Suchergebnisse

A country's identification system is the backbone for effective delivery of public and private services. Governments are exploring the development of multipurpose foundational ID systems, in which individuals receive a unique identifier from the government that they can use for identity assertion and verification. The foundational ID can then be used to access a wide variety of government and private services (MOSIP, "MOSIP Documentation"). As countries consider how best to build foundational ID systems, they face several policy and technological choices. Once these choices are made, countries often grapple with some common implementation challenges. These include ensuring uniqueness in the system, interoperability, privacy by design reaching scale, avoiding vendor lock-in and maintaining affordability (MOSIP, "MOSIP Documentation"). Through the course of this study we have analyzed the security scope of national identity services adopted by various countries around the world.

The complexity of vulnerability to natural hazards requires a thorough assessment of both physical and social factors. Physical vulnerability explains the occupancy within hazardous zones and social vulnerability determines how a community can cope, respond to, and recover from disasters. The determination of both physical and social vulnerability helps find the overall vulnerability of a place and this in turn helps with hazard mitigation. This study assesses the overall place vulnerability by examining both physical and social vulnerability in six Coastal Georgia counties. This study also uses Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to generate a social vulnerability index. To obtain the place vulnerability, AMBUR-HVA which is a package in the R programming language is used to create the place vulnerability index by combining the physical and social vulnerability. The global and local Moran's I statistics are used to determine the spatial autocorrelation of the vulnerability index and the results show census tracts with high place vulnerability mostly within Savannah, Riceboro, Darien, Brunswick, St. Marys, and Sapelo. The results presented in this study can help government officials and policymakers channel resources to the people or areas that need the most assistance.

This article presents the detailed methodology developed for the vulnerability assessment of the military aircraft against fragmentation warhead. Vulnerability assessment methodology consists of calculation of the dispersion of the fragments, determination of the hit locations, penetration calculations and probability of kill calculations for the aircraft utilizing the fault tree established for the particular aircraft studied. Based on the developed methodology, vulnerability assessment and survivability analysis of a generic aircraft is performed for different predefined approach angles of the missile threat. For the measure of the vulnerability, mean volume of effectiveness of the warhead is proposed as the metric which is defined as the volume integral of the probability of kill distribution around the aircraft for different intercept directions of the missile. Through the case study, it is shown that mean volume of effectiveness can be used as the single measure of the overall vulnerability assessment of the aircraft. (C) 2017 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

Between 1996 and 1999, five mining subsidence events occurred in the iron‐ore field in Lorraine, France, and damaged several hundred buildings. Because of the thousand hectares of undermined areas, an assessment of the vulnerability of buildings and land is necessary for risk management. Risk assessment methods changed from initial risk management decisions that took place immediately after the mining subsidence to the risk assessment studies that are currently under consideration. These changes reveal much about the complexity of the vulnerability concept and about difficulties in developing simple and relevant methods for its assessment. The objective of this article is to present this process, suggest improvements on the basis of theoretical definitions of the vulnerability, and give an operational example of vulnerability assessment in the seismic field. The vulnerability is divided into three components: weakness, stakes value, and resilience. Final improvements take into account these three components and constitute an original method of assessing the vulnerability of a city to subsidence.

As part of the collaboration between the Government of Uzbekistan and the World Bank in improving the effectiveness of social protection, the Bank conducted a diagnostic study on the main risk's households face and the main strategies adopted to reduce vulnerability and cope with such risks. The main objective of the study is to determine the extent to which social protection is addressing such risks and in which areas gaps remain. This could inform areas of potential further work and collaboration between the Government of Uzbekistan and the World Bank.

AbstractMajor food fraud scandals of the last decade have created awareness of the need to strengthen companies' ability to combat fraud within their own organizations and across their supply chains. The scandals compelled food companies and the food industry as a whole to take action and to protect companies and industries against the threat of food fraud. Stakeholders expect food companies to act proactively to mitigate food fraud risks. Certification schemes expect food producers to consider food fraud and to undertake food fraud vulnerability assessments and prepare control plans to mitigate fraud risks. This paper examines how vulnerability for food fraud on company level and supply chain level can be assessed using criminological theory. First, the paper discusses how such theory can be applied for assessing motivations and opportunities for internal and external actors to commit food fraud and assessing existing control measures to mitigate these vulnerabilities. Second, the paper discusses the SSAFE-tool in which these elements have been used in a survey for assessing food fraud vulnerability of companies in food supply chains. Third, the paper evaluates the results of the application of the SSAFE-tool to several food supply chain and tiers, including milk, spices, extra olive oil, organic foods and the food service industry.

The 7.6-magnitude earthquake on October 8, 2005, caused a large number of deaths, and left more than 100,000 people injured and an estimated 3 million people displaced or homeless. To assist the Government of Pakistan in the preparation of a rehabilitation plan, the first step was to identify the vulnerable people living in the tent camps. The Population Council completed an assessment survey of the camps in the earthquake area. This assessment is distinctive from the surveys carried out previously, since it collects socio-demographic and vulnerability indicators about each individual. The assessment is useful in tracking the conditions of especially vulnerable individuals and strives to support the Government of Pakistan and other donor agencies to develop their rehabilitation plans. As noted in this report, the survey estimated the extent of the vulnerability, i.e. the numbers of orphans, widows, children, and elderly. Findings have been used in developing the basis of the Government of Pakistan's rehabilitation plan.

Report of the Texas State Auditor's Office related to vulnerability assessments of information systems performed by the Department of Information Resources.

Quantifying vulnerability to critical infrastructure has not been adequately addressed in the literature. Thus, the purpose of this article is to present a model that quantifies vulnerability. Vulnerability is defined as a measure of system susceptibility to threat scenarios. This article asserts that vulnerability is a condition of the system and it can be quantified using the Infrastructure Vulnerability Assessment Model (I‐VAM). The model is presented and then applied to a medium‐sized clean water system. The model requires subject matter experts (SMEs) to establish value functions and weights, and to assess protection measures of the system. Simulation is used to account for uncertainty in measurement, aggregate expert assessment, and to yield a vulnerability (Ω) density function. Results demonstrate that I‐VAM is useful to decisionmakers who prefer quantification to qualitative treatment of vulnerability. I‐VAM can be used to quantify vulnerability to other infrastructures, supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA), and distributed control systems (DCS).

Cities and towns are faced with various types of threat from the extraordinary events involving chemical and radiological materials as exemplified by major chemical accidents, radiological incidents, fires, explosions, traffic accidents, terrorist attacks, etc. On the other hand, many sensitive or vulnerable assets exist within cities, such as: settlements, infrastructures, hospitals, schools, churches, businesses, government, and others. Besides emergency planning, the land use planning also represents an important tool for prevention or reduction of damages on people and other assets due to unwanted events. This paper considers development of method for inclusion vulnerability assessment in land use planning with objective to assess and limit the consequences in cities of likely accidents involving hazardous materials. We made preliminary assessment of criticality and vulnerability of the assets within Belgrade city area in respect to chemical sites and transportation roads that can be exposed to chemical accidents, or terrorist attacks.

Adapting sectors to new conditions under climate change requires an understanding of regional vulnerabilities. Conceptually, vulnerability is defined as a function of sensitivity and exposure, which determine climate impacts, and adaptive capacity of a system. Vulnerability assessments for quantifying these components have become a key tool within the climate change field. However, there is a disagreement on how to make the concept operational in studies from a scientific perspective. This conflict leads to many still unsolved challenges, especially regarding the quantification and aggregation of the components and their suitable level of complexity. This thesis therefore aims at advancing the scientific foundation of such studies by translating the concept of vulnerability into a systematic assessment structure. This includes all components and implies that for each considered impact (e.g. flash floods) a clear sensitive entity is defined (e.g. settlements) and related to a direction of change for a specific climatic stimulus (e.g. increasing impact due to increasing days with heavy precipitation). Regarding the challenging aggregation procedure, two alternative methods allowing a cross-sectoral overview are introduced and their advantages and disadvantages discussed. This assessment structure is subsequently exemplified for municipalities of the German state North Rhine-Westphalia via an indicator-based deductive approach using information from literature. It can be transferred also to other regions. As for many relevant sectors, suitable indicators to express the vulnerability components are lacking, new quantification methods are developed and applied in this thesis, for example for the forestry and health sector. A lack of empirical data on relevant thresholds is evident, for example which climatic changes would cause significant impacts. Consequently, the multi-sectoral study could only provide relative measures for each municipality, in relation to the region. To fill this gap, an exemplary sectoral study was carried out on windthrow impacts in forests to provide an absolute quantification of the present and future impact. This is achieved by formulating an empirical relation between the forest characteristics and damage based on data from a past storm event. The resulting measure indicating the sensitivity is then combined with wind conditions. Multi-sectoral vulnerability assessments require considerable resources, which often hinders the implementation. Thus, in a next step, the potential for reducing the complexity is explored. To predict forest fire occurrence, numerous meteorological indices are available, spanning over a range of complexity. Comparing their performance, the single variable relative humidity outperforms complex indicators for most German states in explaining the monthly fire pattern. This is the case albeit it is itself an input factor in most indices. Thus, this meteorological factor alone is well suited to evaluate forest fire danger in many Germany regions and allows a resource-efficient assessment. Similarly, the complexity of methods is assessed regarding the application of the ecohydrological model SWIM to the German region of Brandenburg. The inter-annual soil moisture levels simulated by this model can only poorly be represented by simpler statistical approach using the same input data. However, on a decadal time horizon, the statistical approach shows a good performance and a strong dominance of the soil characteristic field capacity. This points to a possibility to reduce the input factors for predicting long-term averages, but the results are restricted by a lack of empirical data on soil water for validation. The presented assessments of vulnerability and its components have shown that they are still a challenging scientific undertaking. Following the applied terminology, many problems arise when implementing it for regional studies. Advances in addressing shortcomings of previous studies have been made by constructing a new systematic structure for characterizing and aggregating vulnerability components. For this, multiple approaches were presented, but they have specific advantages and disadvantages, which should also be carefully considered in future studies. There is a potential to simplify some methods, but more systematic assessments on this are needed. Overall, this thesis strengthened the use of vulnerability assessments as a tool to support adaptation by enhancing their scientific basis.