The long-term aim of the IIASA Program on Risk and Vulnerability (RAV) is to conduct conceptual and applied analyses that contribute to decreasing the risk and vulnerability of societies and ecosystems, and promoting their adaptation and resilience, to stresses imposed or aggravated by global change phenomena. The research will be relevant mainly, but not exclusively, to developing countries. B...

This research provides novel insights into the evolutionary basis of cultural norm development and maintenance. We yield evidence for a unique culture-gene coevolutionary model between ecological threat, allelic frequency of the serotonin transporter polymorphism (5-HTTLPR), cultural tightness-looseness-the strength of norms and tolerance for deviance from norms-and moral justifiability. As hyp...

The ecological vulnerability evaluation index was established through Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Wetness (WET), Build-up and Soil (NDBSI) Land Surface Temperature (LST) indicators, comprehensively evaluate the of Zhongxian County Chongqing in 2002, 2009, 2016 by Principal Components Analysis (PCA), analyze its spatio-temporal evolution. areas five levels were calculated resp...

Efforts at improving child-health and development initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa had focused on the physical health of children due to the neglect of child and adolescent mental health (CAMH) policy initiatives. A thorough and broad-based understanding of the prevalent child mental-health risk and vulnerability factors is needed to successfully articulate CAMH policies. In this discourse, we...

We explore interactions between an organization’s strategic position, economic performance, and vulnerability to ecological pressures. We posit that (1) high profitability buffers an organization from density-driven competitive pressure and (2) this effect is moderated by an organization’s strategic positioning choices. Our empirical tests, relying on longitudinal data from the U.S. for-hire tr...

The concepts resilience, vulnerability, and adaptation are increasingly important for the study of the human dimensions of global environmental change. Events during the last 2 years, such as the hurricane Katrina, the Southeast Asian tsunami, and the Pakistan earthquake, together with the bird flu and continuing droughts in Africa, dramatically illustrate the potential vulnerability of human s...