This book explores policy, legal, and practice implications regarding the emerging field of disaster justice, using case studies of floods, bushfires, heatwaves, and earthquakes in Australia and Southern and South-east Asia. It reveals geographic locational and social disadvantage and structural inequities that lead to increased risk and vulnerability to disaster, and which impact ability to recover post-disaster. Written by multidisciplinary disaster researchers, the book addresses all stages of the disaster management cycle, demonstrating or recommending just approaches to preparation, response and recovery. It notably reveals how procedural, distributional and interactional aspects of justice enhance resilience, and offers a cutting edge analysis of disaster justice for managers, policy makers, researchers in justice, climate change or emergency management.
Many ideas and concepts about natural hazards have been developed in Australasia, but these are often overlooked in books written from a Northern Hemisphere perspective. Natural Hazards in Australasia is the first textbook that considers Australasian natural hazards, their triggering mechanisms and the physical and social environments in which they occur. James Goff and Chris de Freitas lead an expert author team from around Australia and New Zealand to introduce readers to the natural hazards of the Australasian region, including floods, drought, tropical cyclones, volcanic and seismic hazards, tsunamis, landslides and bushfires. This book explores the interactions not only between one hazard and another, but also between humans and natural hazards. Key pedagogical features for students include learning objectives, regional case studies, summaries, chapter glossaries, end-of-chapter review and discussion questions, and further reading and resources. The full colour text is enhanced by a rich array of illustrations, photographs and maps.
The beginning of the new millennium has been particularly devastating in terms of natural disasters associated with tectonic plate boundaries, such as earthquakes in Sumatra, Chile, Japan, Tahiti, and Nepal; the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean tsunamis; and volcanoes in Indonesia, Chile, Iceland that have produced large quantities of ash causing major disruption to aviation. In total, half a million people were killed by such natural disasters. These recurring events have increased our awareness of the destructive power of natural hazards and the major risks associated with them. While we have come a long way in the search for understanding such natural phenomena, and although our knowledge of Earth dynamics and plate tectonics has improved enormously, there are still fundamental uncertainties in our understanding of natural hazards. Increased understanding is crucial to improve our capacity for hazard prediction and mitigation. Volume highlights include: Main concepts associated with tectonic plate boundaries Novel studies on boundary-related natural hazards Fundamental concepts that improve hazard prediction and mitigation Plate Boundaries and Natural Hazards will be a valuable resource for scientists and students in the fields of geophysics, geochemistry, plate tectonics, natural hazards, and climate science. Read an interview with the editors to find out more: https://eos.org/editors-vox/plate-boundaries-and-natural-hazards
The term 'natural disaster' is often used to refer to natural events such as earthquakes, hurricanes or floods. However, the phrase 'natural disaster' suggests an uncritical acceptance of a deeply engrained ideological and cultural myth. At Risk questions this myth and argues that extreme natural events are not disasters until a vulnerable group of people is exposed. The updated new edition confronts a further ten years of ever more expensive and deadly disasters and discusses disaster not as an aberration, but as a signal failure of mainstream 'development'. Two analytical models are provided as tools for understanding vulnerability. One links remote and distant 'root causes' to 'unsafe conditions' in a 'progression of vulnerability'. The other uses the concepts of 'access' and 'livelihood' to understand why some households are more vulnerable than others. Examining key natural events and incorporating strategies to create a safer world, this revised edition is an important resource for those involved in the fields of environment and development studies.
In recent times the frequency and severity of natural disasters has placed a clear emphasis on the ability of governments to plan, prepare and respond in an effective way. Disaster Management in Australia examines government coordination when faced with large scale crises, outlining the challenges in managing events such as the 2009 Victorian bushfires and 2011 Queensland floods. The public sector is equipped to deal with policy and service delivery in more routine environments, but crisis management often requires a wider government response where leadership, coordination, social capital, organisational culture and institutions are intertwined in the preparation, response and aftermath of large scale crises. As crises continue to increase in prevalence and severity, this book provides a tangible framework to conceptualise crisis management which can be utilised by researchers, emergency services and government officials alike. Disaster Management in Australia is an important contribution to the study of government coordination of crises and, as such, will be of considerable interest to students and scholars of disaster management, and to policy makers and practitioners looking to refine their approach.
Australia’s variable climate, geography and environment frequently places communities, infrastructure, ecosystems and cultural and heritage sites in the path of natural hazard events. Natural hazards are driven primarily by weather and geology. Weather-driven natural hazards include bushfires, floods, heatwaves, cyclones, landslides and thunderstorms, while geological-driven hazards include earthquakes and tsunami. The major bushfires and floods of the past two years have demonstrated how increasingly exposed the nation is to natural hazards, causing distressing loss of life and property, and devastating the environment. A recent royal commission has exposed gaping holes in Australia’s readiness for natural disasters. How should we better prepare for natural hazards and mitigate their impacts from becoming disasters; and how can we cope during and after they have occurred? What could we do at a government, emergency services, community and personal level to protect ourselves, develop resilience, and recover from the next major natural disaster?
Economic Effects of Natural Disasters explores how natural disasters affect sources of economic growth and development. Using theoretical econometrics and real-world data, and drawing on advances in climate change economics, the book shows scholars and researchers how to use various research methods and techniques to investigate and respond to natural disasters. No other book presents empirical frameworks for the evaluation of the quality of macroeconomic research practice with a focus on climate change and natural disasters. Because many of these subjects are so large, different regions of the world use different approaches, hence this resource presents tailored economic applications and evidence. - Connects economic theories and empirical work in climate change to natural disaster research - Shows how advances in climate change and natural disaster research can be implemented in micro- and macroeconomic simulation models - Addresses structural changes in countries afflicted by climate change and natural disasters
An earthquake shatters Haiti and a hurricane slices through Texas. We hear that nature runs rampant, seeking to destroy us through these 'natural disasters'. Science recounts a different story, however: disasters are not the consequence of natural causes; they are the consequence of human choices and decisions. we put ourselves in harm's way; we fail to take measures which we know would prevent disasters, no matter what the environment does. This can be both hard to accept, and hard to unravel. A complex of factors shape disasters. They arise from the political processes dictating where and what we build, and from social circumstances which create and perpetuate poverty and discrimination. They develop from the social preference to blame nature for the damage wrought, when in fact events such as earthquakes and storms are entirely commonplace environmental processes We feel the need to fight natural forces, to reclaim what we assume is ours, and to protect ourselves from what we perceive to be wrath from outside our communities. This attitude distracts us from the real causes of disasters: humanity's decisions, as societies and as individuals. It stops us accepting the real solutions to disasters: making better decisions. This book explores stories of some of our worst disasters to show how we can and should act to stop people dying when nature unleashes its energies. The disaster is not the tornado, the volcanic eruption, or climate change, but the deaths and injuries, the loss of irreplaceable property, and the lack and even denial of support to affected people, so that a short-term interruption becomes a long-term recovery nightmare. But we can combat this, as Kelman shows, describing inspiring examples of effective human action that limits damage, such as managing flooding in Toronto and villages in Bangladesh, or wildfire in Colorado. Throughout, his message is clear: there is no such thing as a natural disaster. The disaster lies in our inability to deal with the environment and with ourselves.
Measuring Vulnerability to Natural Hazards presents a broad range of current approaches to measuring vulnerability. It provides a comprehensive overview of different concepts at the global, regional, national, and local levels, and explores various schools of thought. More than 40 distinguished academics and practitioners analyse quantitative and qualitative approaches, and examine their strengths and limitations. This book contains concrete experiences and examples from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe to illustrate the theoretical analyses.The authors provide answers to some of the key questions on how to measure vulnerability and they draw attention to issues with insufficient coverage, such as the environmental and institutional dimensions of vulnerability and methods to combine different methodologies.This book is a unique compilation of state-of-the-art vulnerability assessment and is essential reading for academics, students, policy makers, practitioners, and anybody else interested in understanding the fundamentals of measuring vulnerability. It is a critical review that provides important conclusions which can serve as an orientation for future research towards more disaster resilient communities.
