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The American National Red Cross is in many ways the iconic symbol for disaster response and recovery. The organization, founded in 1881, has a long track record for coming to the aid of those in need in the wake of wars, natural disasters, and other crises. However, in the wake of recent disasters, the Red Cross has been criticized for underperforming. By combining the literature on bureaucracy in Austrian economics and the literature on monocentricity in the work of Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom, we provide an analysis of the Red Cross that helps explain the organization’s evolution over time and that also yields implications for disaster management more broadly. Specifically, the Red Cross is a bureaucracy that has become increasingly centralized and rigid as it has become further enmeshed with governmental responsibilities.

Will Florida’s agriculture adapt to climate change? Climate disruptions to agriculture and natural resources in Florida are projected to increase in the future. These impacts will be increasingly negative because critical thresholds are being exceeded. This chapter discusses how Florida’s agriculture and natural resources may be affected by climate change in the coming decades.

Agriculture will be affected by invasive alien species, sea-level-rise flooding, and storm surges. A warmer, drier climate will place agriculture in competition with other users for limited water resources. A serious concern for agriculture is that rising sea level will cause coastal groundwater to become more saline and groundwater levels to rise. The loss of coastal wetlands increases the risk of catastrophic damage due to extreme weather events. Degradation of soil and water assets due to increasing extremes in precipitation will challenge both rainfed and irrigated agriculture without the implementation of innovative conservation methods. High night-time temperatures can reduce grain yields and animal-sourced production. Climate change also increases the vulnerability of forests to ecosystem changes due to decreased soil moisture and increased evapotranspiration. The practical implications are that increased innovation will be needed to ensure the adaptation of agriculture and the associated socioeconomic system can keep pace with climate change. Given the difficulties in predicting our future climate, we must develop new risk-transfer innovations that will facilitate damage recovery. Changes in agricultural yields and food prices could have important implications for food security.

Austrian insights on the limits of central planning, the pervasiveness of knowledge problems, and the importance of the entrepreneur in coordinating social change have yielded substantive contributions to the literature on how individuals and communities respond to both natural and unnatural, or manmade, disasters. Austrian economists have examined the political economy of natural disasters, disaster relief and recovery efforts, the economic effects of extended wars, post-conflict societal reconstitution, and the effectiveness of humanitarian aid. This literature advances two main findings: (1) that centralized governments are likely to be ineffective at providing the goods and services that are necessary for community recovery and (2) that decentralized efforts are better suited to address the needs of society, to discover the best course of action for producing and distributing these goods and services, and to adapt to changing needs, circumstances, and technology. This paper examines the Austrian theories utilized to examine disasters, provides a summary of the recent research on both natural and unnatural disasters, and proposes areas for future research.

It is a well-known fact that economic development and rise in the volume of trade due to globalization have led to more production which has further led to the increase in the emission of carbon dioxide in the environment. Under the backdrop, the aim of this chapter is to examine the relationships among per capita CO₂ emissions as the proxy for exploitation of the environment with international trade and per capita GDP in India. It analyzed cointegration and short-run causal relationships between the variables based on a time series data set for the period of 1979–2018. The data found to be stationary at first integration; hence the researchers ran cointegration. The study found that the carbon emissions are an outcome of economic growth and more and more trade with the foreign countries.

Climate change is a massive multidimensional shift. Temperature shifts, in particular, have important implications for urbanization, agriculture, health, productivity, and poverty, among other things. While much research has documented rising mean temperature levels, the authors also examine range-based measures of daily temperature volatility. Specifically, using data for select US cities over the past half-century, the authors compare the evolving time series dynamics of the average daily temperature (AVG) and the diurnal temperature range (DTR; the difference between the daily maximum and minimum temperatures). The authors characterize trend and seasonality in these two series using linear models with time-varying coefficients. These straightforward yet flexible approximations provide evidence of evolving DTR seasonality and stable AVG seasonality.

The unorganised manufacturing sector contributes one third share of overall manufacturing employment and one fifth share of gross value added of the manufacturing sector. Despite its important role in large-scale employment generation, this sector is neglected by the researchers as well as by the policy makers as compared to the focus given on the organised manufacturing sector. The issues of energy intensity, environment emissions and growth of unorganised manufacturing enterprises (UMEs) remain unexplored. The present chapter attempts to estimate the CO₂ emission and emission intensity (EI) across UMEs on the basis of NSSO Unit Level data of 62nd, 67th and 73rd rounds. It also analyses the growth of UMEs in relation to CO₂ emission and EI. The nature of the sector is very much dispersed. Our study reveals that a portion of unorganised enterprises did not use any energy in their production activities and used manually operated instruments like – handlooms, weaving machines, hand-operated oil and rice mills, etc. The main energy inputs of UMEs are electricity and fuel & lubricants. The CO₂ emission is relatively less in UMEs compared to organised manufacturing enterprises. Across the unorganised manufacturing industries, the higher CO₂ emission are observed in manufacturing of food product industry and other non-metallic mineral industry. The study found that CO₂ EI of UMEs depends on firm-level characteristics like perennial nature, establishment type, urban location and expanding growth status. However, capital intensive UMEs are more polluting.

Climate change is emerging as an important issue increasing uncertainty in the business circle, and financial institutions through their inaction seem to be unmoved by climate change risk despite the potential for climate change events to affect the financial institutions and the financial system. In this chapter, the effect of climate change on financial institutions and the financial system are highlighted and discussed.

World has started to observe important level of global warming fostered by the industrial growth which resulted in the increase in CO₂ emissions and in the environmental pollution (e.g. water and air) affecting total factor productivity growth. Energy is vital for all industries and their growth. Energy generation and energy intensiveness affect carbon emissions. Energy generation relies on water as water is a vital input to the energy generation. Furthermore, water supply is affected by the energy supply and energy dependence. Water is at the core of the industrial growth. It is vital for all productions. Water scarcity problem is becoming more severe due to the climate change. Some regions and countries are more vulnerable to the water scarcity. Middle East countries face significant water scarcity problem. Among these countries Jordan stands out as one of the most vulnerable countries with respect to water scarcity. This chapter emphasises the importance of green and sustainable total factor productivity. Despite of their recent water policies, Jordan started to experience adverse consequences of severe water scarcity problem. The dependence of and relationship between energy and water are vital pillars of economic growth. There is carbon trade-off in their supply. For this reason, conservation capital policies can affect productivity and efficiency. Middle East has scarce water resources and can be affected due to the climate change. Jordan faces most water scarcity among Middle East Countries. This chapter aims to investigate the interaction between industrial growth and climate change as well as their effects to Jordan’s water resources and economy. Furthermore, this chapter emphasises water scarcity problem and water policies in Jordan. This chapter provides recommendations for preventing environmental degradation and mitigating water scarcity problem of Jordan so that its industrial growth can be sustained and its economic growth can become more resilient to the climate change. This chapter is expected to be useful to academics, policy makers, and politics in the relevant field.

Transient climate sensitivity relates total climate forcings from anthropogenic and other sources to surface temperature. Global transient climate sensitivity is well studied, as are the related concepts of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and transient climate response (TCR), but spatially disaggregated local climate sensitivity (LCS) is less so. An energy balance model (EBM) and an easily implemented semiparametric statistical approach are proposed to estimate LCS using the historical record and to assess its contribution to global transient climate sensitivity. Results suggest that areas dominated by ocean tend to import energy, they are relatively more sensitive to forcings, but they warm more slowly than areas dominated by land. Economic implications are discussed.

This chapter presents a model of distribution dynamics in the presence of measurement error in the underlying data. Studies of international growth convergence generally ignore the fact that per capita income data from the Penn World Table (PWT) are not only continuous variables but also measured with error. Together with short-time scale fluctuations, measurement error makes inferences potentially unreliable. When first-order, time-homogeneous Markov models are fitted to continuous data with measurement error, a bias towards excess mobility is introduced into the estimated transition probability matrix. This chapter evaluates different methods of accounting for this error. An EM algorithm is used for parameter estimation, and the methods are illustrated using data from the PWT Mark 6.1. Measurement error in income data is found to have quantitatively important effects on distribution dynamics. For instance, purging the data of measurement error reduces estimated transition intensities by between one- and four-fifths and more than halves the observed mobility of countries.