Collins / Jayawickrama / Samantha Hazards, Risks and, Disasters in Society

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-12-396474-8
Verlag: William Andrew Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 424 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Hazards, Risks, and Disasters in Society provides analyses of environmentally related catastrophes within society in historical, political and economic contexts. Personal and corporate culture mediates how people may become more vulnerable or resilient to hazard exposure. Societies that strengthen themselves, or are strengthened, mitigate decline and resultant further exposure to what are largely human induced risks of environmental, social and economic degradation. This book outlines why it is important to explore in more depth the relationships between environmental hazards, risk and disasters in society. It presents challenges presented by mainstream and non-mainstream approaches to the human side of disaster studies.

By hazard categories this book includes critical processes and outcomes that significantly disrupt human wellbeing over brief or long time-frames. Whilst hazards, risks and disasters impact society, individuals, groups, institutions and organisations offset the effects by becoming strong, healthy, resilient, caring and creative. Innovations can arise from social organisation in times of crisis. This volume includes much of use to practitioners and policy makers needing to address both prevention and response activities. Notably, as people better engage prevalent hazards and risks they exercise a process that has become known as disaster risk reduction (DRR). In a context of climatic risks this is also indicative of climate change adaptation (CCA). Ultimately it represents the quest for development of sustainable environmental and societal futures. Throughout the book cases studies are derived from the world of hazards risks and disasters in society.



- Includes sections on prevention of and response to hazards, risks and disasters

- Provides case studies of prominent societal challenges of hazards, risks and disasters

- Innovative approaches to dealing with disaster drawing from multiple disciplines and sectors

Zielgruppe

<p>Environmental scientists and to a lesser extent environmental engineers, oceanographers, occupational health specialists</p>

Autoren/Hrsg.

Collins, Andrew E.

Jayawickrama, Janaka

Samantha, Jones

Manyena, Bernard

Weitere Mitwirkende

Shroder, John F.

Fachgebiete

• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Soziale & wirtschaftliche Auswirkungen von Umweltfaktoren
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Umweltsoziologie
• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Naturgewalten & Katastrophen
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Forschung und Information Risikobewertung, Risikotheorie
• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Umweltsoziologie, Umweltpsychologie, Umweltethik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Section 1: Prevention and response to natural hazards

Section 2: Hazards of technological, social and economic change

Section 3: Cross-disciplinary dealing with disaster

Leseproben

Chapter 1

Introduction

Hazards, Risks, and Disasters in Society

Andrew E. Collins1, Bernard Manyena2,4, Janaka Jayawickrama3,4,  and Samantha Jones1     1Department of Geography/Disaster and Development Network (DDN), Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK     2Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, Manchester University, Manchester, UK     3Post-war Reconstruction and Development Unit, University of York, York, UK     4Disaster and Development Network (DDN), Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK

Abstract

This introductory chapter outlines why it is important to explore in more depth the relationships between environmental hazards, risks, and disasters in society. It presents an introduction to the challenges presented by mainstream approaches to the human side of disaster studies, whereby perspectives on environmental hazards and human development meet policy and practice. This is informed by analyzing the influences of extreme environmental events on society, exposure factors, and the nature of emergent systems of response. In this field, people are considered as vulnerable and resilient to disaster impacts, suffering, or prospering in times of climate change, development, societal instability, and governance scenarios that can be unpredictable and out of control. This is in part balanced by hope in the emergence of new-found awareness and capacity, to be able to live with hazards and risks, cope with disaster, and prosper socially and economically. A challenge presented by hazards, risks, and disasters is to achieve the capacity to both anticipate the unexpected and act on the known. A wealth of well-grounded emergent knowledge and experience exists to facilitate this, some of the most enlightening and innovative of which is revealed in the selection of contributions to this volume.

Keywords

Grounded knowledge; Hazards; Innovative perspectives; Risks; Society

1.1. Opening

Hazards, Risks, and Disasters in Society presents an exploration of how people interrelate with environmental changes and shocks that are variously within or beyond their ability to alter. It includes accounts based on disaster prevention and response approaches with reference to threats that have become increasingly more prevalent. Risk of a disaster at individual or community level is dependent on exposure to emergent and resurgent hazards and the capacity to avoid, adapt, absorb, or control them. Furthermore, despite a rich debate as to what a disaster is (Quarentelli, 1998; Perry and Quarentelli, 2005), definition and experience remain relative to the varied interpretations of heterogeneous people. Consequently, the collection of contributions herein provides critical comment from necessarily cross-disciplinary discussions about how best to deal with hazards, risks, and disasters in society through the societal perspective. We continue by outlining some relatively straightforward principles of hazards, risks, and disasters in society, followed by an overview of the chapter contributions that comprise the volume. We then return to overall emergent points in a concluding chapter.

Hazards, risks, and disasters in society include environmentally related catastrophes within concentrations of human development that can be interpreted in terms of historical, political, and economic contexts. As such, one rationale underlying this volume is that development largely determines the way in which hazards impact on people, whereas disasters alter the scope of development. A summative overview of the more recent state of this perspective is already outlined in some detail in Disaster and Development (Collins, 2009), among other sources. The collection of chapter contributions in Hazards, Risks, and Disasters in Society reflects how personal and corporate exposure factors, short-term reactions, and longer term responses mediate the manner in which people get understood as vulnerable, resilient, or otherwise. Societies that strengthen themselves or are strengthened mitigate decline and resultant further exposure to what are largely human-induced cycles of environmental, social, and economic change. In a simple delineation, this change may be experienced as improvement by billions of people in economically advantaged societies who become more able to protect against environmental hazards, but as deterioration for billions of other people who are exposed to increased risks. The delineation between those more or less at risk of disaster has been the focus of a long tradition of studies of disaster vulnerability (O'Keefe et al., 1976; Blaikie et al., 1994; Cannon, 1994; Lewis, 1999; Wisner et al., 2004; Bankhoff et al., 2004; Gaillard, 2010; Lewis, 2014). Moreover, in addition to the above, multiple origins occur in the emergence of vulnerability studies through specific hazard and risk categories. For example, it has been central to studies of health risk reduction to view human susceptibility as interacting with socioeconomic vulnerability in relation to both disease hazard and context (Doyal, 1987; Honari and Boleyn, 1999; Collins, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2003).

Although the rationale of the vulnerability approaches to environmental hazards has become more mainstream discourse in recent years, it remains evident that exposure to risk and disaster remains far from being addressed in practice. An implicit argument is that it is not inevitable that major disasters will occur so much as it is possible for governments, communities, individuals, and industries to choose to affect change toward safer and more resilient societies. For a background to the use of resilience discourse and conceptualization in disaster studies, see, for example, Pelling (2003), IFRC (2004), UNISDR (2005), Paton and Johnston (2006), Manyena (2006), and Sudmeier-Rieux (2014). A concern for the field of vulnerability analysis and disaster risk is that it is notoriously subject to cultural leanings and critique, whereby derivative notions of resilience become worryingly minimalist, overly accepting of crises, and are not much help for those vulnerable or extremely poor. It is therefore not surprising that following a decade of progress in the Strategy to Build the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters (UNISDR, 2005), the aspiration remains to achieve awareness and capacity for what lies beyond resilience. This volume aims to not repeat the well-trodden ground of vulnerability and resilience studies in relation to hazard and risk, but instead compiles chapter contributions that tend to bring to the fore new detail and innovative ideas, also exposing some of the associated future challenges and opportunities.

Although such a volume is necessarily inductive and eclectic, an introductory and indicative analytical framework for the volume can nonetheless be represented through reference to individual environmental hazards. For example, here we refer to the case of flood risk that can be considered a function of (1) environmental change, (2) people's exposure, and (3) prevention and response systems. These are core drivers of flood risk analysis that lie behind identifying improved flood risk management. Some of the consequent analytical and practical challenges in approaching integrated flood risk management would therefore be as outlined in Table 1.1.

The analytical challenges presented in Table 1.1 suggest inherent complexity to flood risk management, requiring individual analyses at the level of any one flood event, the weighting of importance of varying components a function of its nature and context. Therefore, rather than emphasizing development of flood risk models with limited applicability to varying environments, societies, and systems of development, progress would be through improving ongoing monitoring, evaluation, and learning for prevention and response. This informs what really is appropriate to addressing complex risks specific in time and relative to knowledge about particular places that are defined by intersecting environmental, social, and economic processes. The approach is key in both the applied and theoretical sense. It can assist in informing smart solutions that balance environmental, social, and economic policy drivers. Though partly idealistic, the aspiration of integrated analyses and action lies at the core of improving flood risk management. It has not yet become “main stream” but is aspirational of what it means to more fully engage hazards risks and disasters in society. The principles here can be extended to other categories of environmental hazards while also being considered as relevant to a multihazard framework.

Table 1.1

Analytical and Practical Challenges in Integrated Flood Risk Management

Domain of Flood Risk

Analytical Challenge

Environmental change

Predictability/uncertainty, opportunity for precautionary actions, “natural” versus built approaches—hard and soft catchment, river and coastal management, methods of long-term maintenance

People's exposure to flood risk

Perception, socioeconomic enablement, information, communication, expectation, risk culture, age, gender, and other forms of social differentiation

Prevention and response systems

Political will, market...

Über Autor(innen)

Shroder, John F.
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