Suchergebnisse

It has been almost a decade since Gonzalez-Mathiesen and March (2014) completed their international analysis that identified 9 design features for wildfire risk reduction via urban planning. Despite their recommendations and subsequent global attempts to enhance and improve resilience from an urban design perspective, wildfires1 remain one of the costliest hazards globally, both from a financial and a human perspective. This continued devastation raises the question as to whether urban design and wildfire engineering practices have either been adopted or changed since Gonzalez-Mathiesen and March (2014). To consider this, this paper presents a review and comparison of contemporary international wildland-urban-interface-related urban design legislation, policy and frameworks. Inconsistent approaches to addressing wildfire-related risk, and at times competing standards required between planning and building approaches were identified. These only serve to further reduce the potential effectiveness of measures intended to improve wildfire resilience at the national and international scales. Future work should focus on establishing evidence-based performance standards that emphasise the practical application of the findings of the best available current research to be incorporated into planning and construction. At the same time, it may be necessary to review policy approaches to clearly align key definitions of tolerable risk as well as provide clarification about how performance standards can be demonstrated.

Source at: http://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14121462 ; Circumpolar regions, and the nations within which they reside, have recently gained international attention because of shared and pressing public policy issues such as climate change, resource development, endangered wildlife and sovereignty disputes. In a call for national and circumpolar action on shared areas of concern, the Arctic states health ministers recently met and signed a declaration that identified shared priorities for international cooperation. Among the areas for collaboration raised, the declaration highlighted the importance of enhancing intercultural understanding, promoting culturally appropriate health care delivery and strengthening circumpolar collaboration in culturally appropriate health care delivery. This paper responds to the opportunity for further study to fully understand indigenous values and contexts, and presents these as they may apply to a framework that will support international comparisons and systems improvements within circumpolar regions. We explored the value base of indigenous peoples and provide considerations on how these values might interface with national values, health systems values and value bases between indigenous nations particularly in the context of health system policy-making that is inevitably shared between indigenous communities and jurisdictional or federal governments. Through a mixed methods nominal consensus process, nine values were identified and described: humanity, cultural responsiveness, teaching, nourishment, community voice, kinship, respect, holism and empowerment.