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The Humanitarian Agents (HAs), are among the first entities dealing with the impacts of natural and man-made disasters. This is more than essential in areas, where the National governments and associated economies are either overwhelmed to respond or unprepared to act. Under such pressing conditions, the agents, as any other similar entity, depend on a variety of monitoring and assessment tools in order to reach the most suitable decisions per case. These tools are mostly employed for the scope definition and the content of their responses, the communication of the information among the various agents, and the reporting to their donors and other beneficiaries. To this end, several field tools have been developed worldwide. Building on such a background, the present effort describes a new tool and it argues towards the development and implementation of a WASH related Composite Index. The purpose of the Index is to facilitate the WASH related assessments in refugee camps, by capturing and reflecting the actual WASH conditions and provide the necessary information for efficient program planning and implementation. Starting with Europe and specifically the humanitarian camps in Greece, the development of the Index may allow its worldwide application, while adhering to the necessary and essential standards that govern the work of all HAs operating in the sector.

Desertification constantly and diachronically manifested itself as one of the most critical environmental issues to be confronted and mitigated by society. This work presents the development of a land desertification risk Expert System (ES) for assessing the application of different land management practices by utilizing indicators through a desertification risk index (DRI). The DRI was developed by a desertification risk assessment framework generated in seventeen study sites worldwide. This assessment was performed through a methodological process incorporating indicators suited to a plethora of physical, social and economic characteristics. Then, the Desertification Risk Assessment Support Tool (DRAST) was created using the indicators' methodology in an effort to efficiently handle complexity and variability in soil and water resources management. To demonstrate DRAST's applicability, an independent data base of indicators was used, and the tool was employed in all the seventeen study sites. Five indicative sites, experiencing different desertification processes, are selected as key representatives of the methodological process implementation. Overall, the assessment depicted that DRAST performs appropriately in demarcating existing desertification risk as well as in portraying how the desertification risk changes after the application of pertinent mitigation actions. Thus, the current approach may lead towards a standardized procedure, which is using the advantages of information technology to assess the effectiveness of various land management practices and facilitate stakeholders and decision-makers to produce and implement timely and appropriate responses to combat desertification.

The terms &lsquo, resilience&rsquo, and &lsquo, vulnerability&rsquo, have been widely used, with multiple interpretations in a plethora of disciplines. Such a variety may easily become confusing, and could create misconceptions among the different users. Policy makers who are bound to make decisions in key spatial and temporal points may especially suffer from these misconceptions. The need for decisions may become even more pressing in times of crisis, where the weaknesses of a system are exposed, and immediate actions to enhance the systemic strengths should be made. The analysis framework proposed in the current effort, and demonstrated in hypothetical forest fire cases, tries to focus on the combined use of simplified versions of the resilience and vulnerability concepts. Their relations and outcomes are also explored, in an effort to provide decision makers with an initial assessment of the information required to deal with complex systems. It is believed that the framework may offer some service towards the development of a more integrated and applicable tool, in order to further expand the concepts of resilience and vulnerability. Additionally, the results of the framework can be used as inputs in other decision making techniques and approaches. This increases the added value of the framework as a tool.

Drought is a complex natural phenomenon that lacks a universally accepted definition, thus it is difficult to confront holistically. Several efforts have been made towards managing the widespread and catastrophic drought impacts. In this quest, the concept of vulnerability to drought seems to offer some significant potential. In the present attempt, a standardized drought vulnerability index (SDVI) is presented, applied, and spatially visualized through geostatistical methods on a country scale. Greece, experiencing frequent and intense droughts, was selected as the study site. In an effort to link drought characteristics to impacts, the index incorporates water supply information, demand data, the state of the relevant water infrastructure and climatic parameters represented by the standardized precipitation index. The index showed potential in portraying various vulnerability states and followed satisfactorily the vulnerability fluctuations in Greece in relation to recorded drought hazard dimensions and impacts. The SDVI may be considered as a first step for the emergence of an integrated SDVI with multi-scalar applications in environmental research and decision-making. It is believed that improving techniques in index formulation may complement more reasonable and acceptable solutions to water challenges posed by droughts and help avoid a drifting sense of continuous ‘water crises’.

The Environmental Vulnerability Index (EVI) was developed by the Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission as a global composite index that quantifies the vulnerability of an area's environment. Greece has been selected as reference area due to its current physical and anthropogenic conditions that may lead to environmental instabilities in the natural, social, and economic infrastructure environment. Hence, in the present approach, using data on Greece, an effort to define the range of information that the EVI may provide for the pertinent country is presented and a discussion on whether the index may be further developed is conveyed. Advantages as well as shortcomings of the Index are also delineated.