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This book explores the common language of politics, ecology and risk, and crosses their conceptual divides. It seeks to shed light on the underlying structural factors, processes, players and interactions in the risk scenario, all of which influence decision-making that both increases and reduces disaster risk. The first section explores risk governance under conditions of increasing complexity, diversity and change. The discussion includes chapters on The problem of governance in the risk society; Making sense of decentralization; Understanding and conceptualizing risk in large-scale social-ecological systems; The disaster epidemic and Structure, process, and agency in the evaluation of ris...
This book is a collection of essays, bringing together seventeen contributions from different disciplines, with various, but complementary points of view, to discuss the directions and key components of risk governance. Some of the many issues of interest to risk scholars addressed in this work include the analysis of proactive approaches to the governance of risk from natural hazards; approaches to broaden the scope of public policies related to the management of risks from natural hazards, including emergency and environmental management, community development and spatial planning.
Following in the footsteps of its popular predecessor, the second edition of Emergency Management: The American Experience 1900–2010 provides the background needed to understand the key political and policy underpinnings of emergency management, exploring how major "focusing events" have shaped the development of emergency management. It builds on the original theoretical framework and chronological approach, but improves on the first edition by adding fresh information on older events such as Hurricane Katrina as well as a new chapter covering the BP oil spill in 2010 and the unprecedented characteristics of the disaster response to it. The final chapter offers an insightful discussion of...
The impacts of natural and man-made disasters have increased exponentially over the past few decades. Moreover, with our global interconnectedness and the growing scale of disasters, today's catastrophic disasters can have regional, national, and even global economic consequences. Following in the tradition of the successful first edition, Hazards Analysis: Reducing the Impact of Disasters, Second Edition provides a structure and process for understanding the nature of natural and human-caused disasters. Stressing the role of hazard risk management for public, private, and nonprofit organizations, the author and expert contributors cover problem solving, risk analysis, and risk communication...
Offers insightful reflections on contemporary challenges to the authority, effectiveness, legitimacy, and coordination of the international dispute settlement system.
Incorporating chaos theory into psychology and the life sciences, this text includes empirical studies of neural encoding, memory, eye movements, warfare, business cycles and selection of time series analysis algorithms. There are theoretical chapters on emergence and social dynamics, and clinical contributions dealing with: the measurement of quality of life for psychiatric patients; psychosis; the organization of self; and the role of love in family dynamics. Finally ideas from non-linear dynamics are applied to understanding the creative process.
The classical field dealing with earthquakes is called “earthquake engineering” and considered to be a branch of structural engineering. In projects dealing with strategies for earthquake risk mitigation, urban planning approaches are often neglected. Today interventions are needed on a city, rather than a building, scale. This work deals with the impact of earthquakes, including also a broader view on multihazards in urban areas. Uniquely among other works in the field, particular importance is given to urban planning issues, in conservation of heritage and emergency management. Multicriteria decision making and broad participation of those affected by disasters are included.
This book looks at vegetation changes across the world. The use of normalized difference vegetation index, CORINE Land Cover, geographical information systems and remote sensing to monitor vegetation changes is highlighted. Conversion of dense forests into agricultural land, grazing areas or settlements and land cover changes in a Miombo woodland are reported. The role of neotropical forests as carbon pool stores and a reservoir of global biodiversity is explored. Influence of climate on island forest vegetation types, structure and diversity is reported in detail. Restoration of a degraded wildlife corridor through re-establishing native vegetation in India is also documented. Finally, the role of apomixes, a form of asexual reproduction via seed, in propagation of neotropical plants is discussed.
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have developed rapidly in recent years and now provide powerful tools for the capture, manipulation, integration, interrogation, modelling, analysis and visualisation of data - tools that are already used for policy support in a wide range of areas at almost all geographic and administrative levels. This holds especially for emergency preparedness and health risk reduction, which are all essentially spatial problems. To date, however, many initiatives have remained disconnected and uncoordinated, leading to less powerful, less compatible and less widely implemented systems than might otherwise have been the case. The important matters discussed here include the probabilistic nature of most environmental hazards and the semi-random factors that influence interactions between these and human exposures; the effects of temporal and spatial scales on hazard assessment and imputed risk; the effects of measurement error in risk estimation and the stratification of risks and their impacts according to socioeconomic characteristics; and the quantification of socioeconomic differences in vulnerability and susceptibility to environmental hazards.
A first-class work of reference that will be both an essential resource for independent study as well as a useful aid in teaching: a solid but also provocative starting point for wider exploration of the city.