Introduction to the Special Issue on Humanitarian Applications: Doing Good with Good OR

Humanitarian applications include research that is primarily directed toward promoting human welfare. For example, humanity’s top 10 problems over the next 50 years have been outlined as the following: energy, water, food, environment, poverty, terrorism, disease, education, democracy, and population. Likewise, research focused on planning and responding to disasters can have an immediate impact on reducing loss of life, easing suffering, and advancing human dignity, all of which are goals of humanitarian applications. When we look back to 2010, we see that millions of people were affected by devastating disasters; the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, the floods in Pakistan, and the volcano eruption and tsunami in Indonesia are just a few examples. Unfortunately 2011 was not kinder to our planet and its people; the devastating triple disaster (earthquake, followed by tsunami, followed by a nuclear emergency) that occurred in Japan in early March affected thousands of people and significantly damaged the infrastructure. Although we wish that these disasters were rare events, looking at history unfortunately indicates otherwise. Thousands of disasters occurred over the past couple of decades, affecting millions of people, claiming lives, damaging infrastructure, and changing social and economic conditions. The impact of disasters on the economy is also significant, as we have seen with the Kobe earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, and many other catastrophes. Our planet is likely to face even more and stronger natural disasters as we move into the future. They will impact more and more people, in part because of the increasing presence of high-density population centers in vulnerable areas. Research to improve response to disasters thus can have a real and immediate impact. The ongoing humanitarian crises in many parts of the world contribute to the loss of lives or prolonged suffering, because of a lack of basic resources in vital areas, including food, water, shelter, health, sanitation, and education. Hunger and malnutrition are the greatest risks to health worldwide—greater than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined (World Food Programme 2011). One in nearly six people does not get enough food to be healthy and lead an active life; these include people living in both developing and developed countries. In 2007, 36.2 million Americans (23.8 million adults and 12.4 million children) lived in food-insecure households (Food Research and Action Center 2008). Access to basic resources is significantly more limited in the developing world. In 2007, 9.2 million children died before age five, and 92 percent of these deaths occurred in Africa and Asia (UNICEF 2008). Every year over half a million women (99 percent of them in developing countries) die of complications during pregnancy or childbirth, and basic health care remains a difficult service to obtain in many parts of the world. The public and civic sectors have many responsibilities that require the analysis of complex situations in which the use of operations research (OR) and management science (MS) in decision making can have a positive societal impact. Public sector activities that can benefit from a systematic decision-making process