Maxx Dilley's research while affiliated with United Nations Development Programme and other places

... Large-scale landslides often have lasting socioeconomic impacts: the Aso Bridge landslide [ (Dang, et al., 2016;Song, et al., 2019;Doi, et al., 2019)], see Fig. 1(a), is a typical example where it took 4-5 years to rebuild the damaged bridge, railroad, and highway. As a result, landslides are considered to be one of the most costly natural disasters in the world [ (Dilley, et al., 2005)]. To improve the understanding of the complex motion of landslides and to mitigate their catastrophic and life-threatening consequences, landslides have attracted great attention and continuous efforts from researchers from many disciplines with a wide range of research priorities and approaches: see, e.g., the review for co-seismic landslides [ (Wasowski, et al., 2011;Jibson, 2011)] and the references therein. ...

... area (5° S-5° N; 170°-120° W; Barnston et al. 1997). Same as Goddard and Dilley (2005) and Camargo et al. (2008), we define El Niño or La Niña years according to the Niño3.4 index. ...

... The annual cycle of precipitation in parts of southern Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean exhibits a bimodal signal characterized by two wetter periods and a drier period in between during Midsummer, most commonly referred to as Midsummer drought (MSD; Mosiño and García 1966;Magaña et al. 1999;Gamble et al. 2008;Perdigón-Morales et al. 2018;Zhao and Zhang 2021) or locally as canícula and Veranillo (Dilley 1996). The MSD, as a relatively drier spell during the rainy season, is known to impact agriculture and crop-yield (Jobbová et al. 2018;Harvey et al. 2018), and recent evidence has highlighted both changes to the timing of the MSD (Anderson et al. 2019) and increasingly damaging impacts of droughts to local farmers (Hellin et al. 2017;Chen et al. 2017). ...

... Using the two scenarios described earlier (see Figure 2), we found that farmers are well aware of the possibility of poor harvests and failed harvests (harvests equal to or less than the amounts planted). Especially in the VC, the primary source of maize harvest failure is variation in timing or amount of summer rainfall [54]. Farmers in that region reported a significantly greater proportion of years (number out of ten) of very poor maize harvest compared to farmers in the SJ region (Table 8). ...

... The primary tools for predicting climate change are global climate models (GCMs), which are developed based on consideration of alternative scenarios for the evolution of GHGs and aerosol concentrations. They work well at replicating both global and continental climate characteristics, such as global and continental temperature and precipitation patterns, and are intended to assess the behavior of the global climate system [18]. The most recent GCMs from the phase 5 Coupled Model Intercomparing Project (CMIP5) used the UK Meteorology Office Hadley Centre Global Earth System Models (HadGEM-ESM) and contributed to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5) [19]. ...

... This study considers the summer season as the most important period for the regional economy, which greatly relies on agriculture, which depends on the seasonal rainfall and the behavior of the monsoon rains (Sivakumar et al., 2014) and is generally practiced during the summer. Any changes during this crucial period often have a devastating effect on socio-economic activities and food security in the region (Dilley & Heyman, 1995;Haile, 2005;Omotosho & Abiodun, 2007). Drought, excessive rains, or heatwaves during the growing season can potentially diminish crop yield, especially in the Sahel, where water is a particularly determining element for the growth of the crops (Ahmed et al., 2015). ...

... We have shown the value of online training (supplemented by practical training) for development knowledge in flood evacuation, rescue, and recovery capacity. Many opportunities for future research remain, including investigation of the strategies drowning prevention and lifesaving organisations have developed in response to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 [30]; identifying gaps in the current strategies of lifesaving organisations to respond to a flood disaster; and comparing a country's drought preparedness to flood preparedness as there are likely lessons that can be transferred from one climate disaster to another in the context of Southern Africa [31]. ...

... Thus, underdeveloped countries face the challenge of reducing conventional agricultural practices that significantly determine environmental deterioration. This is problematic for these countries because their agriculture is usually based on land fragmentation, and small farms often lack adaptability (Archer et al., 2007). ...

... There is little agreement on what vulnerability means (Wrigley, 2015) or how it should be applied (Bracken-Roche, et al., 2017), with some authors describing it as vague and observing that the concept often relies on implicit assumptions (Schroeder and Gefenas, 2009). Some definitions include that it describes the future threat of poverty (Calvo and Dercon, 2005), a condition in which the object is prone to exploitation (Schroeder and Gefenas, 2009) or susceptibility to harm (Dilley and Boudreau, 2001); others have described it in terms of the lifetime dynamic between stress and resources (Spini, et al., 2017). Fineman's (2008) vulnerability theory argues that vulnerability is a human condition, and thus, the role of government is to provide support to all since no individual is immune to vulnerability and the experience of hardship. ...

... The essential difference between them is whether the interaction between different disasters is considered in their synthesis process. From a superposition perspective, the multi-hazards risk is measured through the synthesis of all the single-disaster risk results [30][31][32][33][34], only with different disasters in different weights, or through the synthesis of hazard factors [35][36][37][38][39]. Unfortunately, this type of approach lacks consideration of spatial comparison and the effects of different hazard factors. The determination of index weight for disasters is also significantly influenced by the scale of the research object and historical disaster data availability. ...