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Chronicles and literary records show that Sri Lanka has been affected by various natural disasters from time to time in the past, as it is now. The sea surge/coastal flooding during King Kelani Tissa's reign, around 190 BC could have been a tsunami. A severe drought and famine known as Beminitiya Seya occurred during the intermittent reign of the Brahmin King Thiya (Tissa) and King Valagamba (89–77 BC). There are also references to droughts prior to this, namely, Akkakayika Seya (it is said that about 24,000 monks died and others left the country, and some of those who remained survived by eating kara leaves). Subsequently, this led King Valagamba to undertake to record the sayings of the Buddha (Tripitaka) for posterity. Duttagamini (161–137 BC), Ekanalika Seya during the reign of King Kunchanaga (187–189 AD) and others, none of which had been as severe as Beminitiya Seya. Apart from these extreme hazard events other incidents have been reported, including the flooding incidents during the British rule (National Disaster Management Plan, 2007).

Sri Lanka, as an island located near the southern tip of India and the Asian Continent and in the core area of the South Asian Monsoon has developed its own unique forms of Hydraulic Civilization. Sri Lanka is covered with a network of thousands of man-made lakes and ponds, known locally as “tanks,” numbering more than 25,000. Some are in the functional mode and others still remaining abandoned type. Many are thousands of years old and almost all show a high degree of sophistication in their construction and design. Sri Lanka's tanks are fascinatingly distributed in the cascades of tanks one below the other conserving water and soil and most effectively, acting as buffers against droughts while giving due consideration to maintaining the ecosystem equilibrium.

Heavily subsidised irrigation systems have been the government’s measure to improve the farmer’s lives. However, evaluation of the performance of these systems was often overlooked. Thus, this study aims to assess the efficiency of irrigation systems in Davao del Sur, Philippines, according to agricultural, social and economic aspects, namely cropping intensity, functionality and production and monthly average income per hectare, respectively. More than half of the national irrigation schemes exhibited outstanding functionality based on organisation, system and operation and maintenance areas, while almost 75% of the communal schemes have exhibited the same. On the other hand, communal systems have higher cropping intensities (wet – 106% and dry – 116%) than those of the national schemes (wet – 89.8% and dry – 89.1%). Results show that communal systems perform better than those managed by Irrigation Administration. The former have been given the full control over their farm areas, where it is expected that members of the association are able to fully articulate in the decision-making and participate in their activities. Although irrigation managers of the said agency have key roles in the capacity building and management of the irrigation systems, performances of such systems largely depended on how well farmers manage the irrigation association.

In this chapter, I propose an integrative framework for theorizing and empiricizing about talent management, based on the notion of “talent philosophies.” I believe that current debates about whether talent management should be inclusive or exclusive create the risk that our field will become fragmented, thereby undermining its social-scientific legitimacy. Nonetheless, this debate is absolutely correct in identifying the tensions between inclusive and exclusive approaches to talent management as a phenomenon. This, however, creates issues for talent management as a construct for scientific inquiry, as we need clear definitions and measures to create a cumulative body of research as a community. I propose that the solution lies in an expansion of our vocabulary as talent management researchers and identify four constructs that can help us structure and categorize our collective work: giftedness, talent, potential, and strength. Each of these constructs map logically onto different talent philosophies and talent management practices. In establishing “unity in diversity,” I believe talent management could finally make the transition into a more mature field of academic inquiry – although clearly phenomenon driven – characterized in equal parts by construct clarity, rigor, and relevance.

Myanmar is located between 9deg. 55min. and 28deg. 15min. north latitude and 92deg. 10min. and 101deg. 10min. east longitude. It is the westernmost country in southeast Asia. Its bordering countries are Bangladesh, India, China, Laos, and Thailand. Over 50% of the eastern coastline of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea constitutes the western border. The country occupies a total land area of 676,577km² and is home to 57.5 million people in 14 states and regions, per 2008 estimate. The general topography of the country is high in the north and the west with north–south-oriented mountain ranges extending from the Himalayas. The eastern side of the country is a wide plateau connected to Yunnan, China. The central area and the more southern parts of the country are relatively low. Rivers run from north to south in most parts of the country. A map of Myanmar's states and regions is shown in Fig. 1.

Of all the natural disasters, drought is the most gradual and the most hard to predict. However, this insidious disaster continually affects the lives and livelihoods of farmers living in drought-affected areas. The northwestern part of Bangladesh is recognized as being more severely affected by drought than the rest of the country, as drought is a recurring event in this area. It has substantial impacts on agriculture and causes great suffering for farmers – in particular, poor and small farmers, who are more vulnerable to drought. Therefore, this study tries to illustrate farmers’ existing coping practices with regard to drought. It also addresses their prioritized adaptation practices, which are based on local context and available resources. This study not only focuses on the implementation of these adaptation practices from the national to the local level, but it also mentions various roles of stakeholders and a definite timeframe for each adaptation practice.

Climate change during the next century is likely to significantly influence forest ecosystems in the western United States, including indirect effects on forest and shrubland fire regimes. Further exacerbation of fire hazards by the warmer, drier summers projected for much of the western U.S. by climate models would compound already elevated fire risks caused by 20th century fire suppression. This has potentially grave consequences for the urban–wildland interface in drier regions, where residential expansion increasingly places people and property in the midst of fire-prone vegetation. Understanding linkages between climate variability and change, therefore, are central to our ability to forecast future risks and adapt land management, allocation of fire management resources, and suburban planning accordingly. To establish these linkages we review previous research and draw inferences from our own retrospective work focused on 20th century climate–fire relationships in the U.S. Pacific Northwest (PNW). We investigated relationships between the two dominant modes of climate variability affecting the PNW, which are Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and historic fire activity at multiple spatial scales. We used historic fire data spanning most of the 20th century for USDA Forest Service Region 6, individual states (Idaho, Oregon, and Washington), and 20 national forests representative of the region's physiographic diversity. Forest fires showed significant correlations with warm/dry phases of PDO at regional and state scales; relationships were variable at the scale of individual national forests. Warm/dry phases of PDO were especially influential in terms of the occurrence of very large fire events throughout the PNW. No direct statistical relationships were found between ENSO and forest fires at regional scales, although relationships may exist at smaller spatial scales. However, both ENSO and PDO were correlated with summer drought, as estimated by the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), and PDSI was correlated with fire activity at all scales. Even moderate (±0.3°C decadal mean) fluctuations in PNW climate over the 20th century have influenced wildfire activity based on our analysis. Similar trends have been reported for other regions of the western U.S. Thus, forest fire activity has been sensitive to past climate variability, even in the face of altered dynamics due to fire suppression, as in the case of our analysis. It is likely that fire activity will increase in response to future temperature increases, at the same or greater magnitude as experienced during past climate variability. If extreme drought conditions become more prevalent we can expect a greater frequency of large, high-intensity forest fires. Increased vulnerability to forest fires may worsen the current fire management problem in the urban–wildland interface. Adaptation of fire management and restoration planning will be essential to address fire hazards in areas of intermingled exurban development and fire-prone vegetation. We recommend: (1) landscape-level strategic planning of fire restoration and containment projects; (2) better use of climatic forecasts, including PDO and ENSO related predictions; and (3) community-based efforts to limit further residential expansion into fire-prone forested and shrubland areas.

A trend in modern supply chain management has been to substitute information for inventory. In this chapter, an approach to how information and communication technology can be used to achieve this in a maritime logistics context is outlined and described based upon a bulk shipping case.

The approach used is based on data-driven modeling and analysis, in which current logistics and commodity storage costs are benchmarked against a “best possible solution.”

To make a new solution operative, a change should be made based upon an analytical decision-making approach, ICT infrastructure development, and inter-organizational development. Thus, the proper use of analytical and transactional information and communication technology in maritime logistics would enable logistics chain stakeholders to track stock levels and ultimately allocate vessels to move cargo when that is logistically most cost effective. Further, this could support a development in the contractual relationships between producer and shipping line changing from a Contract of Affreightment to a Service Level Agreement relationship.

There is room for enhanced use of information and communication technology to provide decision and operational support at strategic, tactical, and operational levels within maritime logistics. This chapter explains some of the driving forces for this, together with a tested approach and method for this, given into a specific, practical case.

Founded by Peter the Great in 1714, the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences (BAN—Biblioteka Akademii Nauk) is the first library of Russia open to the public. At present it is the main scientific library of the Russian Academy of Sciences and due to the size and value of its collections, BAN is among the greatest libraries of the world including the Library of Congress (USA), the Russian State Library and the Russian National Library. Since 1783, it has received depository copies of all published works in the country.