Shopping to save lives: Gender and environment theories meet ethical consumption

Much of the current work in the field of ‘gender and environment’ has been developed around case studies of environmental roles, rights and responsibilities at the community or household scale in the South. This paper asserts that the theoretical insights developed through these case studies can be of great use when examining issues of gender and environment in the North, particularly when it comes to issues of ethical consumption. In this paper I examine the promotional discourses of two cause-related marketing (CRM) campaigns (where consumption of a CRM product triggers a donation to a development cause) using two such insights: (i) the mutual constitution of gendered subjectivities and environments and (ii) a gender and environment approach to questioning neoliberalization. This approach highlights the ways in which – through consumption – gender is constituted transnationally at the same time that it is constituted in relation to environments. This approach also emphasizes a series of questions about the neoliberal aspects of CRM campaigns that are usually hidden behind discourses of motherhood and responsibility. Overall, I argue that bringing gender and environment and ethical consumption research together allows us to advance both areas of study in critical and insightful ways.     

Landslide susceptibility assessment in Apulian Southern Apennine: heuristic vs. statistical methods

In this paper, a bivariate-heuristic model (modified Stevenson’s method) and two multivariate statistical procedures (discriminant analysis and logistic regression) were used in order to assess and map landslide susceptibility in the north-western side of Daunia region (Apulia, Southern Italy). The whole Daunia region is characterized by complex and composite landslides, which are located on clayey slopes, near urban centers, affecting structures and infrastructures. The high predisposition to landsliding of the Daunia hillslopes is related to the very poor strength properties of clayey formations. The comparative analysis of landslide susceptibility using different methods, on the same test site and with the same inventory map allowed understanding the dependence of the results from the dataset and the capability of models under different levels of use, from expert to simple operator. By comparing the performance of the three models through the success rate curves, it emerges that the simple modified Stevenson’s method produces reliable outcomes, comparable with those deriving from more complex multivariate statistical models. This result is related to the characteristics of clayey slopes, in which the landslide occurrence is so much controlled by the poor strength properties of the clayey formations that the multivariate analysis of a large set of morphometric, geological and land-use variables results to be somehow superfluous. This suggests that, for clayey slopes, a simple, easy-to-manage bivariate-heuristic model based on expert opinion can be used with reliable results.     

Assessment of susceptibility to landslides through geographic information systems and the logistic regression model

Natural Hazards - The increase in the frequency of natural disasters in recent years and its consequent social, economic and environmental impacts make it possible to prioritize areas of risk as an...