A measurement of community disaster resilience in Korea

Building a community that is resilient to disasters has become one of the main goals of disaster management. Communities that are more disaster resilient often experience less impact from the disaster and reduced recovery periods afterwards. This study develops a methodology for constructing a set of indicators measuring Community Disaster Resilience Index (CDRI) in terms of human, social, economic, environmental, and institutional factors. In this study, the degree of community resilience to natural disasters was measured for 229 local municipalities in Korea, followed by an examination of the relationship between the aggregated CDRI and disaster losses, using an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression method and a geographically weighted regression (GWR) method. Identifying the extent of community resilience to natural disasters would provide emergency managers and decision-makers with strategic directions for improving local communities' resilience to natural disasters while reducing the negative impacts of disasters.     

Bison and cattle grazing management,bare ground coverage,and links to suspended sediment concentrations in grassland streams

This study quantified the impact of bison and cattle grazing management practices on bare ground coverage at the watershed, riparian, and forested riparian scales within the Flint Hills ecoregion in Kansas. We tested for correlations between bare ground coverage and fluvial suspended sediment concentrations during base‐flow and storm‐flow events. We used remotely sensed imagery combined with field surveys to classify ground cover and quantify the presence of bare ground. Base‐flow water samples were collected bi‐monthly during rain‐free periods and 24 h following precipitation events. Storm‐flow water samples were collected on the rising limb of the hydrograph, using single‐stage automatic samplers. Ungrazed treatments contained the lowest coverage of bare ground at the watershed, riparian, and forested riparian scales. Bison treatments contained the highest coverage of bare ground at the watershed scale, while high‐density cattle treatments contained the highest coverage of bare ground at the riparian and forested riparian scales. In bison and cattle‐grazed treatments, a majority of bare ground was located near fence lines, watershed boundaries, and third‐ and fourth‐order stream segments. Inorganic sediment concentrations at base flow were best predicted by riparian bare ground coverage, while storm‐flow sediment concentrations were best predicted by watershed scale bare ground coverage.     

Temporal Trends in the Spatial Distribution of Impervious Cover Relative to Stream Location

Use of impervious cover is transitioning from an indicator of surface water condition to one that also guides and informs watershed planning and management, including Clean Water Act (33 U.S.C. §1251 et seq.) reporting. Whether it is for understanding surface water condition or planning and management, impervious cover is most commonly expressed as summary measurement (e.g., percentage watershed in impervious cover). We use the National Land Cover Database to estimate impervious cover in the vicinity of surface waters for three time periods (2001, 2006, 2011). We also compare impervious cover in the vicinity of surface waters to watershed summary estimates of impervious cover for classifying the spatial pattern of impervious cover. Between 2001 and 2011, surface water shorelines (streams and water bodies) in the vicinity of impervious cover increased nearly 10,000 km. Across all time periods, approximately 27% of the watersheds in the continental United States had proximally distributed impervious cover, i.e., the percentage of impervious cover in the vicinity of surface waters was higher than its watershed summary expression. We discuss how impervious cover spatial pattern can be used to inform watershed planning and management, including reporting under the Clean Water Act.     

Food: From Commodity to Commons

Our food and farming system is not socially, economically or ecologically sustainable. Many of the ills are a result of market competition driving specialization and linear production models, externalizing costs for environmental, social and cultural degradation. Some propose that market mechanisms should be used to correct this; improved consumer choice, internalization of costs and compensation to farmers for public goods. What we eat is determined by the path taken by our ancestors, by commercialization and fierce competition, fossil fuels and demographic development. Based on those, governments and the food industry are the choice architects who determine what we eat; consumer choice plays a marginal role. Using market mechanisms to internalize cost and compensate farmers for public goods has been proposed for decades but little progress has been made. There are also many practical, ethical and theoretical objections to such a system. The market is not a good master for a sustainable food system. Instead we need to find new ways of managing the food system based on food as a right and farming as a management system of the planet Earth. The solutions should be based on relocalization of food production and de-commodification of food and our symbionts, the plants and animals we eat.     

The Normative Limits of Consumer Citizenship

In political philosophy, citizenship is a key concept. Citizenship is tied to rights and duties, as well as to concepts of social justice. Recently, the debate on citizenship has developed a new direction in focusing on qualified notions of citizenship. In this contribution, I shall defend three claims. Firstly, consumer citizenship fits into the discussion of qualified notions of citizenship. Secondly, the debate on qualified notions of citizenship cannot be detached from the normative claims in the philosophy of citizenship more generally. In particular, duties and rights receive a distinct shape when debated in terms of “consumer citizenship”. Thirdly, I shall argue that further normative limits can be established by discussing qualified notions of citizenship as items of a list that need to cohere in normative terms. I shall pay particular attention to environmental citizenship.     

The IPBES Conceptual Framework: An Unhelpful Start

The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) have recently launched themselves as the UN-sanctioned instrument for conserving nature. They seek to establish themselves as the authority in this field alongside the well-known Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in climate science. Quickly following or even before recent publication of their conceptual framework in two biology journals, they were already underway building upon it. This headlong push, we believe, is ill advised. We show how the framework is unsound as a foundation for further work—in a number of ways and perhaps even by its authors’ own lights. It is therefore urgent that the IPBES thoroughly and thoughtfully reconsider their framework before too much effort is wasted.     

Consuming for the Sake of Others: Whose Interests Count on a Market for Animal-Friendly Products?

Many Europeans are concerned about the living conditions of farm animals because they view animals as beings that possess interests of their own. Against this background the introduction of an animal welfare label is being intensively discussed in Europe. In choosing a market-based instrument to take these concerns into account, normative judgments are made about the formation of preferences, the value system that is implicitly assumed, and the distribution of property rights. From the perspective of classical institutional economics it can be shown that the introduction of a label as an institutional change does not redefine institutions in a way that allows them to consider the interests of animals for their own sake. Rather, the label only redefines the property rights that humans have over animals. The market segregation into privileged and normal animals conflicts with the idea of equality between sentient animals. Within the group of humans only the interests of those who act on markets count. The commodification of their moral concerns assumes that people always decide based on their own interests, which can be traded off. The lexicographical ordering of preferences, which occurs when humans view animals as entities with rights, is not compatible with the normative assumptions of markets. Furthermore, interpreting animal suffering as market failure that can be corrected by labeling impedes a reasoned dialog within the society about the values and beliefs that serve as a basis for preference formation. Thus, an animal welfare label cannot replace a fundamental societal debate about legal standards on animal well-being.     

Determinants of Individual Attitudes Toward Animal Welfare-Friendly Food Products

Animal welfare involves societal and human values, ethical concerns and moral considerations since it incorporates the belief of what is right or what is wrong in animal treatment and care. This paper aims to ascertain whether the different dimensions of individual attitudes toward animal welfare in food choices may be characterized by general human values, as identified by Schwartz. For this purpose, an EU-wide survey was carried out, covering almost 2500 nationally representative individuals from five European countries. Compared with the previous literature this study shows a twofold novelty: (1) it develops a general framework to link individual enduring beliefs and attitudes toward animal welfare attributes in food choices; (2) the framework is analyzed within a broad-based cross-country study. Our empirical results prove that human values related to self-transcendence are strongly associated to overall animal welfare attitudes and especially to those explicitly related to food choices, while values related to the spheres of self-enhancement and conservatism are significantly associated to less sensitive attitudes to animal welfare. Moreover, our results appear to indicate that a determinant of animal welfarism in food choices is potentially associated to individual concerns regarding food safety issues.