Search results

Enhancing the resilience of cities and strengthening risk-informed decision-making are defined as key within the Global Agenda 2030. Implementing risk-informed decision-making also requires the consideration of scenarios of exposure and vulnerability. Therefore, the paper presents selected scenario approaches and illustrates how such vulnerability scenarios can look like for specific indicators and how they can inform decision-making, particularly in the context of urban planning.

The research study uses the example of heat stress in Ludwigsburg, Germany, and adopts participatory and quantitative forecasting methods to develop scenarios for human vulnerability and exposure to heat stress.

The paper indicates that considering changes in future vulnerability of people is important to provide an appropriate information base for enhancing urban resilience through risk-informed urban planning. This can help cities to define priority areas for future urban development and to consider the socio-economic and demographic composition in their strategies.

The value of the research study lies in implementing new qualitative and quantitative scenario approaches for human exposure and vulnerability to strengthen risk-informed decision-making.

This paper aims to propose a collaborative approach toward an integrated vulnerability assessment to climate change in Germany that attempts to bridge the gap between scientific output and policy demand.

Conceptually, the approach follows the definition of vulnerability as used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but it has modified this basic concept. It clearly distinguishes between three time slices (presence, near and remote future) not only regarding the change in the climatic conditions but also socio-economic development trends.

The paper concentrates on the selected methodological framework, the collaborative research design and those preliminary results of the nationwide vulnerability assessment that are transferable to other settings.

A Vulnerability Network (“Netzwerk Vulnerabilitaet”) emerged from an applied research project commissioned under the Adaptation Action Plan of the German Strategy for Adaptation to Climate Change by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety and the Federal Environment Agency. The assessment serves as evidence basis for the implementation of the German Adaptation Strategy. Thus, all relevant federal authorities and agencies are represented in the Vulnerability Network.

The approach is the first really integrative vulnerability assessment for the whole Germany, as it considers not only 16 sectors but also interconnections between these sectors and cumulative effects for three different time slices. Moreover, the normative component of the assessment was clearly separated from the analytic one. The Vulnerability Network as a whole has been responsible for all normative decisions to be taken during the assessment procedure thus ensuring a wide understanding and acceptance of commonly achieved results.

The politically laden nature of postdisaster recovery calls for more research on its governance, especially at the micro-scale. Apart from engineering-oriented frameworks, researchers need new theoretical underpinnings. This paper aims to review the development of the evolutionary resilience theory and use it as an analytical framework to evaluate the governance of post-earthquake reconstruction planning in China.

This paper examines how reconstruction planning is governed in the epicenter town of the 2008 Great Sichuan Earthquake, highlighting three key qualities of evolutionary resilience. The authors draw on site investigations, semistructured interviews and analysis of official and unpublished documents from various sources.

This paper finds that despite the absence of specific resilience statements in reconstruction plans of the time, qualities of evolutionary resilience, including social connectedness, flexibility and innovation, were evident in a hybrid and contradictory reconstruction planning system. In this respect, resilience thinking appears in Chinese planning earlier than generally assumed. This paper suggests that this manifestation of resilience was the result of an instrumental utility in addressing socioeconomic uncertainties in the postdisaster environment and, thus, may not be systematic.

This work enriches the understanding of recovery governance from an evolutionary resilience perspective where existing research is insufficient. It also offers ample practical guidance for similar cases in China and elsewhere.

Until very recently an immense USSR comprised fifteen republics. Now the three Baltic states are free of Moscow's direction, and an independent Ukraine has joined Belarus and the former Russian Soviet Federated Republic (RSFSR) as the hub in a commonwealth of former republics that have declared themselves independent or “sovereign,” but federated through agreements based on economics or defense considerations. Whether one concentrates on the story of Baltic freedom following the abortive 1991 coup, the subsequent dissolution of central governmental power, or the lasting enmities among some of the peoples in Central Asia and the Caucasus, the pivot around which this new interest or heightened curiosity turns is the recent great change within the late Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

This study aims to propose a novel viscoelastic–viscoplastic combined constitutive model for glassy amorphous polymers within the framework of thermodynamics at finite strain that is capable of capturing their rate-dependent inelastic mechanical behavior in wide ranges of deformation rate and amount.

The rheology model whose viscoelastic and viscoplastic elements are connected in series is set in accordance with the multi-mechanism theory. Then, the constitutive functions are formulated on the basis of the multiplicative decomposition of the deformation gradient implicated by the rheology model within the framework of thermodynamics. Dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) and loading/unloading/no-load tests for polycarbonate (PC) are conducted to identify the material parameters and demonstrate the capability of the proposed model.

The performance was validated in comparison with the series of the test results with different rates and amounts of deformation before unloading together. It has been confirmed that the proposed model can accommodate various material behaviors empirically observed, such as rate-dependent elasticity, elastic hysteresis, strain softening, orientation hardening and strain recovery.

This paper presents a novel rheological constitutive model in which the viscoelastic element connected in series with the viscoplastic one exclusively represents the elastic behavior, and each material response is formulated according to the multiplicatively decomposed deformation gradients. In particular, the yield strength followed by the isotropic hardening reflects the relaxation characteristics in the viscoelastic constitutive functions so that the glass transition temperature could be variant within the wide range of deformation rate. Consequently, the model enables us to properly represent the loading process up to large deformation regime followed by unloading and no-load processes.

This paper aims to describe an updated urban planning process to expose a theoretical model bridging the resilience concept and urban planning, and then it explains this process through Istanbul case.

A hypothetical framework is proposed based on the three different but complementary aspects of resilience which are identified as “resilience to what”, “resilience where” and “resilience how”, as well as “five elements process” referring the upgraded components of urban planning processes. Additionally, the methodology conducted to figure out a resilient urban planning process is listed as an expert opinion survey, a two-stage policy Delphi survey, public opinion survey and multi-criteria analysis.

It is possible to apply this process in many different case studies for various scales and temporalities for coping with the key vulnerabilities and promote the administrative response capacity.

Considering size of the study area and the unclarified roles of urban authorities, it is difficult to have a consensus on the key vulnerabilities and the prior urban policies.

The proposed process is beneficial in addressing the most prominent vulnerabilities and developing capacity to manage unexpected changes, through the collaborative decisions of a wide range of urban planning authorities. Depending on the severity of the disturbances, applying this process to identify changing priorities can be a crucial policy, both for long- or short-term urban policy-making, for further studies.

The author investigates the effects of human capital on labor income share in the 15 sectors of the European Union (EU)-13 countries and the United Kingdom (UK) over the period 2008–2015.

The author employs pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation with panel data, using the EU KLEMS database.

The results show that when education level increases, labor income share increases and gender-based labor income share differentials decrease. Return to education is higher in qualitative sectors in contrast with the other sectors. Moreover, there are gender-based labor income share differentials at the sectoral level. These differentials are higher in nonqualitative sectors, while they are relatively lower in qualitative sectors.

The biggest limitation of the study is that the data range cannot be expanded because of the database. The author is of opinion that the empirical findings will guide to policy makers in terms of wage setting.

The expected contribution of this study to the literature is to investigate the effect of human capital on labor income share at the sectoral level for the EU-13 countries and the UK. As far as the author knows, there is no study which investigates this topic at the sectoral level such a comprehensive, in the literature.