Building Effective Crisis Communications for Disaster Recovery: A Case of Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation in Sichuan, China reviews and evaluates public relations (PR) campaigns launched by the Chinese government to facilitate long-term disaster recovery after the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008. The Discourse of Renewal (DR) theory is employed to guide the study and explore how the Chinese government utilized communication to help communities recover from disaster and promote community growth. Steered by the co-creational perspective, this book also examines the influence of PR campaigns on the public's situation awareness, attitude agreement, perceived care and concern, and ultimately the public's relationship with the Chinese government in renewal. In addition to developing and testing a DR evaluation model, this study investigates the communication obstacles that constrain the effectiveness of DR. In-depth interviews, content analysis, and surveys are conducted to analyze the themes, characteristics, effectiveness, and barriers of the campaigns. The findings of Building Effective Crisis Communications for Disaster Recovery include that (1) DR theory, which has heretofore been developed and applied mainly in Western culture, can inform the study of crisis communication in an Eastern culture, especially in China, (2) DR employed in government campaigns can be very powerful in achieving PR goals in crisis renewal, and (3) imbalanced deployment of campaign resources can affect the outcome of DR. This book also discusses the implications of utilizing these findings to better plan and implement long-term DR campaigns.

The New England landscape has long been battered by some of the most intense weather in US history. Discover the legendary storms that have devastated New England, including: the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 that killed 564 people; the Worcester Tornado of 1953; the Snow Hurricane of 1804 that demolished orchards and killed dozens of sailors off the coast; and the Blizzard of 1978 that brought Boston to a standstill for weeks.

Vulnerable populations such as children, older adults, and people with disabilities are disproportionately affected by large-scale disasters. This book is a valuable resource for students and professionals in the fields of social work, counseling, nursing, and mental health who need information on the best evidence-based interventions for disaster preparedness and response with these groups. The authors review disaster theory, preparedness checklists, and best practices for crisis intervention with each population. They also discuss where to find the latest assessment tools and other resources offered by national disaster relief organizations.

This book addresses pressing challenges of policy makers, planners and project managers in the water sector to successfully implement adaptation action. Taking into account both strategic planning and implementation of adaptation projects, it provides principles and attributes that contribute to the effective delivery of adaptation to flooding and drought. The book is organised around questions of 'what?', 'when?', 'why?' and 'how?'. It explains that a governance approach to adaptation is effective when it is 'fit-for-purpose' in a specific social-ecological or socio-technical context. The concept of 'fit-for-purpose' governance is applied to evaluate the effectiveness of governance efforts in three Australian cities to adapt to a decade of drought. Based on a case study of the Room for the River flood protection programme in the Netherlands, this book describes how planned adaptation projects in multi-stakeholder settings can be managed effectively and how large scale investment programmes can contribute to a transition of a water system that is adapting to a changed context. The cases in Australia and the Netherlands are used to link governance for strategic planning and governance for the delivery of adaptation. Through combining insights about multi-level governance, adaptive governance, transition management, programme management this book enriches the scientific literature about adaptation to flooding and drought.

The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since.
Timothy Egan's critically acclaimed account rescues this iconic chapter of American history from the shadows in a tour de force of historical reportage. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, Egan does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, "the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect" (New York Times).
In an era that promises ever-greater natural disasters, The Worst Hard Time is "arguably the best nonfiction book yet" (Austin Statesman Journal) on the greatest environmental disaster ever to be visited upon our land and a powerful cautionary tale about the dangers of trifling with nature.

Climate change is the single largest threat to the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and sustainable development. Addressing climate risk is a challenge for all. This book calls for greater collaboration between climate communities and disaster development communities. In discussing this, the book will evaluate the approaches used by each community to reduce the adverse effects of climate change. One area that offers some promise for bringing together these communities is through the concept of resilience. This term is increasingly used in each community to describe a process that embeds capacity to respond to and cope with disruptive events. This emphasizes an approach that is more focused on pre-event planning and using strategies to build resilience to hazards in an adaptation framework. The book will conclude by evaluating the scope for a holistic approach where these communities can effectively contribute to building communities that are resilient to climate driven risks.

This book addresses the operationalization of community resilience in the United Kingdom (UK) in connection with severe floods. Written for early academic professionals, students, and community practitioners, it investigates the educational and practical meaning and application of community resilience using a UK-centric local-level case study. Exploring the perceptions of both those who have been affected by a natural hazard and those who have not, the book reveals how trust, community resources, and neighborhood security can offer effective ways of bringing communities together after a natural hazard. The author introduces the topic of community resilience as it applies to disasters in Chapter 1 and its implications for securing and improving the wellbeing of disaster-affected communities in Chapters 2 and 3. In Chapter 4, the lessons learned contributing to the available information and research on community resilience are reviewed. Finally, the author offers recommendations and outlines future directions in coping with the uncertainty and insecurity caused by natural hazards in Chapter 5.

Disasters both natural and human-induced are leading to spiralling costs in terms of human lives, lost livelihoods and damaged assets and businesses. Yet these consequences and the financial and human crises that follow catastrophes can often be traced to policies unsuited to the emerging scales of the problems they confront, and the lack of institutional capacity to implement planning and prevention or to manage disasters. This book seeks to overcome this mismatch and to guide development of a more strategic policy and institutional framework. This updated and revised second edition includes new coverage of climate change adaptation, which has rapidly become central to disaster and emergency planning and management. This is an essential handbook for practitioners across the world seeking to improve the quality, robustness and capacity of their disaster management mechanisms.

The 1984 explosion of the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India was undisputedly one of the world's worst industrial disasters. Some have argued that the litigation following the Bhopal disaster provided an "innovative model" for dealing with the global distribution of technological risk; others consider the disaster a turning point in environmental legislation; still others argue that Bhopal is what globalization looks like on the ground.
Kim Fortun explores these claims by focusing on the dynamics and paradoxes of advocacy in competing power domains. She moves from hospitals in India to meetings with lawyers, corporate executives, and environmental justice activists in the United States to show how the disaster and its effects remain with us. Spiraling outward from the gas victims' stories, Fortun's innovative narrative sheds light on the complex intertwined way advocacy works within a global system, calling into question conventional notions of responsibility and ethical conduct. Revealing the hopes and frustrations of advocacy, this moving work also counters the tendency to think of Bhopal as an isolated incident that "can't happen here."

The guide serves as a primer for decision and policy makers, technical specialists, central, regional and local government officials, and concerned stakeholders in the community sector, civil society and non-governmental organizations, and the private sector. The Guide embodies the state-of-the art on integrated urban flood risk management. The Guide starts with a summary for policy makers which outlines and describes the key areas which policy makers need to be knowledgeable about to create policy directions and an integrated strategic approach for urban flood risk management. The core of the Guide consists of seven chapters, organized as: understanding flood hazard; understanding flood impacts; integrated flood risk management (structural measures and non-structural measures); evaluating alternative flood risk management options: tools for decision makers; implementing integrated flood risk management; and conclusion. Each chapter starts with a full contents list and a summary of the chapter for quick reference.

The recent floods that ravaged Queensland saw three-quarters of the state declared a disaster zone.from the capital city on the Brisbane River to remote rural communities.and caused billions of dollars worth of damage, forcing thousands to abandon their homes. This latest assault by nature reminds us all that, despite its stark beauty, the Australian landscape has a deadly edge. It is a place of flood, fire, earthquake and ferocious storms. The Australian Book of Disasters features enthralling stories of catastrophe.and survival and courage in the face of enormous odds. With chapters covering the breadth of this harsh land, it includes detailed accounts of the events burnt into Australia's national memory, from the Dunbar shipwreck in 1857 to the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009, and finishing with an in-depth look at the Queensland floods of 2010-2011. From the same series as The Australian Book of True Crime and The Australian Book of Heroism.

This book comprehensively documents the various types of karst collapse and related conceptual site models, before discussing these collapses in terms of their impacts on engineering and the environment. Featuring over 200 real-world photos to illustrate the variety of karst collapses and their consequences, the book also provides specific methods and techniques to prevent, investigate, monitor and remediate these collapses. Decades of experience with these collapses make it clear that addressing the related hazards requires a multi-disciplinary approach that integrates geomorphology, engineering geology, hydrology, hydrogeology, biology, geophysics, geochemistry, and risk assessment.

This book discusses the impact of climate change, land use and land cover, and socio-economic dynamics on landslides in Asian countries. Scholars recently have brought about a shift in their focus regarding triggering factors for landslides, from rainfall or earthquake to claiming rapid urbanization, extreme population pressure, improper land use planning, illegal hill cutting for settlements and indiscriminate deforestation. This suggests that the occurrence or probabilities of landslides are shaped by both climate-related and non-climate-related anthropogenic factors. Among these issues, land use and land cover change or improper land use planning is one of the key factors. Further climate change shapes the rainfall pattern and intensity in different parts of the world, and consequently rainfall-triggered landslides have increased. These changes cause socio-economic changes. Conversely, socio-economic and lifestyle changes enhance inappropriate land use and climate change. All these changes in land use, climate and socio-economic aspects are dynamics in nature and shape landslide risks in Asian countries, where they are given serious attention by governments, disaster management professionals, researchers and academicians. This book comprises 21 chapters divided into three major sections highlighting the effect of climate change on landslide incidence with the influence on vegetation and socio-economic aspects. The sections address how climate change and extreme events have triggered landslides. The advances in geospatial techniques with the focus on land use and land cover change along with the effect on socio-economic aspects are also explored.

This book calls for the progressive creation of supra-national institutions intended to protect life on Earth against natural threats, be these terrestrial (pandemics, super-volcanoes, major earthquakes.) or celestial (comets, asteroids, meteor storms). The protection proffered would need to be pre-emptive though also responsive, reducing the number of adverse events but also their specific consequences. Rancid though the world scene currently looks, this may actually be a good time to look towards a planetary security programme that can build up over a century or more. It would need special international institutions that are sufficiently integrated to cope with the celestial and terrestrial contingencies anticipated yet not so much a class apart as to be a law unto themselves, a military regime able to ride roughshod over general world opinion. Such an holistic approach to planetary security might prove to be a definitive substitute for war between nations. Professor Brown comes to such questions from a broad career background. His lead qualifications are a Masters degree from Oxford in Modern History and a Doctorate of Science from Birmingham (UK) in Applied Geophysics. He has been a naval meteorologist; staff college instructor; part-time but pro-active as a defence correspondent for several of the West's leading journals; and political consultant. From 1980 to 1986, he was Chairman of the Council for Arms Control. From 1993 to 1997 he worked half-time in the Sensors and Electronic Systems directorate of Britain's Ministry of Defence. This was as the Academic Consultant in a small task force specifically created to advise the government of the day apropos what British policy to Strategic Ballistic Missile Defence should be. A declassified rendering of his 90,000-word report (published by Mansfield College, Oxford, in 1998) argued firmly against our going down this path. It could lead to a catastrophic arms race.

The book, after two introductory chapters on seismic design principles and structural seismic analysis methods, proceeds with the detailed description of seismic design methods for steel building structures. These methods include all the well-known methods, like force-based or displacement-based methods, plus some other methods developed by the present authors or other authors that have reached a level of maturity and are applicable to a large class of steel building structures. For every method, detailed practical examples and supporting references are provided in order to illustrate the methods and demonstrate their merits. As a unique feature, the present book describes not just one, as it is the case with existing books on seismic design of steel structures, but various seismic design methods including application examples worked in detail. The book is a valuable source of information, not only for MS and PhD students, but also for researchers and practicing engineers engaged with the design of steel building structures.

This book presents key principles of the hydraulics of river basins, with a unique focus on the interplay between stream flows and sediment transport. Addressing a number of basic topics related to the hydraulics of river systems, above all it emphasizes applicative aspects in order to provide the reader with a solid grasp of river engineering. The understanding of the river hydraulics is essential for the assessment of optimum locations for the conservation of water resources and its structures. This book will be interesting to readers and researchers working in the specialized area of river hydraulics of Ganga basin, Narmada, Tapi, Godavari, and other basins of India. It consists of review on hydraulics of meandering river; hydraulic design of reservoir in permeable pavement; optimization of hydraulic design; hydraulic investigations to optimize the design of spillway and design of energy dissipater; and analysis of performance of orifice spillway using computational fluid dynaics

This book aims to provide insight into how Southeast Asian countries have responded to disasters, recovered, and rebuilt. It investigates emergency response and disaster recovery cases at national levels and from regional perspectives. Recovery from great disasters poses great challenges to affected countries in terms of organization, financing, and opportunities for post-disaster betterment. Importantly, disasters are critical moments in which to achieve disaster risk reduction, especially in the context of climate change and Sustainable Development Goals. Insights from these cases can help other countries better prepare for response and recovery before the next disaster strikes. While the experiences of disaster risk reduction and climate change implementation in Southeast Asian countries have been well documented, tacit knowledge from emergency response and recovery from these countries has not been transformed into explicit knowledge. There are only a few books that integrate information and lessons from post-disaster governance in Southeast Asia as a region, and because of the importance of providing real and recent situations, this book will interest many policymakers, practitioners, and academics. The information presented here will lead to a better understanding of how to plan for future disasters and improve governance to ensure effective emergency response as well as encouraging a build back better and safer towards a more resilient and sustained recovery.

In 2011, there were fourteen natural calamities that each destroyed over a billion dollars worth of property in the United States alone. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy ravaged the East Coast and major earthquakes struck in Italy, the Philippines, Iran, and Afghanistan. In the first half of 2013, the awful drumbeat continued a monster supertornado struck Moore, Oklahoma; a powerful earthquake shook Sichuan, China; a cyclone ravaged Queensland, Australia; massive floods inundated Jakarta, Indonesia; and the largest wildfire ever engulfed a large part of Colorado.

Despite these events, we still behave as if natural disasters are outliers. Why else would we continue to build new communities near active volcanoes, on tectonically active faults, on flood plains, and in areas routinely lashed by vicious storms?

A famous historian once observed that civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice. In the pages of this unique book, leading geologist Susan W. Kieffer provides a primer on most types of natural disasters: earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, landslides, hurricanes, cyclones, and tornadoes. By taking us behind the scenes of the underlying geology that causes them, she shows why natural disasters are more common than we realize, and that their impact on us will increase as our growing population crowds us into ever more vulnerable areas.

Kieffer describes how natural disasters result from changes in state in a geologic system, much as when water turns to steam. By understanding what causes these changes of state, we can begin to understand the dynamics of natural disasters.

In the book s concluding chapter, Kieffer outlines how we might better prepare for, and in some cases prevent, future disasters. She also calls for the creation of an organization, something akin to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but focused on pending natural disasters."

Taking natural disaster as the political and legal norm is uncommon. Taking a person who has become unstable and irrational during a disaster as the starting point for legal analysis is equally uncommon. Nonetheless, in "Law in Crisis" Ruth Miller makes the unsettling case that the law demands an ecstatic subject and that natural disaster is the endpoint to law. Developing an idiosyncratic but compelling new theory of legal and political existence, Miller challenges existing arguments that, whether valedictory or critical, have posited the rational, bounded self as the normative subject of law.
By bringing a distinctive, accessible reading of contemporary political philosophy to bear on source material in several European and Middle Eastern languages, Miller constructs a cogent analysis of natural disaster and its role in modern subject formation. In the process, she opens up exciting new lines of inquiry in the fields of law, politics, and gender studies. "Law in Crisis" represents a promising new development in the interdisciplinary study of law.

This book presents the select proceedings of the Virtual Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (VCDRR 2021). It emphasizes on the role of civil engineering for a disaster resilient society. It presents latest research in geohazards and their mitigation. Various topics covered in this book are land use, ground response, liquefaction, and disaster mitigation techniques. This book is a comprehensive volume on disaster risk reduction (DRR) and its management for a sustainable built environment. This book will be useful for the students, researchers, policy makers and professionals working in the area of civil engineering, especially disaster management.

The extent to which human activity has influenced species extinctions during the recent prehistoric past remains controversial due to other factors such as climatic fluctuations and a general lack of data. However, the Holocene (the geological interval spanning the last 11,500 years from the end of the last glaciation) has witnessed massive levels of extinctions that have continued into the modern historical era, but in a context of only relatively minor climatic fluctuations. This makes a detailed consideration of these extinctions a useful system for investigating the impacts of human activity over time. Holocene Extinctions describes and analyses the range of global extinction events which have occurred during this key time period, as well as their relationship to both earlier and ongoing species losses. By integrating information from fields as diverse as zoology, ecology, palaeontology, archaeology and geography, and by incorporating data from a broad range of taxonomic groups and ecosystems, this novel text provides a fascinating insight into human impacts on global extinction rates, both past and present. This truly interdisciplinary book is suitable for both graduate students and researchers in these varied fields. It will also be of value and use to policy-makers and conservation professionals since it provides valuable guidance on how to apply lessons from the past to prevent future biodiversity loss and inform modern conservation planning.

This book contains a collection of papers from the special issue on the global perspective on meteotsunami science, published in Vol. 106 (2) of the journal Natural Hazards. By topic, the contributions are covering overview studies, case studies of actual events, introduction of new insights into meteotsunami modelling, new techniques in meteotsunami monitoring and detection, and those describing meteotsunami operational and forecast systems. More than half of all papers describe specific meteotsunami events observed in most of the world ocean basins, some others at a rudimentary level recall previous extreme episodes, while several papers contain thorough analysis of either atmospheric conditions or oceanic sea-level response. The book is intended for specialists in oceanography and atmospheric sciences, tsunami and fluid dynamics scientists, climatologists, coastal hazard agencies and managers, ocean engineers and many others, including students and science policy-makers, in particular in the regions affected by this potentially destructive coastal hazard. The chapters "Proudman resonance with tides, bathymetry and variable atmospheric forcings", "Long wave generation and coastal amplification due to propagating atmospheric pressure disturbances", "On the potential of ensemble forecasting for the prediction of meteotsunamis in the Balearic Islands: sensitivity to atmospheric model parameterizations", and "Combined hazard of typhoon-generated meteorological tsunamis and storm surges along the coast of Japan" are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. Previously published in Natural Hazards, Volume 106, Issue 2, 2021

This book comprehensively illustrates the elemental processes of vesiculation and crystallization recorded in volcanic products on the basis of the equilibrium and non-equilibrium theories. The book describes the derivation of equations and the basic physics behind them in detail. This textbook is fundamental in preparing for future volcanic hazards. The target readers are graduate students and researchers, but Parts I and IV are written to be understandable by undergraduate students as well, to inspire them to enter this field.

This book highlights the current issues, challenges, and priorities for climate change adaptation in the ten member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The status of each country was prepared by a consortium of researchers in consultation with National Focal Points of the ASEAN Working Group on Climate Change (AWGCC). National documents on adaptation actions, including local scenario and priorities, were reviewed where available and supplemented with an assessment of scientific publications to identify vulnerable ecosystems and regions. Adaptation needs and priorities were determined through stakeholder consultation in the respective countries. This allows for local-level perspectives to be captured and brought to the attention of policy and decision-makers at the national and regional levels. An important lesson from this exercise is that universities and research institutions at the national level have a critical role to play in bridging the gap between science and policy in climate change adaptation. These institutions also have the capacity to continuously facilitate transfer of the best available science for advancing climate change adaptation at the local level.

This edited volume dedicated to late Prof. P.S. Saklani addresses the multidisciplinary themes pertaining to role of tectonism and magmatism in Crustal Evolution and global distribution of metallic and non metallic mineral deposits. It gives valuable information on geodynamic evolution, structural, petrological, isotopic, metamorphic, geochemical and geochronological attributes of continental and oceanic crust and is challenging reassessments of the existing paradigms. It addresses the implication of magmatism, metallogeny and application of geochronological ages (U-Pb SHRIMP age, Lu-Hf isotopic system; detrital zircons). This book also advocates the role of tectonics in contamination of ground water, and control on drainage pattern and geothermal systems. It explores the vulnerability of earth towards natural hazards viz. earthquakes, floods, cyclones, tsunami, volcanism, cyclones and drought. This volume throws light on the applications of remote sensing, GIS (Geographical Information System) and SRTM data for evaluation of the morphometric and morphotectonic parameters and exploring the susceptibility of river basins toward erosion and flood. It will be beneficial to graduate and post-graduate students as well as professionals and researchers.