89 results match your criteria: "SOAS University of London[Affiliation]"

Famine and food security: new trends and systems or politics as usual? An introduction.

Disasters

January 2025

The Sudd Institute and University of Juba, South Sudan, and Africa Center for Strategic Studies, National Defense University, United States.

Article Synopsis
  • Famine and food insecurity have surged over the last decade, yet there's a lack of critical analysis on their social and political aspects.
  • A special issue of the journal Disasters aims to fill this gap with eight articles that explore various topics, including global politics, neoliberal strategies, and the impact of war and colonialism.
  • The articles offer a mix of global and local perspectives, focusing on regions like Kashmir, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, and Syria.
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Keeping the global consumption within the planetary boundaries.

Nature

November 2024

Integrated Research on Energy, Environment and Society (IREES), Energy and Sustainability Research Institute Groningen (ESRIG), University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands.

The disparity in environmental impacts across different countries has been widely acknowledged. However, ascertaining the specific responsibility within the complex interactions of economies and consumption groups remains a challenging endeavour. Here, using an expenditure database that includes up to 201 consumption groups across 168 countries, we investigate the distribution of 6 environmental footprint indicators and assess the impact of specific consumption expenditures on planetary boundary transgressions.

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Food insecurity in South Africa was critical prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, but the problem deepened quickly during the pandemic when government controls caused job losses, a food supply collapse, and escalating hunger. The food and fuel price hikes and political instability that followed led to the July 2021 'unrest', which left more than 350 people dead. Behind this lay a crisis within the governing African National Congress.

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Despite growing calls and efforts to decolonise global and humanitarian health, there is limited practical guidance for researchers, educators and practitioners on how to do so. This paper fills this gap by offering a narrative exploration of key recommendations on decolonising global/humanitarian health research, partnerships, teaching, organisational structures and other practices. We present concrete guidelines to support humanitarian actors in decolonising their work.

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The Socio-Environmental Determinants of Childhood Malnutrition: A Spatial and Hierarchical Analysis.

Nutrients

June 2024

Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, 2181 LeFrak Hall, 7251 Preinkert Dr., College Park, MD 20740, USA.

Despite a remarkable reduction in global poverty and famines, substantial childhood malnutrition continues to persist. In 2017, over 50 million and 150 million young children suffered from acute malnutrition () and chronic malnutrition (), respectively. Yet, the measurable impact of determinants is obscure.

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Monitoring health is key for identifying priorities in public health planning and improving healthcare services. Life expectancy has conventionally been regarded as a valuable indicator to compare the health status of different populations. However, this measure is simply the mean of the distribution of the length of life and, as such, neglects individual disparities in health outcomes.

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Healthy democracies require ethical leadership and respect for rules, but since the 2000s we have witnessed serious attacks on standards in the UK Parliament. Two narratives about scandals will reveal cultural and social aspects that are often ignored by the public, journalists and parliamentary scholars. A slow development of conditions led to a scandal over misuse of expenses in 2009, while rule-breaking in Parliament during Prime Minister Johnson's term in office emerged more suddenly, in part out of the rupture of Brexit.

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Addressing the total energy cost burden of elderly people is essential for designing equitable and effective energy policies, especially in responding to energy crisis in an aging society. It is due to the double impact of energy price hikes on households-through direct impact on fuel bills and indirect impact on the prices of goods and services consumed. However, while examining the household energy cost burden of the elderly, their indirect energy consumption and associated cost burden remain poorly understood.

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Does interstate trade of agricultural products in the U.S. alleviate land and water stress?

J Environ Manage

March 2024

Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.

Interregional free-trade of agricultural products is expected to transfer embodied (virtual) water from more to less water-productive regions. However, irrigation in semi-arid to arid regions may significantly push up agricultural productivity but cause local water scarcity. This may result in a puzzle: inter-regional trade may save overall water consumption but lead to more severe local water scarcity.

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Multiple estimates exist of global monetary and multidimensional poverty, but populations at risk of social exclusion still lack a worldwide estimate. This paper fills this gap by providing the first estimates of the share and number of populations at risk of social exclusion worldwide. The paper contributes to the literature in three important respects.

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Background: Persons with albinism face challenges to their wellbeing, safety, and security, ranging from vision impairment and skin cancer to stigma and discrimination. In some regions, they also face human rights atrocities including mutilation and murder. Research on human rights and albinism is a relatively new field that has gained momentum since the United Nations appointment of an Independent Expert on the enjoyment of human rights by persons with albinism.

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The concept of food and nutrition policy has broadened from simply being an aspect of health policy, to policy interventions from across a wide range of sectors, but still with potentially important impact on nutritional outcomes. This wider and more complex conceptualisation involves policy with multiple objectives and stakeholder influences. Thus, it becomes particularly important to understand the dynamics of these policy processes, including policy design and implementation.

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Preventing parasite transmission from humans to mosquitoes is recognised to be critical for achieving elimination and eradication of malaria. Consequently developing new antimalarial drugs with transmission-blocking properties is a priority. Large screening campaigns have identified many new transmission-blocking molecules, however little is known about how they target the mosquito-transmissible Plasmodium falciparum stage V gametocytes, or how they affect their underlying cell biology.

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Background: Informal payments for healthcare are typically regressive and limit access to quality healthcare while increasing risk of catastrophic health expenditure, especially in developing countries. Different responses have been proposed, but little is known about how they influence the incentives driving this behaviour. We therefore identified providers' preferences for policy interventions to overcome informal payments in Tanzania.

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Implementation of carbon pricing in an aging world calls for targeted protection schemes.

PNAS Nexus

July 2023

Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, 2181 LeFrak Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA.

Understanding the impact of climate fiscal policies on vulnerable groups is a prerequisite for equitable climate mitigation. However, there has been a lack of attention to the impacts of such policies on the elderly, especially the low-income elderly, in existing climate policy literature. Here, we quantify and compare the distributional impacts of carbon pricing on different age-income groups in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan and then on different age groups in other 28 developed countries.

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Objective: While discrete choice experiments (DCEs) have been used in other fields as a means of eliciting respondent preferences, these remain relatively new in studying corrupt practices in the health sector. This study documents and discusses the process of developing a DCE to inform policy measures aimed at addressing informal payments for healthcare in Tanzania.

Design: A mixed methods design was used to systematically develop attributes for the DCE.

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When Open Dialogue diversifies internationally as an approach to mental healthcare, so too do the research methodologies used to describe, explain and evaluate this alternative to existing psychiatric services. This article considers the contribution of anthropology and its core method of ethnography among these approaches. It reviews the methodological opportunities in mental health research opened up by anthropology, and specifically the detailed knowledge about clinical processes and institutional contexts.

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The rapid growth of China's demand for grains is expected to continue in the coming decades, largely as a result of the increasing feed demand to produce protein-rich food. This leads to a great concern on future supply potentials of Chinese agriculture under climate change and the extent of China's dependence on world food markets. While the existing literature in both agronomy and climate economics indicates a dominance of the adverse impacts of climate change on rice, wheat, and maize yields, there is a lack of study to assess changes in multi-cropping opportunities induced by climate change.

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The adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) on a large scale is crucial for meeting the desired climate commitments, where affordability plays a vital role. However, the expected surge in prices of lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese, four critical materials in EV batteries, could hinder EV uptake. To explore these impacts in the context of China, the world's largest EV market, we expand and enrich an integrated assessment model.

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Filial piety, love or money? Foundation of old-age support in urban China.

J Aging Stud

March 2023

SOAS China Institute, SOAS University of London, London WC1H 0XG, UK. Electronic address:

This article explores the intertwining issues of filial obligation, material interest and emotional intimacy in driving adult children's provision of old-age support in family settings. Drawing upon multi-generational life history interviews with urban Chinese families, this article reveals how the configuration of these multiple forces is governed by the socio-economic and demographic context of a particular time. The findings dispute a lineal modernization model of transition and generational change (from past family relations structured by filial obligation to the present emotion-laden nuclear family).

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Regulating the Global Antimicrobial Commons: Climate Agreements and Beyond.

Health Care Anal

March 2023

School of Law, SOAS University of London, Russell Square, London, WC1H 0XG, UK.

A treaty to regulate the global antimicrobial commons can be appropriately framed around the model provided by multilateral environmental agreements. At the same time, it is not clear that a comprehensive treaty is the only possible entry point and other options, such as an agreement on technology transfer or funding may be apt starting points. Any legal instrument adopted to regulate the global antimicrobial commons needs to reflect the global South-North dichotomy and integrate the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.

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Background: Achieving climate targets will require a rapid transition to clean energy. However, renewable energy (RE) firms face financial, policy, and economic barriers to mobilizing sufficient investment in low-carbon technologies, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Here, we analyze the challenges and successes of financing the energy transition in Nigeria and Brazil using three empirically grounded levers: financing environments, channels, and instruments.

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