A rmed conflicts frequently lead to the destruction of food systems. Often, warring parties manipulate starvation as a deliberate tactic, using their control over access to food to attract and reward friends and humble and punish enemies. Such conflicts are “food wars,” not only because hunger is used as a weapon but also because food insecurity is both an effect and cause of conflict. In Febru...

The presence of robots in areas containing threats is becoming more prevalent, due to their ability to perform missions accurately, efficiently, and with little risk to humans. Having the robots handle adversarial forces in missions such as search and rescue, intelligence gathering, border protection and humanitarian assistance, raises many new, exciting research challenges. This paper describe...

FAO has as its mandate the raising of levels of nutrition and standards of living and ensuring humanity's freedom from hunger by promoting sustainable agricultural development and alleviating poverty. FAO is dedicated to promoting agriculture, nutrition, forestry, fisheries and rural development to achieve the World Food Summit goal of eradicating hunger. FAO provides advice and assistance to o...

Syria: More than 5 years of conflict have taken a toll on the health of the Syrian people and the health system that serves them, with almost 13.5 million people requiring humanitarian assistance. More than half of the country’s public hospitals and primary health care centres have either closed or are only partially functioning, hundreds of thousands of children under 5 have missed out on rout...

The crisis in Syria has forced more than 4 million people to find refuge outside Syria. In Lebanon, in 2015, the refugee population represented 30 % of the total population. International health assistance has been provided to refugee populations in Lebanon. However, the current humanitarian system has also contributed to increase fragmentation of the Lebanese health system. Ensuring universal ...

GeoWorlds is an extension to digital library technology to support situation understanding and management tasks. Using Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief as a test bed application, GeoWorlds demonstrates feasibility of relating geographical information to a corpus of "other" information in documents. The function of the system is to help a user understand facts and events in relation t...

This chapter provides a historical perspective on the relationship between land and confl ict in Colombia, in which land is identifi ed as both a source and resource of confl ict. This relationship is central to understanding forced displacement in Colombia and this study argues that in light of signifi cant shortfalls in translating state policy on land and IDPs into practice, humanitarian age...

Substantive progress has been achieved in advancing emergency response interventions during disasters including assistance of internally displaced persons (IDPs). Explicit operational technical guidelines and management strategies have been successfully applied through the "cluster approach". In 2008-09 armed conflict in several districts of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province and the Federall...