Drought

For nearly a decade, international efforts to combat famine and food shortages around the globe have concentrated on the critical situations in sub-Saharan Africa. In the Sudan, the largest country in Africa, prolonged drought, complicated by civil strife and debilitating economic problems, has caused widespread human suffering. The Sudan illustrates the proverbial worst-case scenario in which urgent food needs have been denied, food has been used as a weapon, and outside assistance has been obstructed. The Challenges of Famine Relief focuses on the two famine emergencies in the Sudan in the 1980s - the great African drought-related famine of 1984-86 and the conflict-related famine that afflicted the southern Sudan in 1988-91. Francis Deng and Larry Minear analyze the historical and political setting and the response by Sudan authorities and the international community. The book outlines four problem areas exemplified in the response to each crisis: the external nature of famine relief, the relationship between relief activities and endemic problems, the coordination of such activities, and the ambivalence of the results. The authors identify the many difficulties inherent in providing emergency relief to populations caught in circumstances of life-threatening famine. They show how such famine emergencies reflect the most extreme breakdown of social order and present the most compelling imperatives for international action. Deng and Minear also discuss how the international community, alerted by the media and mobilized by the Ethiopian famine, moved in to fill the moral void left by the government and how outside organizations worked together to pressure Sudan's political authorities tobe more responsive to these tragedies. Looking ahead, the authors highlight the implications for future involvement in humanitarian initiatives in a new world order. As recent developments in Eastern Europe and the former S

In this new, enlarged edition, John Opie updates his groundbreaking work on the environmental history of the Ogallala aquifer and plains farming. He addresses the impact of the 1996 Farm Bill (Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform Act) and looks at the recent movement of industrial hog farming onto the plains. Opie also develops his argument for the plains as a "moral geography", a view involving the recognition by society that it has an obligation to balance the responsibility for conserving natural resources with that for keeping a regional people -- the family farmers -- in operation.

An international team of distinguished scholars have each contributed a chapter to produce an advanced, full length, physical geography of Africa. The first part provides an overview of both pan-Africa patterns in the physical environment and those attributes of African physical geography that are distinctive by considering the development of the main features through time. The authors also provide a synoptic review of Francophone and Anglophone literature on the subject, discuss the present state of knowledge, and set out the work and methods that have created it. This part is followed by a group of chapters that integrate such topics as geomorphology, biogeography, environmental change and hydrology within each of the major biomes - forest, savannah, desert, coast, wetland, mountain, Mediterranean and Rift Valley - found in the African continent. Finally there is a section in which various authors look at topical issues concerned with the impact of human activity on the environment. Conservation and development are considered in the light of issues such as soil erosion, desertification, and biodiversity and biodepletion. The authors have produced this integrated physical geography in honour of A.T. Grove as a durable reference work which gives a new perspective on the continent of Africa.

With weather-related losses on the rise, this timely volume explores the poorly-understood fields of hazard vulnerability and disaster management. Including issues of societal responses to climate change, as well as insurance matters and current research methodologies, Thomas Downing presents an overview of the future of climatic disasters, and our ability to cope with them.

This volume integrates key findings from the natural and the social sciences to provide an assessment of environmental risk and the policy responses required to achieve a safer world.