The use of healthcare data analytics is anticipated to play a significant role in future public health policy formulation. Therefore, this study examines how big data analytics (BDA) may be methodically incorporated into various phases of the health policy cycle for fact-based and precise health policy decision-making. So, this study explores the potential of BDA for accurate and rapid policy-making processes in the healthcare industry. A systematic review of literature spanning 22 years (from January 2001 to January 2023) has been conducted using the PRISMA approach to develop a conceptual framework. The study introduces the emerging topic of BDA in healthcare policy, goes over the advantages, presents a framework, advances instances from the literature, reveals difficulties and provides recommendations. This study argues that BDA has the ability to transform the conventional policy-making process into data-driven process, which helps to make accurate health policy decision. In addition, this study contends that BDA is applicable to the different stages of health policy cycle, namely policy identification, agenda setting as well as policy formulation, implementation and evaluation. Currently, descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics are used for public health policy decisions on data obtained from several common health-related big data sources like electronic health reports, public health records, patient and clinical data, and government and social networking sites. To effectively utilize all of the data, it is necessary to overcome the computational, algorithmic and technological obstacles that define today's extremely heterogeneous data landscape, as well as a variety of legal, normative, governance and policy limitations. Big data can only fulfill its full potential if data are made available and shared. This enables public health institutions and policymakers to evaluate the impact and risk of policy changes at the population level.
Climate change is a global problem since many countries worldwide are becoming increasingly vulnerable to natural disasters. Numerous climate models in various studies project a decline in agricultural productivity that will mainly be due to excessive heat in tropical and subtropical regions, especially in Southeast Asia. As a Southeast Asian country, Malaysia is no exception to this problem. Hence, the present study aimed to examine the impact of climate change on rice yields in Malaysia. A panel data approach was adopted using data from 1987 to 2017 on eight granary areas in Peninsular Malaysia. The main objectives were to assess the impact of climate variables (i.e., minimum and maximum temperature and precipitation) on rice yield and the variance of the impact during the main season and off-season. Our regression results indicate that precipitation was not statistically significant in all model specifications for both the main and off-season. While the maximum temperature was found to be negatively associated with yield during the off-season, the minimum temperature showed a positive effect in both cropping seasons. We used the HadGEM3-GC31 N512 resolution model based on the high-emission Shared Socioeconomic Pathways 8.5 scenario (SSPs-8.5) from the High-Resolution Model Intercomparison Project (HighResMIP) of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) to project future climate change in 2030 and 2040. The projected results indicate that rice yield would show a more positive trend by 2040 when compared to the previous decade, ranging from −0.02 to 19.85% during the main season and −2.77 to 7.41% during the off-season. Although rice yield is likely to increase in certain areas, other areas are projected to experience negative effects. Hence, adaptation at the farm level remains crucial, specifically during the off-season, since climate change could widen the gaps in rice yields between cropping seasons and among granary areas.
12 October 2021 in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
This study explored food security and climate change issues and assessed how food sovereignty contributes to addressing the climate change impacts on entire food systems. The study aimed to contextualise food security, climate change, and food sovereignty within Sri Lanka’s current development discourse by bringing global learning, experience, and scholarship together. While this paper focused on many of the most pressing issues in this regard, it also highlighted potential paths towards food sovereignty in the context of policy reforms. This study used a narrative review that relied on the extant literature to understand the underlying concepts and issues relating to climate change, food security and food sovereignty. Additionally, eight in-depth interviews were conducted to obtain experts’ views on Sri Lanka’s issues relating to the thematic areas of this study and to find ways forward. The key findings from the literature review suggest that climate change has adverse impacts on global food security, escalating poverty, hunger, and malnutrition, which adversely affect developing nations and the poor and marginalised communities disproportionately. This study argues that promoting food sovereignty could be the key to alleviating such impacts. Food sovereignty has received much attention as an alternative development path in international forums and policy dialogues while it already applies in development practice. Since the island nation has been facing many challenges in food security, poverty, climate change, and persistence of development disparities, scaling up to food sovereignty in Sri Lanka requires significant policy reforms and structural changes in governance, administrative systems, and wider society.
This paper reviews the studies from various disciplines and countries on the impacts of climate change on food security and its four dimensions, namely food availability, accessibility, food utilisation and the stability of food systems. Reviewed literature has shown that the impacts of climate change on food security would be devastating. If any of these four dimensions of food security is affected, the impacts will vary from local to global. However, most of the studies have focussed on food availability, so the other three dimensions of food security were not given due attention. This paper, therefore, reviews the impacts of climate change in all food security dimensions based on a narrative review approach. In summary, the impacts of climate change at the micro-level, involving households’ food access and utilisation, and food stability were still less discussed and understood as compared to food availability issues. This review consequently emphasises the importance of future researches on climate change and food security to concentrate on other dimensions of food security.
7 June 2023 in Environment, Development and Sustainability