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Purpose – The purpose of this research is to to determine the value of land erodibility in Krueng Seulimum watershed.

Design/Methodology/Approach – This research apply survey method and field measurement that begins with making land unit map.

Findings – The results showed that Krueng Seulimum watershed consisted of 22 units of land (LU). The value of land erodibility in secondary forest land use is low, i.e., 0.13–0.19 (LU 13 and 22), the value of land erodibility in grazing lands land use is medium, i.e., 0.31–0.32 (LU 9 and 11 ), the value of land erodibility in scrub lands land use is rather high, i.e., 0.33–0.35 (LU 2, 6, 12, 15, and 19) and the value of land erodibility in dry land agriculture land use is medium – rather high, i.e., 0.28–0.35 (LU 3, 7, 10, and 16).

Research Limitations/Implications – The land use directions for scrub lands is for cocoa-based mixed crops, such as cocoa monoculture, cocoa + areca nut, and cocoa +banana.

Practical Implications – The use of dry land agriculture is maintained for land use coupled with agrotechnology action that is guludan terrace plus mulsa application.

Originality/Value – Most of the soil in the Krueng Seulimum watershed has very low soil fertility level that affects nutrient availability plant. These characteristics should be considered in the direction of land use in the Krueng Seulimum watershed.

Erosion is the main cause of soil and water degradation, which demands investments for the recovery of such natural resources. The purpose of this paper is to quantify and spatialize soil losses in a municipality with large areas of monoculture of sugarcane.

The Universal Soil Loss Equation was applied for the identification of areas susceptible to erosion in the municipality of Jahu, SP, Brazil. Soil maps, statistical census data from Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, radar images from SRTM, rainfall data from Fatec-Jahu hydrometeorological station and digital satellite images from Landsat 5 TM were used for the analyses. Four basic parameters were evaluated: topography of the terrain, rainfall erosivity, soil erodibility, and soil use and management factors. The analyses were conducted in the Geographic Information System (ArcView software).

The results show most of the municipality (91 percent) consists of areas of erosion potential. However, the remaining 9 percent can potentially produce 40 percent of the sediment load, which indicates the need for conservation practices and environmental recovery for a reduction in the erosion process acceleration.

In view of the expansion of sugarcane culture in the cities of São Paulo, the results show the importance of a master plan for new areas of sugarcane planting and the need for restoration of riparian vegetation in the surrounding streams and springs for the reduction of erosion.

Among natural disasters, drought affected the most people worldwide during the past few decades (Obasi, 1994). Since the late 1970s, there has been a shift in El Niño-Southern Oscillation toward more warm events, closely related to a worldwide trend for intensified drought (Dai, Trenberth, & Karl, 1998). In particular, this trend was manifested as widespread droughts during 1999–2002 in the northern hemisphere (Lotsch, Friedl, Anderson, & Tucker, 2005), including Asia, and notably in Mongolia (Nandintsetseg, Shinoda, Kimura, & Ibaraki, 2010; Shinoda, Ito, Nachinshonhor, & Erdenetsetseg, 2007). The decade of 2000s has experienced increased vegetation degradation and wind erosion that resulted from decreased summer precipitation in wide areas of East Asia (Kurosaki, Shinoda, & Mikami, 2011a; Kurosaki, Shinoda, Mikami, & Nandintsetseg, 2011b). Furthermore, in general, projections of climate models have suggested that the frequency and intensity of extreme weathers will likely increase in the future (IPCC WG I, 2007). Given this background, it is vital to make an assessment of socioeconomic impacts of the extreme weathers and to develop proactive approaches to mitigating such impacts.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate quick and low-cost processes for surface runoff potential on the basis of natural environmental attributes.

An approach based on the natural environmental attributes and on the Cook’s method was used for maximal peak flows of surface runoff, as well as for assigning weights to the considered attributes. Used attributes are as follow: steepness, bedrock (lithology), soil (texture, genesis, thickness, and permeability coefficient), drainage density, and favorable features to surface storage.

Using natural environmental attributes from previous available studies, adapted from different scales, the authors obtain a low-cost potential surface runoff chart, which can be useful for planning, impact and hazard analysis, and decision purposes in an area without large financial resources, like small communities in developing countries. Despite the common scarcity of data in these communities, often regional basic studies of soil and bedrock are available, making this kind of analysis possible.

The highlights are quick and low-cost procedures in characterizing the natural environment for planning activities, providing the basis for further detailing, which focus on solving local problems. This approach to runoff estimation allows for the definition of the criteria, considering the potential geodynamic processes. Thus, this kind of study may be very useful for land use planning in developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the problem of land degradation as a category of environmental terrorism, which has been increasing along with the rise of open pit mining and oil palm plantation activities.

This study uses a doctrinal approach that aims to find the best solution to address the problem of land degradation and environmental terrorism activities in Indonesia through a comparative legal study conducted with the handling of similar cases in Malaysia, which has almost the same character as Indonesia.

This paper finds that both Indonesia and Malaysia have enacted laws and regulations to address environmental concerns. However, it turns out that relying only on law enforcement is not an optimal solution. Addressing the problem of land degradation would also require the implementation of sustainable development practices, public awareness and cooperative dialogue.

This paper provides a new approach to answer the inclusion of environmental degradation as environmental terrorism, which should also be considered a crime against humanity.

All over the world, Bangladesh is well known as a flood- and cyclone-affected country. But in the recent years the slow onset disaster of drought is more frequent in Bangladesh due to climatic as well as nonclimatic variability. As a consequence, agriculture along with its dependent farmers’ livelihoods tremendously experience its adverse impacts. Therefore, the main focus of this chapter is to discuss about drought, its effects on different sectors, and how in different levels a number of drought risk management actions are carried out to cope with this insidious disaster in the context of Bangladesh.

This paper aims to present the “Vulnerability Sourcebook” methodology, a standardised framework for the assessment of climate vulnerability and risk in the context of adaptation planning. The Vulnerability Sourcebook has been developed for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and has been applied in more than twenty countries worldwide.

It is based on a participative development of so-called climate impact chains, which are an analytical concept to better understand, systemise and prioritise the climate factors as well as environmental and socio-economic factors that drive climate related threats, vulnerabilities and risks in a specific system. Impact chains serve as the backbone for an operational climate vulnerability assessment with indicators based on quantitative approaches (data, models) combined with expert assessments. In this paper, the authors present the concept and applications of the original Vulnerability Sourcebook, published in 2015, which was based on the IPCC AR4 concept of climate vulnerability. In Section 6 of this paper, the authors report how this concept has been adapted to the current IPCC AR5 concept of climate risks.

The application of the Sourcebook is demonstrated in three case studies in Bolivia, Pakistan and Burundi. The results indicate that particularly the participative development of impact chains helped with generating a common picture on climate vulnerabilities and commitment for adaptation planning within a region. The mixed methods approach (considering quantitative and qualitative information) allows for a flexible application in different contexts. Challenges are mainly the availability of climate (change) and socio-economic data, as well as the transparency of value-based decisions in the process.

The Vulnerability Sourcebook offers a standardised framework for the assessment of climate vulnerability and risk in the context of adaptation planning.

This paper aims to review the rise of the resource-based theory (RBT) in light of the perennial tension between rationalism and behaviorism. The authors appraise the RBT’s strengths and its potential fault-line, the erodibility of resources.

A nontraditional melding of the review and conceptual development methodological modes sheds light on the limitations and future prospects of the three main strands within the RBT, with a special emphasis on its rapidly developing dynamic capabilities (DC) strand.

The paper proposes a framework for modeling the transformation of resources into usable highly specific assets.

The ascent of the DC strand will itself have to be revisited some day.

The findings imply that the decline of resources should not be left to chance, but be regulated according to one’s strategic intent.

Driven by a constructive perspective aimed at integrating theoretical coherence with practical relevance, a nontraditional synoptic tour situates the contribution of the RBT with respect to earlier approaches, in particular the evolving notion of fit.

The purpose of the paper is to predict mapping of areas vulnerable to flooding in the Ourika watershed in the High Atlas of Morocco with the aim of providing a useful tool capable of helping in the mitigation and management of floods in the associated region, as well as Morocco as a whole.

Four machine learning (ML) algorithms including k-nearest neighbors (KNN), artificial neural network, random forest (RF) and x-gradient boost (XGB) are adopted for modeling. Additionally, 16 predictors divided into categorical and numerical variables are used as inputs for modeling.

The results showed that RF and XGB were the best performing algorithms, with AUC scores of 99.1 and 99.2%, respectively. Conversely, KNN had the lowest predictive power, scoring 94.4%. Overall, the algorithms predicted that over 60% of the watershed was in the very low flood risk class, while the high flood risk class accounted for less than 15% of the area.

There are limited, if not non-existent studies on modeling using AI tools including ML in the region in predictive modeling of flooding, making this study intriguing.