean climate modeling community toward the development of fully coupled regional climate simulations, improving all relevant components of the system from atmosphere and ocean dynamics to land surface, hydrology, and biogeochemical processes. The primary goals of Med-CORDEX are to improve understanding of past climate variability and trends and to provide more accurate and reliable future projections, assessing in a quantitative and robust way the added value of using high-resolution and coupled regional climate models. The coordination activities and the scientific outcomes of Med-CORDEX can produce an important framework to foster the development of regional Earth system models in several key regions worldwide.

Mobilising “vulnerability” in the public health response to pandemic influenza

Analysis of public health's growing interest in “vulnerability” has largely focused on health policy, with little interrogation of how vulnerability is being actively appropriated, countered, ignored or reworked by the publics whose health such policy is designed to protect. Once the assemblage of public health is understood as comprised of different forms of expertise and actors, including publics, addressing this gap matters. We examine the use of vulnerability in the specific context of pandemic influenza preparedness. Pandemic preparedness raises some familiar dilemmas for public health governance: how to engage with publics without fuelling social divisions and disruption; and whether to invoke publics as passive recipients of public health advice or to recognise publics as collective agents responding to the threat of pandemic influenza. Thus, we ask how the mobilisation of vulnerability connects with these dilemmas. To examine vulnerability in pandemic preparedness, two forms of qualitative data are analysed: 1) interviews and focus groups with “vulnerable” and “healthy” people (conducted 2011–12) discussing seasonal and pandemic influenza and; 2) international, Australian national and state level pandemic plans (1999–2013). Vulnerability is variously used in plans as a way to identify groups at particular risk of infection because of pre-existing clinical conditions, and as a free-floating social category that could apply to a broad range of people potentially involved in the social disruption a pandemic might entail. Our interview and focus group data indicate that healthy people rework the free-floating extension of vulnerability, and that people designated vulnerable encounter an absence of any collective responsibility for the threat of pandemic influenza. Our analysis suggests that vulnerability's mobilisation in pandemic preparedness limits the connection between public health governance and its publics: here, the openness and unpredictability of people's collective agency is something to be tightly controlled by a government concerned with protecting people from themselves.

Design and Implementation of Automatic Defensive Websites Tamper-Resistant System

Webpages tampering attack has become one of the most serious hazards to network security. Security measures of Website system were limited to install network layer protection devices, thus they could not provide effective monitoring and protection for illegal page tampering attack which making use of vulnerabilities of operating system. In this paper, we analyzed the research development of domestic and international Webpages tamper-resistant technologies, presented Website tamper-resistant technology system architecture of combining the third-generation anti-tampering technology with hardware device. We also established an integrated anti-tampering system that could actively detect attacks and dynamically defend tampering attack for Websites. Test results showed that the system could effectively prevent Webpages to be tampered, and could recovery real time in the event of tampering and alert administrators. It was proved that the deployment of this system would not result in a performance loss of Web server environment.

Vulnérabilité du territoire littoral guyanais aux maladies infectieuses à transmission vectorielle : esquisses de problématiques et perspectives de recherches pluridisciplinaires

Vulnerability is a concept increasingly mobilized for understanding the emergence of situations of risk regardless of their nature (Beck, Glatron, 2009; Bogardi, 2004, D'Ercole, 1991; D'Ercole et al., 1994; Fabiani, Theys 1987; Fabiani, 2010, Leone 2007, Leone, Vinet, 2007, Pierrat, 2011). The use of vulnerability for the knowledge of conditions for the emergence risk of vector-borne diseases (VBD) opens a way for systemic and multidisciplinary analysis of risk that exceeds the knowledge of traditional social criteria such as age, gender, social class or level of income taken into account in epidemiological studies. If since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the anglo-aaxon work on the risks of VBD (Cohen, 2000; Daszack et al., 2000 and 2001; Hong, Lee, 2005; Midley, Thuiller, 2005, Plowright et al., 2008 ) take into account the vulnerability assessment, however the France lags behind the Haut Conseil de la santé publique wishes to catch up (Leport and Guégan, 2011). The study of territorial vulnerability of French Guiana to VBD opens new possibilities of action for the management of health risks.

Towards an Ontological Approach to Information System Security and Safety Requirement Modeling and Reuse

ABSTRACT Misuse cases are currently used to identify safety and security threats and subsequently capture safety and security requirements. There is limited consensus to the precise meaning of the basic terminology used for use/misuse case concepts. This paper delves into the use of ontology for the formal representation of the use-misuse case domain knowledge for eliciting safety and security requirements. We classify misuse cases into different category to reflect different type of misusers. This will allow participants during the requirement engineering stage to have a common understanding of the problem domain. We enhanced the misuse case domain to include abusive misuse case and vulnerable use case in order to boost the elicitation of safety requirements. The proposed ontological approach will allow developer to share and reuse the knowledge represented in the ontology thereby avoiding ambiguity and inconsistency in capturing safety and security requirements. OWL protégé 3.3.1 editor was used for the ontology coding. An illustration of the use of the ontology is given with examples from the health care information system.

A Unified Use-Misuse Case Model for Capturing and Analysing Safety and Security Requirements

This paper proposes an enhanced use-misuse case model that allows both safety and security requirements to be captured during requirements elicitation. The proposed model extends the concept of misuse case by incorporating vulnerable use case and abuse case notations and relations that allows understanding and modeling different attackers and abusers behaviors during early stage of system development life cycle and finishes with a practical consistent combined model for engineering safety and security requirements.The model was successfully applied using health care information system gathered through the university of Kansas HISPC project. The authors were able to capture both security and safety requirements necessary for effective functioning of the system. In order to enhance the integration of the proposed model into risk analysis, the authors give both textual and detailed description of the model. The authors compare the proposed approach with other existing methods that identify and analyze safety and security requirements and discovered that it captures more security and safety threats.

Linking vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience science to practice: Pathways, players, and partnerships

Vulnerability, adaptation and resilience are concepts that are finding increasing currency in several fields of research as well as in various policy and practitioner communities engaged in global environmental change science, climate change, sustainability science, disaster risk-reduction and famine interventions. As scientists and practitioners increasingly work together in this arena a number of questions are emerging: What is credible, salient and legitimate knowledge, how is this knowledge generated and how is it used in decision making? Drawing on important science in this field, and including a case study from southern Africa, we suggest an alternative mode of interaction to the usual one-way interaction between science and practice often used. In this alternative approach, different experts, risk-bearers, and local communities are involved and knowledge and practice is contested, co-produced and reflected upon. Despite some successes in the use and negotiation of such knowledge for ‘real’ world issues, a number of problems persist that require further investigation including the difficulties of developing consensus on the methodologies used by a range of stakeholders usually across a wide region (as the case study of southern Africa shows, particularly in determining and identifying vulnerable groups, sectors, and systems); slow delivery of products that could enhance resilience to change that reflects not only a lack of data, and need for scientific credibility, but also the time-consuming process of coming to a negotiated understanding in science–practice interactions and, finally, the need to clarify the role of ‘external’ agencies, stakeholders, and scientists at the outset of the dialogue process and subsequent interactions. Such factors, we argue, all hinder the use of vulnerability and resilience ‘knowledge’ that is being generated and will require much more detailed investigation by both producers and users of such knowledge.

The role of women's substance use in vulnerability to forcible and incapacitated rape.

Although women's substance use is believed to contribute to rape vulnerability, few studies have examined, separately from forcible rape, rape that occurs due to incapacitation. The current study examines the prevalence of completed forcible and incapacitated rape in a representative community sample of young women, identifies the predictors of these two forms of rape and compares characteristics of forcible and incapacitated rape incidents. Women, ages 18-30 (N = 1,014), were recruited from households in the Buffalo, NY, area, by means of random-digit-dialing. They completed computer-assisted measures, including the Sexual Experiences Survey and a face-to-face interview regarding sexual assault experiences occurring since age 14. Lifetime prevalence of incapacitated rape was nearly identical to prevalence of forcible rape, with about 1 in 10 women reporting each type of rape since age 14. In multivariate analysis, age and childhood sexual abuse predicted forcible but not incapacitated rape, whereas adolescent alcohol and drug use predicted incapacitated but not forcible rape. Incapacitated rape incidents differed from forcible rape incidents on several contextual variables, including relationship to perpetrator, activities preceding the assault and victim injury. Findings suggest that forcible rape and incapacitated rape may be different forms of sexual assault, with different distal and proximal correlates. Distinguishing these two forms may facilitate understanding of the role of women's alcohol and drug use in sexual assault.