Natural disasters, the effects of climate change, and political upheavals and war have driven tens of millions of people from their homes and spurred intense debates about how governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) should respond with long-term resettlement strategies. Many resettlement efforts have focused primarily on providing infrastructure and have done little to help displaced people and communities rebuild social structure, which has led to resettlement failures throughout the world. So what does it take to transform a resettlement into a successful community? This book offers the first long-term comparative study of social outcomes through a case study of two Honduran resettlements built for survivors of Hurricane Mitch (1998) by two different NGOs. Although residents of each arrived from the same affected neighborhoods and have similar demographics, twelve years later one resettlement wrestles with high crime, low participation, and low social capital, while the other maintains low crime, a high degree of social cohesion, participation, and general social health. Using a multi-method approach of household surveys, interviews, ethnography, and analysis of NGO and community documents, Ryan Alaniz demonstrates that these divergent resettlement trajectories can be traced back to the type and quality of support provided by external organizations and the creation of a healthy, cohesive community culture. His findings offer important lessons and strategies that can be utilized in other places and in future resettlement policy to achieve the most effective and positive results.

This book is for a broad audience of practitioners, policymakers, scholars, and anyone interested in scenarios, simulations, and disaster planning. Readers are led through several different planning scenarios that have been developed over several years under the auspices of the US Department of Energy, the US Air Force, and continued work at GlobalInt LLC. These scenarios present different security challenges and their potential cascading impacts on global systems - from the melting of glaciers in the Andes, to hurricanes in New York and Hawaii, and on to hybrid disasters, cyberoperations and geoengineering. The book provides a concise and up-to-date overview of the 'lessons learned', with a focus on innovative solutions to the world's pressing energy and environmental security challenges.

Dramatic scenes of devastation and suffering caused by disasters such as the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, are viewed with shock and horror by millions of us across the world. What we rarely see, however, are the international politics of disaster aid, mitigation and prevention that condition the collective response to natural catastrophes around the world. In this book, respected Canadian environmental sociologist John Hannigan argues that the global community of nations has failed time and again in establishing an effective and binding multilateral mechanism for coping with disasters, especially in the more vulnerable countries of the South.Written in an accessible and even-handed manner, Disasters without Borders it is the first comprehensive account of the key milestones, debates, controversies and research relating to the international politics of natural disasters. Tracing the historical evolution of this policy field from its humanitarian origins in WWI right up to current efforts to cast climate change as the prime global driver of disaster risk, it highlights the ongoing mismatch between the way disaster has been conceptualised and the institutional architecture in place to manage it. The book's bold conclusion predicts the confluence of four emerging trends - politicisation/militarisation, catastrophic scenario building, privatisation of risk, and quantification, which could create a new system of disaster management wherein 'insurance logic' will replace humanitarian concern as the guiding principle. "Disasters Without Borders" is an ideal introductory text for students, lecturers and practitioners in the fields of international development studies, disaster management, politics and international affairs, and environmental geography/sociology.

This book covers the restoration and reconstruction process and activities undertaken in Japan in the first five years since the 2011 Earthquake and Tsunami - a period widely considered to be the most intensive reconstruction phase within the 10-year restoration plan drawn up by the Japanese Government. The respective chapters explore technical, scientific, social and non-scientific (policy-related) aspects, including: reconstruction and restoration policies, infrastructure and designs for tsunami coastal defence, resilient urban areas and affected communities, housing and relocation schemes, disaster mitigation and evacuation measures, reactivation of the economy, revitalization of fisheries and coastal agriculture, and industry and tourism. The book also illustrates some of the achievements and failures in a broad range of projects and initiatives intended to address the above-mentioned issues, making it particularly relevant for experts, decision makers, students and other interested scholars.

Mass starvation's causes may seem simple and immediate: crop failure, poverty, outbreaks of violence, and poor governance. But famines are complex, and scholars cannot fully understand what causes them unless they look at their numerous social and environmental precursors over long arcs of history, and over long distances. Famine in the Remaking examines the relationship between the reorganisation of food systems and large-scale food crises through a comparative historical analysis of three famines: Hawaii in the 1820s, Madagascar in the 1920s, and Cambodia in the 1970s. This examination identifies the structural transformations - that is, changes to the relationships between producers and consumers - that make food systems more vulnerable to failure. Moving beyond the economic and political explanations for food crisis that have dominated the literature, Stian Rice emphasises important socioecological interactions, developing a framework for crisis evolution that identifies two distinct temporal phases and five different types of causal mechanisms involved in food systems failure. His framework contributes to current work in famine prevention and, animated by a commitment to social justice, offers the potential for early intervention in emerging food crises.

Here Ireland's premier economic historian and one of the leading authorities on the Great Irish Famine examines the most lethal natural disaster to strike Europe in the nineteenth century. Between the mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the food source that we still call the Irish potato had allowed the fastest population growth in the whole of Western Europe. As vividly described in O'Grada's new work, the advent of the blight "phytophthora infestans" transformed the potato from an emblem of utility to a symbol of death by starvation. The Irish famine peaked in Black '47, but it brought misery and increased mortality to Ireland for several years.

Central to Irish and British history, European demography, the world history of famines, and the story of American immigration, the Great Irish Famine is presented here from a variety of new perspectives. Moving away from the traditional narrative historical approach to the catastrophe, O'Grada concentrates instead on fresh insights available through interdisciplinary and comparative methods. He highlights several economic and sociological features of the famine previously neglected in the literature, such as the part played by traders and markets, by medical science, and by migration. Other topics include how the Irish climate, usually hospitable to the potato, exacerbated the failure of the crops in 1845-1847, and the controversial issue of Britain's failure to provide adequate relief to the dying Irish.

O'Grada also examines the impact on urban Dublin of what was mainly a rural disaster and offers a critical analysis of the famine as represented in folk memory and tradition.

The broad scope of this book is matched by its remarkable range of sources, published and archival. The book will be the starting point for all future research into the Irish famine."

This book investigates how nature and history intertwined during the violent aftermath of the Latin American Wars of Independence. Synthesizing intellectual history and readings of textual production, The Literature of Catastrophe reimagines the emergence of the modern Latin American nation-states beyond the scope of the harmonious "foundational fictions" that marked the emergence of the nation as an organic community. Through a study of philosophical, literary and artistic representations of three catastrophic figures - earthquakes, volcanoes and epidemics - this book provides a critical model through which to refute these state-sponsored "happy narratives," proposing instead that the emergence of the modern state in Latin America was indeed a violent event whose aftershocks are still felt today. Engaging a variety of sources and protagonists, from Simon Bolivar's manifestoes to Cesar Aira's use of landscape in his novels, from the revolutionary role mosquitoes had within the Haitian Revolution to the role AIDS played in the writing of Reinaldo Arenas' posthumous novel, Carlos Fonseca offers an original retelling of this foundational moment, recounting how history has become a site where the modern division between nature and culture collapses.

"The focus of this guide is to assist you in planning for all the vital factors and imperative considerations essential in enhancing the likelihood of your organization's continuity and survival when impacted by an out-of-course event: planning to prevent disasters, planning to reduce the likelihood of disasters, planning to deal with disasters, and planning to recover after a disaster has affected the organization." — Alan M. Levitt

The only complete, hands-on guide to disaster planning, Disaster Planning and Recovery provides proven strategies, tools, and techniques for helping your company plan for, cope with, and recover from cataclysmic events. Internationally recognized business continuity expert Alan M. Levitt tells you what you need to know to avoid having natural and man-made disasters become business disasters. You'll find out how to:

• Create an effective plan in advance
• Reduce the likelihood of disasters
• Maintain functioning when disaster strikes
• Mobilize staff safely and efficiently during an emergency
• Reduce costs of and recovery time following an out-of-course event
• Work effectively with key departments, including IT, HR, maintenance
• Minimize stress on staff members
• And much more

Earthquakes, floods, fires, tornadoes . . . there isn't much you can do to stop them from happening, but there are steps you can take to prevent natural and man-made disasters from turning into business disasters. And that is what this book is all about: minimizing the damage done to your business by cataclysmic external events.

The only complete, practical guide of its kind, Disaster Planning and Recovery shows facility professionals how to prepare for, cope with, and rebound from a disaster. Alan Levitt clearly demonstrates that the first major step toward minimizing risk and optimizing recovery time following an emergency is to formulate a comprehensive disaster plan. Drawing upon his years of experience as a business continuity expert—and using fascinating and instructive vignettes and case studies (many of them previously unpublished) to illustrate his points—he shows you how to develop the most cost-effective plan possible.

Rather than offer a set of one-size-fits-all checklists and procedures, Levitt supplies a rational framework and proven strategies for formulating a plan tailored to your business. He shows you how to set reasonable goals that will allow you to react more quickly and effectively without losing sight of business outcomes. And he provides the means for researching and conducting the five phases of a comprehensive disaster/recovery plan: identifying potential disasters; quantifying the risk of occurrence; establishing parameters for reducing that risk; forecasting the potential impact a disaster can have on personnel, plant, and business processes; and establishing systems for counterbalancing those impacts.

Throughout Disaster Planning and Recovery, the emphasis is on human factors. Levitt describes techniques for efficiently mobilizing staff in an emergency, working effectively with key departments, such as IT, and most importantly, easing the stress that disasters can impose on staff members. Disaster Planning and Recovery is an indispensable resource for facility professionals, human resources managers, building owners and managers, architects, designers, and planners.

For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about. Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios.

Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19. The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected.

A thirteen-year-old girl’s science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm’s-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu…everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work.

Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in.

In a cemetery on the southern outskirts of Paris lie the bodies of nearly a hundred of what some have called the first casualties of global climate change. They were the so-called abandoned victims of the worst natural disaster in French history, the devastating heat wave that struck in August 2003, leaving 15,000 dead. They died alone in Paris and its suburbs, and were then buried at public expense, their bodies unclaimed. They died, and to a great extent lived, unnoticed by their neighbors-their bodies undiscovered in some cases until weeks after their deaths. Fatal Isolation tells the stories of these victims and the catastrophe that took their lives. It explores the multiple narratives of disaster-the official story of the crisis and its aftermath, as presented by the media and the state; the life stories of the individual victims, which both illuminate and challenge the ways we typically perceive natural disasters; and the scientific understandings of disaster and its management. Fatal Isolation is both a social history of risk and vulnerability in the urban landscape and a story of how a city copes with emerging threats and sudden, dramatic change.

'This book is brilliant. Utterly, utterly brilliant. Apart from the epilogue, which is idiotic' Jeremy Clarkson 'F*cking brilliant' Sarah Knight AN EXHILARATING JOURNEY THROUGH THE MOST CREATIVE AND CATASTROPHIC F*CK-UPS OF HUMAN HISTORY In the seventy thousand years that modern human beings have walked this earth, we've come a long way. Art, science, culture, trade - on the evolutionary food chain, we're real winners. But, frankly, it's not exactly been plain sailing, and sometimes - just occasionally - we've managed to really, truly, quite unbelievably f*ck things up. From Chairman Mao's Four Pests Campaign, to the American Dustbowl; from the Austrian army attacking itself one drunken night, to the world's leading superpower electing a reality TV mogul as President... it's pretty safe to say that, as a species, we haven't exactly grown wiser with age. So, next time you think you've really f*cked up, this book will remind you: it could be so much worse... FURTHER PRAISE FOR HUMANS: 'Very funny' Mark Watson 'A light-touch history of moments when humans have got it spectacularly wrong... Both readable and entertaining' The Telegraph 'Chronicles humanity's myriad follies down the ages with malicious glee and much wit ... a rib-tickling page-turner' Business Standard 'A timely, irreverent gallop through thousands of years of human stupidity' Nicholas Griffin, Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World

Hunger is a daily reality for a billion people. More than six decades after the technological discoveries that led to the Green Revolution aimed at ending world hunger, regular food shortages, malnutrition, and poverty still plague vast swaths of the world. And with increasing food prices, climate change, resource inequality, and an ever-increasing global population, the future holds further challenges.

In One Billion Hungry, Sir Gordon Conway, one of the world's foremost experts on global food needs, explains the many interrelated issues critical to our global food supply from the science of agricultural advances to the politics of food security. He expands the discussion begun in his influential The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the Twenty-First Century, emphasizing the essential combination of increased food production, environmental stability, and poverty reduction necessary to end endemic hunger on our planet.

Conway addresses a series of urgent questions about global hunger:

How we will feed a growing global population in the face of a wide range of adverse factors, including climate change?

What contributions can the social and natural sciences make in finding solutions?

And how can we engage both government and the private sector to apply these solutions and achieve significant impact in the lives of the poor?

Conway succeeds in sharing his informed optimism about our collective ability to address these fundamental challenges if we use technology paired with sustainable practices and strategic planning.

Beginning with a definition of hunger and how it is calculated, and moving through issues topically both detailed and comprehensive, each chapter focuses on specific challenges and solutions, ranging in scope from the farmer's daily life to the global movement of food, money, and ideas. Drawing on the latest scientific research and the results of projects around the world, Conway addresses the concepts and realities of our global food needs: the legacy of the Green Revolution; the impact of market forces on food availability; the promise and perils of genetically modified foods; agricultural innovation in regard to crops, livestock, pest control, soil, and water; and the need to both adapt to and slow the rate of climate change. One Billion Hungry will be welcomed by all readers seeking a multifaceted understanding of our global food supply, food security, international agricultural development, and sustainability. "

Social media is an invaluable source of time-critical information during a crisis. However, emergency response and humanitarian relief organizations that would like to use this information struggle with an avalanche of social media messages that exceeds the human capacity to process. Emergency managers, decision makers, and affected communities can make sense of social media through a combination of machine computation and human compassion - expressed by thousands of digital volunteers who publish, process, and summarize potentially life-saving information. This book brings together computational methods from many disciplines: natural language processing, semantic technologies, data mining, machine learning, network analysis, human-computer interaction, and information visualization, focusing on methods that are commonly used for processing social media messages under time-critical constraints, and offering more than 500 references to in-depth information.

The 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station led to serious radioactive contamination of the environment. Due to transportation by seasonal wind and ocean currents, these radioactive materials have now been observed in many places in the Northern Hemisphere. This book provides a unique summary of the environmental impact of the unprecedented accident. It covers how radioactive materials were transported through the atmosphere, oceans and land. The techniques used to investigate the deposition and migration processes are also discussed including atmospheric observation, soil mapping, forest and ecosystem investigations, and numerical simulations. With chapters written by international experts, this is a crucial resource for researchers working on the dispersion and impact of radionuclides in the environment. It also provides essential knowledge for nuclear engineers, social scientists and policymakers to help develop suitable mitigation measures to prepare for similar large-scale natural hazards in the future.

Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein trav els across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to witness the reality of disaster capitalism. He discovers how companies such as G4S, Serco, and Halliburton cash in on or ganized misery in a hidden world of privatized detention centers, militarized private security, aid profiteering, and destructive mining. Disaster has become big business. Talking to immigrants stuck in limbo in Britain or visiting immigration centers in America, Loewenstein maps the secret networks formed to help cor porations bleed what profits they can from economic crisis. He debates with Western contractors in Afghanistan, meets the locals in post-earthquake Haiti, and in Greece finds a country at the mercy of vulture profiteers. In Papua New Guinea, he sees a local commu nity forced to rebel against predatory resource companies and NGOs. What emerges through Loewenstein's re porting is a dark history of multinational corpo rations that, with the aid of media and political elites, have grown more powerful than national governments. In the twenty-first century, the vulnerable have become the world's most valu able commodity.

The Halifax explosion was unprecedented in its devastation with regards to casualties, force and radius of the blast, and widespread damage to property.This book offers a collection of carefully selected visuals that tell the story of the devastation caused by the explosion and the impact it had on Halifax. Joyce Glasner focuses on the impact of this wartime disaster on the thousands of survivors.

This novel, transdisciplinary work explains how perturbations (defined as strong disturbances or deviations to a system) can affect the population dynamics of social animals, including ourselves. Social responses to perturbations, especially dispersal processes, can also generate non-linear population dynamics, including the potential appearance of tipping points and critical population transitions, which can in turn lead to catastrophic shifts and collapses. The book describes the links between social behaviour (mainly the use of social information and social copying), and non-linear population dynamics at different spatial scales (local dynamics and meta-population dynamics), and their ecological and evolutionary consequences. Examples from the natural world illustrate each of the main themes (prospecting, habitat suitability, collective dispersal, and cultural evolution). Human warfare and conflict, referred to in several chapters together with quantitative and qualitative examples, is also viewed as a form of perturbation and represents a paradigmatic example of the rationale behind this book. This applicability to our own species is particularly timely, given increased interest in both ecosystem change, human migration, and the global refugee crisis. Perturbation, Behavioural Feedbacks, and Population Dynamics in Social Animals will appeal to applied, theoretical, and evolutionary ecologists, particularly those working on the population and behavioural ecology of any social animal including humans. Its overlap with the study of complexity will also ensure its relevance and use to scientists from other disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, physics, computational science, economics, and mathematics.

Land has been a dominant theme in modern Irish history, extending to political and cultural issues as well as permeating social and economic ones.

On May 5, 2007, two days into his twenty-seventh trip to the Boundary Waters, Stephen Posniak found a perfect spot on Ham Lake and set about making a campfire. Over the next two weeks, the fire he set would consume 75,000 acres of forest and 144 build