Browsing by Subject "index"
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Item Agricultural Livelihoods and Climate Change: Employing the Livelihood Vulnerability Index in Bluefields, Jamaica(2014-08-20) Fath, KevinThe purpose of this quantitative study was to examine agricultural livelihood vulnerability to climate change in Bluefields, Westmoreland, Jamaica based on the Livelihoods Vulnerability Index (LVI). Additionally, this study sought to examine relationships between selected characteristics of adopter innovativeness and farmer vulnerability level. Random sampling was used to select participants (N=52). Personal interviews were conducted with farmers using an instrument consisting of LVI components representing livelihood strategies, natural and physical assets, socio-demographic profile, social networks, water issues, food issues, and natural disasters and climate variability. The instrument also contained questions related to selected characteristics of adopter innovativeness: years of farming experience, relative income, farm size, access to credit, contact with extension services, distance to market, and head of household age. LVI data were aggregated using an indexing approach to create scores for comparison across vulnerability components. The study showed farmers in Bluefields have the greatest amount of vulnerability in the area of social networks and water issues. Low numbers of farmers owned their land, had contact with extension services, or used irrigation. Most farmers reported having problems with access to seeds and planting material, depended on their farms for food, and experienced frequent crop failure. Only one adopter innovativeness characteristic was significantly correlated to farmer vulnerability scores. A moderate negative association was observed between perceived relative income and farmer vulnerability. Farmers in Bluefields are vulnerable to climate change. Development organizations and local change agents should target the areas of greatest vulnerability illuminated by this study. Vulnerability and its contributing factors (exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity) should be reassessed with the LVI and other methods to monitor changes in Bluefields over time.Item Safety-oriented Resilience Evaluation in Chemical Processes(2012-02-14) Dinh, Linh Thi ThuyIn the area of process safety, many efforts have focused on studying methods to prevent the transition of the state of the system from a normal state to an upset and/or catastrophic state, but many unexpected changes are unavoidable, and even under good risk management incidents still occur. The aim of this work is to propose the principles and factors that contribute to the resilience of the chemical process, and to develop a systematic approach to evaluate the resilience of chemical processes in design aspects. Based on the analysis of transition of the system states, the top-level factors that contribute to Resilience were developed, including Design, Detection Potential, Emergency Response Planning, Human, and Safety Management. The evaluation framework to identify the Resilience Design Index is developed by means of the multifactor model approach. The research was then focused on developing complete subfactors of the top-level Design factor. The sub-factors include Inherent Safety, Flexibility, and Controllability. The proposed framework to calculate the Inherent Safety index takes into account all the aspects of process safety design via many sub-indices. Indices of Flexibility and Controllability sub-factors were developed from implementations of well-known methodologies in process design and process control, respectively. Then, the top-level Design index was evaluated by combining the indices of the sub-factors with weight factors, which were derived from Analytical Hierarchical Process approach. A case study to compare the resilience levels of two ethylene production designs demonstrated the proposed approaches and gave insights on process resilience of the designs.