Providing an integrated and multi-level analysis of the impacts of COVID-19 on people, place, economies and policies, across the globe, this timely book explores how the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic combines failure with success. It focuses on exploring rapid adaptation and improvisation by individuals, organisations and governments as they attempted to minimise and mitigate the socio-economic and health impacts of the pandemic. Interdisciplinary chapters written by social policy, geography, planning, policy, sociology and public health experts explore the broader impacts of COVID-19, positioning the pandemic in the context of wider trends and risks including climate change. Chapters highlight the importance of place and local contexts in understanding its impacts in different settings including Europe, Canada, North America, South Korea, South Africa and Lebanon. In doing so, the book develops a pandemic preparedness, responsiveness and recovery research framework and intends to inform post-pandemic policy development and research. This is an important book for geography, social policy, politics, urban studies, planning and business and management researchers and students, particularly those focusing on crisis management and risk and resilience. With key case studies from across the globe, it will help elucidate key issues for policy makers and practitioners across a range of sectors including strategic management, social policy, public health and the built environment.

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Salim S. Abdool Karim was catapulted into a prominent position in the media and on television as the face of South African science in the country's response to the pandemic. Up to that point, his groundbreaking research on AIDS had garnered many awards, leading to his recognition as one of the world’s leading epidemiologists, making him ideally positioned to take the scientific lead in the Covid-19 response.

Standing Up for Science is Abdool Karim’s personal, behind-the-scenes account of the first three years of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is inspiring and informative, shedding light on the difficulties in providing scientific advice, on the international co-operation that was integral to responding to the pandemic, as well as giving insight to some of the controversies in the science-to-policy process, and drawing lessons from Covid-19 to prepare for future pandemics.

Beyond the recent events in which the story is grounded, the book is an ode to the value of science and its power to help us tackle some of the world's biggest problems.

A riveting investigation into the dark underbelly of the global trash trade - a dirty, multi-billion-dollar industry that almost no one knows exists.

The total mass of the world's manmade materials has recently come to equal the entire biomass of the earth. This means we are living in a world where man's ability to create garbage, or eventual garbage, has surpassed the earth's ability to create life. Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing, and disputes about what to do with the tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged in just about every country on earth. Some are border skirmishes, fought to move trash out of one place and dump it into another. Others are waged across thousands of miles.

But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they're happening. For every story about how a commodity gets hustled through world supply chains for consumption, there exists another untold story about how it gets discarded for renewal - or for eternity. Some trash gets tossed onto roadsides. Some gets burned for fuel. Some gets buried underground. But most of it lives a hot potato second life, getting bartered, sold, re-sold, smuggled, salvaged, re-purposed from one country or mafia or corporation to another, with devastating consequences for millions of people.

Waste Wars tells the stories of five trash conflicts being waged in different corners of the world right now. They are representative but rich strands in the story of our planet's runaway garbage pandemic. In each theater, a different commodity is being smuggled or imported or bartered. Sometimes there is a winner; sometimes there is a loser. And in each theater a different political dilemma - from global inequality to the pitfalls of green politics - is presenting itself through the seemingly pedestrian medium of trash. A globe-trotting work of relentless investigative reporting, Waste Wars exposes the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade in which almost everyone in the world unknowingly engages and asks: If the handling of its trash reveals deeper truths about a particular society, what does the global business of trash say about our world today?

A brilliantly original exploration of our obsession with the end of the world, from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man to the Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go.

For two millennia, Christians have anticipated the end of the world, haunted by the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelation. But over the past two centuries, these dark fantasies have given way to secular stories of how the world, our planet, or our species (or all of the above) might be annihilated.

In Everything Must Go – a cultural history of the modern world that weaves together politics, history, science, high and popular culture – Dorian Lynskey explores the endings that we have read, listened to, or watched, while perched on the edge of our seats with eyes wide, (mostly) loving every moment.

Whether with visions of destruction by nuclear holocaust or a mighty collision with a meteor, a devastating epidemic or a violent takeover by robots, why do we like to scare ourselves, and why do we keep coming back for more?

Deeply illuminating about our past, our present and – given the revelation that the end of the world has seemingly always been nigh – hopeful about our future, Everything Must Go will grip you from beginning to, well, end.

Landslide Hazards, Risks and Disasters Second Edition makes a broad but detailed examination of major aspects of mass movements and their consequences, and provides knowledge to form the basis for more complete and accurate monitoring, prediction, preparedness and reduction of the impacts of landslides on society. The frequency and intensity of landslide hazards and disasters has consistently increased over the past century, and this trend will continue as society increasingly utilises steep landscapes. Landslides and related phenomena can be triggered by other hazard and disaster processes - such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and wildfires - and they can also cause other hazards and disasters, making them a complex multi-disciplinary challenge. This new edition of Landslide Hazards, Risks and Disasters is updated and includes new chapters, covering additional topics including rockfalls, landslide interactions and impacts and geomorphic perspectives. Knowledge, understanding and the ability to model landslide processes are becoming increasingly important challenges for society extends its occupation of increasingly hilly and mountainous terrain, making this book a key resource for educators, researchers and disaster managers in geophysics, geology and environmental science.

The much-anticipated definitive account of China's Great Famine

An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women, and children starved to death during China's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early '60s. One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is still euphemistically referred to as "the three years of natural disaster."

As a journalist with privileged access to official and unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent twenty years piecing together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation, including the death of his own father. Finding no natural causes, Yang attributes responsibility for the deaths to China's totalitarian system and the refusal of officials at every level to value human life over ideology and self-interest.

"Tombstone" is a testament to inhumanity and occasional heroism that pits collective memory against the historical amnesia imposed by those in power. Stunning in scale and arresting in its detailed account of the staggering human cost of this tragedy, "Tombstone" is written both as a memorial to the lives lost--an enduring tombstone in memory of the dead--and in hopeful anticipation of the final demise of the totalitarian system. Ian Johnson, writing in "The New York Review of Books," called the Chinese edition of "Tombstone ""groundbreaking . . . One of the most important books to come out of China in recent years."

Dr. Peter Hotez discusses how an antivaccine movement became a dangerous political campaign promoted by elected officials and amplified by news media, causing thousands of American deaths.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, one renowned scientist, in his famous bowtie, appeared daily on major news networks such as MSNBC, NPR, the BBC, and others. Dr. Peter J. Hotez often went without sleep, working around the clock to develop a nonprofit COVID-19 vaccine and to keep the public informed. During that time, he was one of the most trusted voices on the pandemic and was even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his selfless work. He also became one of the main targets of anti-science rhetoric that gained traction through conservative news media.

In this eyewitness story of how the anti-vaccine movement grew into a dangerous and prominent anti-science element in American politics, Hotez describes the devastating impacts it has had on Americans' health and lives. As a scientist who has endured antagonism from anti-vaxxers and been at the forefront of both essential scientific discovery and advocacy, Hotez is uniquely qualified to tell this story. By weaving his personal experiences together with information on how the anti-vaccine movement became a tool of far-right political figures around the world, Hotez opens readers' eyes to the dangers of anti-science. He explains how anti-science became a major societal and lethal force: in the first years of the pandemic, more than 200,000 unvaccinated Americans needlessly died despite the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines. Even as he paints a picture of the world under a shadow of aggressive ignorance, Hotez demonstrates his innate optimism, offering solutions for how to combat science denial and save lives in the process.

Earth Observation for Flood Applications: Progress and Perspectives describes the latest scientific advances in Earth Observation. With recent floods around the world becoming ever more devastating, there is a need for better science enabling more effective solutions at a fast pace. This book aims at stretching from the current flood mapping to diverse real data so as to estimate the flood risk and damage. Earth Observation for Flood Applications: Progress and Perspectives includes three parts containing each a separate but complementary topic area under floods. Each chapter unfolds various applications, case studies, and illustrative graphics. In terms of flood mapping and monitoring, the usage of multi-sensor satellite data, web-services information, microwave remote sensing methods are discussed in depth. So, this book is a valuable resource for scientists, researchers, and students in the area of earth observation.

Pharma-funded mainstream media has convinced millions of Americans that Dr. Anthony Fauci is a hero. He is anything but.

As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci dispenses $6.1 billion in annual taxpayer-provided funding for scientific research, allowing him to dictate the subject, content, and outcome of scientific health research across the globe. Fauci uses the financial clout at his disposal to wield extraordinary influence over hospitals, universities, journals, and thousands of influential doctors and scientists—whose careers and institutions he has the power to ruin, advance, or reward. During more than a year of painstaking and meticulous research, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unearthed a shocking story that obliterates media spin on Dr. Fauci... and that will alarm every American—Democrat or Republican—who cares about democracy, our Constitution, and the future of our children’s health.

The Real Anthony Fauci reveals how “America’s Doctor” launched his career during the early AIDS crisis by partnering with pharmaceutical companies to sabotage safe and effective off-patent therapeutic treatments for AIDS. Fauci orchestrated fraudulent studies, and then pressured US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulators into approving a deadly chemotherapy treatment he had good reason to know was worthless against AIDS. Fauci repeatedly violated federal laws to allow his Pharma partners to use impoverished and dark-skinned children as lab rats in deadly experiments with toxic AIDS and cancer chemotherapies.

In early 2000, Fauci shook hands with Bill Gates in the library of Gates’ $147 million Seattle mansion, cementing a partnership that would aim to control an increasingly profitable $60 billion global vaccine enterprise with unlimited growth potential. Through funding leverage and carefully cultivated personal relationships with heads of state and leading media and social media institutions, the Pharma-Fauci-Gates alliance exercises dominion over global health policy.

The Real Anthony Fauci details how Fauci, Gates, and their cohorts use their control of media outlets, scientific journals, key government and quasi-governmental agencies, global intelligence agencies, and influential scientists and physicians to flood the public with fearful propaganda about COVID-19 virulence and pathogenesis, and to muzzle debate and ruthlessly censor dissent.

Optimizing Community Infrastructure: Resilience in the Face of Shocks and Stresses examines the resilience measures being deployed within individual disciplines and sectors and how multi-stakeholder efforts can catalyze action to address global challenges in preparedness and disaster and hazard mitigation. The book provides a theoretical framework to advance thinking on creating resilient, inclusive, sustainable and safe communities. Users will find an accurate and up-to-date guide for working on the development, implementation, monitoring and assessment of policies, programs and projects related to community resilience.

A richly imagined new view on the great human tradition of apocalypse, from the rise of Homo sapiens to the climate instability of our present, that defies conventional wisdom and long-held stories about our deep past to reveal how cataclysmic events are not irrevocable endings, but transformations.

A drought lasts for decades, a disease rips through a city, a civilization collapses. When we finally uncover the ruins, we ask: What happened? The good news is, we’ve been here before. History is long, and people have already confronted just about every apocalypse we’re facing today. But these days, archaeologists are getting better at seeing stories of survival, transformation, and even progress hidden within those histories of collapse and destruction. Perhaps, we begin to see, apocalypses do not destroy worlds, but create them anew.

Apocalypse offers a new way of understanding human history, reframing it as a series of crises and cataclysms that we survived, moments of choice in an evolution of humanity that has never been predetermined or even linear. Here Lizzie Wade asks us to reckon with our long-held narratives of these events, from the end of Old Kingdom Egypt, the collapse of the Classic Maya, to the Black Death, and shows us how people lived through and beyond them—and even considered what a new world could look like in their wake.

The more we learn about apocalypses past, the more hope we have that we will survive our own. It won’t be pleasant. It won’t be fair. The world will be different on the other side, and our cultures and communities—perhaps even our species—will be different too.

From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on The Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then ... six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann’s recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O’Brian, his portrayal of the castaways’ desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann’s work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.

Drought is considered to be a normal feature of climate especially in tropical countries where occurrence of periods of dry weather during rainy season is common. Virtually droughts can occur in all climates and they can also be witnessed when the air temperatures are higher than the normal for a longer period that increases both evaporation and water deficit. 1. The first deals with the introduction to the topic, historical evidences of drought and famines in India. 2. The definition of droughts, criteria for classification of droughts, drought indices based on rainfall, climate derivatives and remote sensing are covered under two. 3. Information on climate change with respects to climate trends, projections on temperature and rainfall at global as well at national level, consequences of climate change on droughts are presented in there. 4. Approaches on drought monitoring, adopted by various countries, international cooperation in drought monitoring and drought monitoring mechanism in India are presented in four. Decision Support Systems and applications of GIS for drought monitoring are also covered in this . 5. World food production and its variability, the impact of phenomenal drought during 2009 on food grain production in different countries, impacts of droughts on livestock, milk and fisheries production are covered under five. 6. Global surface waters, availability of surface waters in India, influence of drought on fauna and flora of surface waters and global warming on water resources at global and national level is discussed in - six. 7. Drought management strategies, drought planning and preparedness action plans at global as well at national level, indigenous knowledge on drought management, astrological techniques in weather forecasting and traditional wisdom on management of droughts in different nomadic communities in Asia and Africa are covered in seven. eight carries the conclusion of the entire book. Book will be useful to the students and research scholars of Agrometeorology, Meteorology and Geography and all Research Scientists dealing with NRM.

Disasters can happen without warning and cause detrimental damage to society. By planning and conducting research beforehand, businesses can more effectively aid in relief efforts. The Developing Role of Public Libraries in Emergency Management: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an essential reference source for the latest scholarly information on library engagement in official emergency response and how these institutions can offer community aid in disaster situations. Featuring extensive coverage on a number of topics such as hazard analysis, mitigation planning, and local command structure, this publication is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, and practitioners seeking current research on the role local businesses play in emergency response situations.