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Efficient and equitable policies for managing disaster risks and adapting to global environmental change are critically dependent on development of robust options supported by integrated modeling. The book is based on research and state-of-the art models developed at IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) and within its cooperation network. It addresses the methodological complexities of assessing disaster risks, which call for stochastic simulation, optimization methods and economic modeling. Furthermore, it describes policy frameworks for integrated disaster risk management, including stakeholder participation facilitated by user-interactive decision-support tools. Ap...
Based on extensive fieldwork, Nature’s Embrace reveals the emerging pluralization of death rites in postindustrial Japan. Low birth rates and high numbers of people remaining permanently single have led to a shortage of ceremonial caregivers (most commonly married sons and their wives) to ensure the transformation of the dead into ancestors resting in peace. Consequently, older adults are increasingly uncertain about who will perform memorial rites for them and maintain their graves. In this study, anthropologist Satsuki Kawano examines Japan’s changing death rites from the perspective of those who elect to have their cremated remains scattered and celebrate their return to nature. For t...
In the domain of science concerned with systems structure and behavior, the issue of the relationship between the micro and the macro level is of key importance. This book concentrates on the interplay between these levels and has a special focus on the level ?in between? ? the meso level.An investigation of those links is made through a number of cases from different domains of science, including physics, chemistry, ecology, social science, economics and technology. What is evident is that there are facets regarding meso-level issues that are similar between cases, but also that the domains differ in various ways. This is particularly exemplified by the differences in perspectives from which the natural and social sciences deal with scaling issues. The various examples provided in this book mirror its overriding theme: systems complexity.
The growth of a global digital economy has enabled rapid communication, instantaneous movement of funds, and availability of vast amounts of information. With this come challenges such as the vulnerability of digitalized sociotechnological systems (STSs) to destructive events (earthquakes, disease events, terrorist attacks). Similar issues arise for disruptions to complex linked natural and social systems (from changing climates, evolving urban environments, etc.). This book explores new approaches to the resilience of sociotechnological and natural-social systems in a digital world of big data, extraordinary computing capacity, and rapidly developing methods of Artificial Intelligence. Most...
Population, Land Use, and Environment: Research Directions offers recommendations for future research to improve understanding of how changes in human populations affect the natural environment by means of changes in land use, such as deforestation, urban development, and development of coastal zones. It also features a set of state-of-the-art papers by leading researchers that analyze population-land useenvironment relationships in urban and rural settings in developed and underdeveloped countries and that show how remote sensing and other observational methods are being applied to these issues. This book will serve as a resource for researchers, research funders, and students.
The book comprises original articles on topical issues of risk theory, rational decision making, statistical decisions, and control of stochastic systems. The articles are the outcome of a series international projects involving the leading scholars in the field of modern stochastic optimization and decision making. The structure of stochastic optimization solvers is described. The solvers in general implement stochastic quasi-gradient methods for optimization and identification of complex nonlinear models. These models constitute an important methodology for finding optimal decisions under risk and uncertainty. While a large part of current approaches towards optimization under uncertainty ...
Provides statistical information on the worldwide population of people 65 years old or older.
Understanding sustainability is vital to resolving and managing many of today's problems, on a global as well as local scale. Sustainability science is an emerging field of research that comprises concepts and methodologies from different disciplines in a problem-oriented manner. Research efforts are often concentrated in a variety of sectoral domains. The heterogeneity of scientific tasks involved here and the complexity of environmental and social systems call for specific research strategies which are generally a compromise between high-precision analysis and educated guesswork. For understanding of global change, which embraces a variety of processes on several scales, information needs ...
Consisting of two parts, this book presents papers describing publicly available stochastic programming systems that are operational. It presents a diverse collection of application papers in areas such as production, supply chain and scheduling, gaming, environmental and pollution control, financial modeling, telecommunications, and electricity.