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Supporting People provides the opportunity to put refuge services on a firm financial footing. However, Supporting People only funds adult ‘housing‐related’ bed spaces. Children use refuge services, and the lack of funding for children's services is a big omission in the new Supporting People funding regime. This needs to be addressed both nationally and locally ‐ children have support needs too. Outreach services which provide a vital lifeline for women who do not access refuges are also absent from the funding strategy to tackle domestic violence. These services are desperately needed, and the challenge for Women's Aid and local authorities is to work together to ensure that all the needs of women and children escaping domestic violence can be properly met. The dislocation of capital and funding issues must be resolved quickly, so that much‐needed additional refuge spaces are developed and women who desperately need a safe place to stay free from violence can be accommodated.

Islands have long been discussed as refuges from global catastrophes; this paper will evaluate them systematically, discussing both the positives and negatives of islands as refuges. There are examples of isolated human communities surviving for thousands of years on places like Easter Island. Islands could provide protection against many low-level risks, notably including bio-risks. However, they are vulnerable to tsunamis, bird-transmitted diseases and other risks. This paper aims to explore how to use the advantages of islands for survival during global catastrophes.

Preliminary horizon scanning based on the application of the research principles established in the previous global catastrophic literature.

The large number of islands on Earth, and their diverse conditions, increase the chance that one of them will provide protection from a catastrophe. Additionally, this protection could be increased if an island was used as a base for a nuclear submarine refuge combined with underground bunkers and/or extremely long-term data storage. The requirements for survival on islands, their vulnerabilities and ways to mitigate and adapt to risks are explored. Several existing islands, suitable for the survival of different types of risk, timing and budgets, are examined. Islands suitable for different types of refuges and other island-like options that could also provide protection are also discussed.

The possible use of islands as refuges from social collapse and existential risks has not been previously examined systematically. This paper contributes to the expanding research on survival scenarios.

Crime and fear of crime in and around the university campus can affect enrolments and retention rates as well as compromising the safety, security and well-being of students and staff. The purpose of this paper is to explore user perceptions of personal safety using the “Prospect and Refuge Model” and crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED).

The study used a fear of crime survey of 88 students at a university in Western Australia. The respondents were asked to identify on a map, three locations perceived to be “safe” and three locations perceived to be “unsafe”. The six most commonly identified sites were then visually audited to measure the levels of “prospect” and “refuge” and CPTED features at each location.

The findings indicate the top three “fear spots” were associated with low levels of “prospect” and high levels of “refuge” – and generally, with poor opportunities for natural surveillance and CPTED qualities. The top three “safe spots” had consistently higher levels of “prospect” and lower levels of “refuge” in the site audits and responses to the surveys. Increased opportunities for surveillance were therefore associated with increased levels of personal safety.

The survey is relatively small (88) and a larger study is certainly required to underpin these findings. The methodology is transferable to other universities and facilities seeking to manage crime and fear of crime. The research develops more finely nuanced measures for the concepts of prospect and refuge.

Interestingly, surveillance opportunities and perceptions of personal safety were perceived to be mediated by distance from buildings and by the construction of new buildings and infrastructure being carried out across the campus. This has implications for the construction of new universities and for those which are expanding. Recommendations are provided for new and existing universities and for those undergoing redevelopment.

Improving students’ perception of personal safety can enhance their performance and retention at university.

No studies have investigated the campus design and layout and students’ perceptions of personal safety in Australia in this way. The approach is more “bottom-up” by first exploring users’ perceptions of “unsafe” locations, then assessing these sites in terms of the presence or absence of measures for CPTED and prospect-refuge.

The research reported here examines the experiences of women with learning disabilities who have lived at the only specialist refuge available in this country. A full description of the specialist refuge is given and lessons drawn for other learning disability service providers. The importance of safe, women‐only space is emphasised.

This paper outlines best practice in the commissioning of emergency accommodation for children and young people who run away, identifying: levels of need; models of accommodation provision that have existed in the UK; approaches to funding; costs of emergency accommodation; the commissioning process; and service delivery issues.

This paper is an expert opinion piece drawing upon a project commissioned by The Scottish Government based on extensive research including a review of the pre‐existing evidence base and new data.

Fixed refuge has been the most common form of emergency accommodation for young runaways in the UK and provides positive outcomes for young runaways relating to improved general well‐being, mental health and schooling. The costs of refuge can compare favourably to alternative specialised accommodation and support and prevent other costs relating to future episodes of running away, future offending, substance misuse and youth homelessness.

Evidence‐based learning has identified best practice in the commissioning of emergency accommodation related to a number of issues including: scoping activity; the commissioning process; costs; approaches to funding; effective future commissioning of emergency accommodation; why the third sector is best placed to deliver emergency accommodation; and ensuring key elements of service delivery are included to meet children and young people's need and achieve positive outcomes.

The commissioning of emergency accommodation for young runaways has received little attention in research; this paper goes some way to rectifying this omission alongside providing evidence‐based learning for commissioners and service delivery organisations.

The chapter tries to understand how nuclear tests and the radiation fallouts in their aftermath can lead to cancer. It seeks to explore how our diseased ecological systems have resulted in silencing the birdsong and the spreading of cancer in the Anthropocene with reference to Terry Tempest Williams' (An environmentalist and Utah naturalist) two memoirs – “‘Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place” and “When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice.” It would also try to factor in connections between climate change, pandemics like the COVID-19, and the onslaught of other terminal illnesses like cancer, all a result of mankind's anthropocentric hubris and domination of nature.

Mine would be a qualitative approach wherein I will refer to the original two texts mentioned for primary material and other sources for secondary references and analyze them from an ecofeminist perspective.

We need to establish the health of the Environment through reduced usage of nuclear weapons and by developing a language and an environmental praxis that doesn't separate the subject and the object and only then we can usher in biological egalitarianism, and restore the song of the whistling thrush again. We also need to revere our Mother Earth and see to it that she maintains her ecological balance through homeostasis.

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, to study the safe-haven characteristic of the Islamic stock indexes and Ṣukūk during the crises time. Second, to evaluate this property in the last pandemic. This study employs the daily dataset from June 15, 2015, to June 15, 2020, for the most affected countries by the earlier disease.

This study uses the Markov-switching Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) approach and the basic CAPM for the main analysis and the safe haven index (SHI) recently developed by Baur and Dimpfl (2021) for the robustness test.

Based on Baur and Lucey's (2010) definition, empirical findings indicate that Islamic stock indexes cannot be a refuge throughout the crisis regime for all selected conventional markets. However, Ṣukūk are a strong refuge in Brazilian, Russian and Malaysian markets. For the remainder countries, except Italy, the USA and Spain, the Ṣukūk index offers weak protection against serious conventional market downturns. Similar conclusions are obtained during the COVID-19 global crisis period. Finally, results are confirmed by using the SHI.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first study that evaluates the safe haven effectiveness of the Islamic index and Ṣukūk using the SHI in the most impacted countries by the COVID-19 outbreak.

The purpose of this paper is to recount the author's experience of developing the first ever refuges for domestic violence, and the lessons learned about working with “violence-prone” people.

This is a first hand, narrative account, interspersed with observations and commentary on the lessons learned.

The author first identifies the author's own experience, as the child of several generations of violent parents, as central to the author's ability to empathise and work with women with similar histories. Learning together, and refusing to take responsibility away from the mothers, becomes central to the approach. Recognising the roots of violence requires in-depth, long-term relationship building with peers. The concept of “therapeutic chaos” sums up the way the spontaneous turmoil of the households seems to match and manage the cathartic expression of the residents’ world.

As a first hand account, this reportage challenges the assumption that constructive practice must all be based on someone else's prior, “evidence based”, practice.

The refuge and network that arose from the work at Chiswick Women's aid was a pioneer in addressing domestic violence. This is a unique voice, and an opportunity to place this personal account in the record for future work on inter-generational emotional damage, addictive violence and social-environmental therapeutic treatments.

This paper argues that there is a need for a healthy independent specialist women's refuge sector to address the housing needs of black minority ethnic and refugee (BMER) women. It will consider barriers to equal access that BMER women have and how they could be addressed by specialist services. The paper examines how housing inequality creates additional barriers for BMER women fleeing domestic violence, and provides arguments for the way in which specialist services address inequality from the perspective of race, class and gender. The primary research provides a snapshot of the impact that the lack of access to provision has for BMER women. A case is made for a strengthened independent specialist sector as a way to address the housing needs of women who flee domestic violence. Key recommendations are identified on how housing policies, practices and service provision can be strengthened.

In answer to the urgent need to adapt conservation strategies and approaches to climate change, the purpose of this paper is to locate the climatically stable forests in West and Central Africa and to assess whether they overlap with the existing network of protected areas and if not, to prioritize them for protection.

With ongoing global warming, rain forest will survive where locally soil moisture content remains high compensating for the regional drought stress. As a proxy for a soil moisture‐driven model, rainfall >2,000 mm, altitude >500 m and strong relief (standard deviation in elevation data pixels) were overlapped in a GIS analysis to locate the climatically stable forest within the present continuous forest of Central Africa and within the degraded forest of West Africa. As a means of verification, the biodiversity was measured in and outside the identified areas in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea as high levels of biodiversity are related to the survival and stability of the forest in the past. Biodiversity was calculated (measured as Fisher‐α diversity) for all trees (dbh >5 cm) on 66 transects (200 × 5 m).

The forest areas identified as climatically stable in the GIS analysis showed a higher biodiversity than the forest outside these areas (student T‐test: P<0.000035, stable = 54.7 and unstable = 33.7), supporting the validity of the model. Mapping the results of the GIS query showed that most of the climatically stable forests in West and Central Africa are located outside the park systems, and that it is already too late to protect the climatically stable forest in West Africa as almost nothing is left of it.

Wedged in between large‐scale drought tolerant ecosystems the African rain forest is most vulnerable to global climate change. Knowing which parts are climatically stable and resilient helps to set and focus conservation priorities and efforts. This approach is a powerful tool which has helped to identify areas with a high‐conservation priority in Africa.