Over the past half century, environmental risk assessment (ERA) has become increasingly important in political decisions. It forms an important basis within the World Trade Organization’s Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement (SPS) and is an important touch point within the Convention on Biological Diversity. The scope of ERA is expanding rapidly both in the issues that it covers and in its role...

Climate change is affecting every aspect of human activities, especially the agriculture. In China, extreme drought events caused by climate change have posed a great threat to food safety. In this work we aimed to study the drought risk of maize in the farming–pastoral ecotone in Northern China based on physical vulnerability assessment. The physical vulnerability curve was constructed from th...

The welfare and security of modern nations rely on the continuous production and distribution of a number of essential goods (e.g. water, energy, data), and services (e.g. banking, health care), by large scale, man-made, networked systems, called infrastructures, mostly spanning long distances, and privately owned or operated. Such infrastructures are termed critical, as any incapacity or destr...

In this paper we propose an alternative approach for the assessment of network vulnerability under random and intentional attacks as compared to the results obtained from the “vulnerability function”given by Criado et al. [Int. J. Comput. Math., 86 (2)(2009), pp. 209-218]. By using spectral and statistical measurements, we assess robustness as the antonym to vulnerability of complex networks an...