At Risk Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability and Disasters

About this book

This work reasserts the significance of the human factor in disasters, and argues that disaster mitigation is rooted in the potential humans have to understand their vulnerability and to take common action.

Contents

Foreword Preface List of figures and tables Part 1: Framework and Theory 1. The challenge of disasters and our approach 1.1 In at the deep end 1.2 Conventional views of disaster 1.3 What is vulnerability? 1.4 Changes since the first edition 1.5 The International decade for natural disaster reduction 1.6 Convergence and critique 1.7 Audiences 1.8 Scope and plan of the book 1.9 Limits and assumptions 2. The disaster pressure and release model 2.1 The nature of vulnerability 2.2 Cause and effects in the disaster pressure model 2.3 Time and the chain of explanation 2.4 Limits to our knowledge 2.5 Global trends and dynamic pressures 2.6 Uses of the pressure and release model 3. Access to resources and coping in adversity 3.1 Access to resources - an introduction 3.2 New thinking since 1994 3.3 'Normal life' - the formal Access model 3.4 Coping and access to safety Part 2: Vulnerability and Hazard Types 4. Famine and natural hazards 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Famines and their causes 4.3 Explanations of famine 4.4 Complex emergencies, policy famines and human rights 4.5 Causes, pressures, unsafe conditions and famine 4.6 Access and famines 4.7 Policy 4.8 Conclusion 5. Biological hazards 5.1 Introduction 5.2 What are biological hazards? 5.3 Limitations to our treatment of biological hazards 5.4 Biological links with other hazards 5.5 Livelihoods, resources and disasters 5.6 Vulnerability-creating processes 5.7 Pressures affecting defences against biological hazards 5.8 Root causes and pressures 5.9 Steps toward risk reduction 6. Floods 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Floods as known risks 6.3 Disastrous outcomes for vulnerable people 6.4 Floods and vulnerability 6.5 Summary: flood prevention and mitigation 7. Coastal storms 7.1 Introduction 7.2 The physical hazard 7.3 Patterns of vulnerability 7.4 Case-studies 7.5 Policy responses 8. Earthquakes and volcanoes 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Classic case-studies: Guatemala and Mexico 8.3 Recent case-studies 8.4 Volcanoes and related hazards 8.5 Goma, Congo, eruption of Mount Nyiragongo 2002 8.6 Policy response and mitigation Part 3: Towards a Safer Environment 9. Towards a safer environment 9.1 Towards a safer environment: are statements of intent merely hot air? 9.2 From Yokohama to Johannesburg via Geneva 9.3 Risk reduction objectives Notes Bibliography

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