查看更多>>摘要:Unexploded ordnance (UXO) from the World Wars on the North Sea floor pose an uncertain occupational safety risk for dredging and cable installation. At present mitigation strategies are based on an interpretation of the precautionary principle that uses a worst-case approach, that is, assuming that UXO will be encountered, will explode, and will harm people onboard. We propose a probabilistic framework to estimate the UXO risk. Using this probabilistic framework, we conclude that the UXO risk during cable installation meets the prevailing safety standard in the Netherlands. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the UXO risk is lower than the general maritime risk, that is, the occupational health risk caused by the mitigation is higher than the UXO risk itself.We conclude that even for uncertain occupational risks, such as the UXO risk in the North Sea, a probabilistic analysis can be more instrumental in the decision-making process on accepting and mitigating risks than using worst-case scenario thinking.
查看更多>>摘要:In light of the escalating global warming and the escalating frequency of extreme weather events, the agricultural sector, being a fundamental and pivotal industry worldwide, is encountering substantial challenges due to climate change. Using Chinese provincial panel data for 2000–2021, this paper utilizes a two-way fixed-effect model to investigate the impact of Climate Risk (CR) on green total factor productivity in agriculture (AGTFP), with China’s climate policy uncertainty (CPU) being introduced as a moderating variable within the research framework to scrutinize its influence in this context. The findings reveal a noteworthy adverse effect of CR on AGTFP, further exacerbated by CPU. Heterogeneity analysis results show that there is a clear regional variation in the effect of CR on AGTFP across different Chinese regions, with CR significantly inhibiting AGTFP development in the northern regions and provinces in major grain producing regions. Consequently, there is a pressing necessity to bolster the establishment of climate change monitoring infrastructures, devise tailored climate adaptation strategies at a regional level, and enhance the clarity and predictability of climate policies to fortify the resilience and sustainability of agricultural production systems.
Sarah C. LinkMarie EggelingFerdinand AbaciogluChristoph Boehmert...
996-1008页
查看更多>>摘要:To understand citizens’ reactions to the 5G rollout, their affective reaction and perception of radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) exposure are of interest. Although precursor studies on 2G–4G have investigated exposure perception mostly quantitatively, the present study applied a qualitative exploratory approach. A number of 35 individual interviews and 6 focus groups with the same participants were conducted in December 2022. Participants were recruited from several locations in Germany, where 5G rollout was at different stages. Interactive tasks, particularly an affective evaluation task and a ranking task, encouraged participants to consider their affect regarding mobile communications and their exposure perception. This approach allowed the participants to first engage with the topic of mobile communications/5G in an intuitive way, before talking about their specific beliefs on RF-EMF exposure. Several pictures showing a person (1) interacting with a mobile phone, (2) surrounded by other peoples’ mobile phones, or (3) in the vicinity of mobile phone base stations (antennas) were used as stimulus materials. Data were analyzed using an exploratory content analysis. In the affective evaluation task participants revealed more negative associations with base stations than with mobile phones. The analysis showed that the reasons for their evaluation were very diverse, whereby exposure to RF-EMF only played a subordinate role. Further, the ranking task indicated that most participants (n = 20) felt more exposed from base stations than from mobile devices. Results are mostly in-line with the literature on 2G–4G and do not indicate a substantially different exposure perception for 5G.
查看更多>>摘要:Foodborne disease cases are increasingly occurring in home kitchens because of improper food handling behavior. Human factors are considered major determinants of such behavior, although economic factors, which have attracted little attention, may also be important influencers. Taking the service time of kitchen towels as an example, we construct a theoretical model to analyze food handling behavior under an economic framework and empirically explore its economic determinants. Empirically, we use a randomized controlled trial (RCT) coupled with pre- and postsurveys in rural China. The RCT intervention includes information with tips for proper kitchen towel use and in-kind subsidies of one, two, or three packs of kitchen towels, which is regarded as a price intervention. We find that information alone and information plus one pack of towels are not enough to stimulate behavior improvement, whereas information plus two or three packs is sufficient. This implies that the quantity of kitchen towels used increases only as the towel price drops below a certain threshold. As an early attempt, we indicate that food handling behavior is economically driven, suggesting that a well-designed policy should combine educational campaigns and appropriate economic incentives to improve such behavior to reduce the risk of foodborne disease.
查看更多>>摘要:Cybersecurity events can cause business disruptions, health and safety repercussions, financial costs, and negative publicity for large firms, and executives rank cybersecurity as a top operational concern. Although cybersecurity may be the most publicized information systems (IS) risk, large firms face a range of IS risks. Over the past three decades, researchers developed frameworks to categorize and evaluate IS risks. However, there have been few updates to these frameworks despite numerous technological advances, and we are not aware of any research that uses empirical data to map actual IS risks cited by large firms to these frameworks. To address this gap, we coded and analyzed text data from Item 1A (Risk Factors) of the fiscal year 2020 Securities and Exchange Commission Forms 10-K for all Fortune 1000 firms. We build on prior research to develop a framework that places 25 IS risks into four quadrants and 10 categories, and we record the number and type of IS risks cited by each firm. The risk of cyberattack is cited by virtually all Fortune 1000 firms, and the risk of software/hardware failure is cited by 90% of Fortune 1000 firms. Risks associated with data privacy law compliance are cited by 70% of Fortune 1000 firms, and risks associated with internet/telecommunications/power outage, human error, and natural disasters/terrorism are cited by 60% of Fortune 1000 firms. We perform additional analysis to identify differences in risk citation based on industry and financial measures.
查看更多>>摘要:The vulnerability of mega infrastructure projects (MIPs) has generated online public opinion crises, leading to public trust damage. However, few studies focused on the online dynamic trust of MIPs in such crises from the perspective of multiple users. Based on situational crisis communication theory, this study aims to explore the dynamic public trust in MIPs during online public opinion crises of extreme climate emergencies. The extreme heavy rainstorm event in Zhengzhou City, China, was selected as the case. Content analysis, the curve fitting method, and sentiment analysis were conducted to process the collected data from multiple users. The results indicated that the opinions of trust damage were set by “media practitioners” and led by “elites,” whereas the opinions of trust repair were directed by “elites,” led by “media practitioners,” and defended by “individuals.” Besides, trust dimensions would change over time; integrity-based and competence-based trust diffused alternatively. “Diminish,” “deny,” and “rebuild” strategies were proved to be the most effective strategies in integrity-based, competence-based, and competence and integrity–based trust repair, respectively. The findings can contribute to the authorities monitoring online public opinions in extreme climate emergencies and repairing trustworthy images.
查看更多>>摘要:Online knowledge-sharing platforms construct risk knowledge and provide the audience with risk-related scientific facts. We study how speakers organize narratives in past, present, and future foci to influence the audience’s emotions through the audience’s appraisal of motive congruency and coping potential. Empirical evidence from 210 Technology, Entertainment, Design talks about disasters from 2002 to 2018 demonstrates that emphasizing the past, present, and future in risk narrative leads to the audience’s comments with more negative, less positive, and more positive emotions, respectively. Concrete (vs. abstract) portrayal of the risk narrative improves the audience’s situational awareness, enhances their risk appraisal, and intensifies the impact of temporal focus on emotions, providing evidence of how temporal focus impacts. These findings demonstrate that temporal focus can effectively reduce risk overreaction or ignorance and facilitate emotion regulation in risk communication.
查看更多>>摘要:Critical infrastructure systems (CISs) are the cornerstone of modern cities. Substantial economic losses and social impacts are caused once natural disasters or man-made disruptions attack the CISs. As a “resilient city” has become an essential theme of communities’ sustainable development, research on resilience and its practice in industries boost the CISs’ capacity to respond and adapt to changing environments. From the Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection, this study screened 1,247 scientific articles related to resilience in CISs and conducted a bibliometric analysis to investigate the evolution and future potential in this field. Topic visualized networks were constructed for CIS resilience using CiteSpace, a dedicated tool for visualizing and analyzing trends and patterns in scientific literature. The results demonstrate collaborative research networks among countries, institutions, main scholar/group networks, and leading journals publishing CIS resilience work. This study also explained how the research interest evolved over the last 20 years and found the current frontiers pointing to “power systems resilience” and “supply chain resilience.” The reasons were discussed subsequently from the perspectives of the influence that natural hazards (based on the EM-DAT data) and government policies have upon CISs’ resilience work.
查看更多>>摘要:Damage to a nuclear power station resulted in radioactive contamination of certain areas of Japan in 2011. Legislation was put in place in Europe to establish controls on the import of certain types of food and feed, including a limit of 100 radioactive decays (becquerel, Bq) per second of radiocesium per kg. This legislation was retained in the United Kingdom after leaving the EU and then reviewed in 2021. A quantitative risk assessment was developed to estimate the radiological risk to public health from consuming Japanese food imported into the United Kingdom should the maximum level on radiocesium be removed. Although Japanese monitoring data indicated occurrences when products exceeded the 100 Bq per kg limit, these were found to be rare; a total of 1485 occurrences (0.0013%) of all measured foodstuff samples (>1 million) within the scope of this assessment had radiocesium activity concentrations that exceeded 100 Bq per kg. Using the recorded occurrence and level of radiocesium measured, and the current pattern and volume of food imported from Japan, there was an estimated excess risk of fatal cancer of around one in a million per year, categorized as negligible compared to the baseline 2018–2020 UK cancer fatality rate of around 1 in 4. On the basis of the described assessment and the estimated small additional risk, Great Britain lifted import controls related to radioactivity present in food from Japan. A number of recommendations to address data gaps and approaches in this assessment are made, particularly how we can improve modeling UK dietary habits for specialist foods.
查看更多>>摘要:Advantages of commercial UAS-based services come with the disadvantage of posing third party risk (TPR) to overflown population on the ground. Especially challenging is that the imposed level of ground TPR tends to increase linearly with the density of potential customers of UAS services. This challenge asks for the development of complementary directions in reducing ground TPR. The first direction is to reduce the rate of a UAS crash to the ground. The second direction is to reduce overflying in more densely populated areas by developing risk-aware UAS path planning strategies. The third direction is to develop UAS designs that reduce the product A_(impact) ⋅ ℙ{F|impact} in case of a crashing UAS, where A_(impact) is the size of the crash impact area on the ground, and ℙ{F|impact} is the probability of fatality for a person in the crash impact area. Because small UAS accident and incident data are scarce, each of these three developments is in need of predictive models regarding their contribution to ground TPR. Such models have been well developed for UAS crash event rate and risk-aware UAS path planning. The objective of this article is to develop an improved model and assessment method for the product A_(impact) ⋅ ℙ{F|impact}. In literature, the model development and assessment of the latter two terms is accomplished along separate routes. The objective of this article is to develop an integrated approach. The first step is the development of an integrated model for the product A_(impact) ⋅ ℙ{F|impact}. The second step is to show that this integrated model can be assessed by conducting dynamical simulations of Finite Element (FE) or Multi-Body System (MBS) models of collision between a UAS and a human body. Application of this novel method is illustrated and compared to existing methods for a DJI Phantom III UAS crashing to the ground.