Bücher der Reihe Routledge Studies in Hazards, Disaster Risk and Climate Change

This book offers anthropological insights into disasters in Latin America. It fills a gap in the literature by bringing together national and regional perspectives in the study of disasters.

This book explores the role and practice of risk communication in building community resilience to natural and social hazards. It examines how risk communication can be used to reduce the hazardous outcomes to communities from natural disasters, and therefore improve resilience to those events.

This book taps into discussions about social vulnerability, empowerment, and resistance in relation to disaster relief and recovery. It disentangles tensions and dilemmas within post-disaster empowerment, through a rich ethnographic narrative of the work of Occupy Sandy in Rockaway, New York City, after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. It details both a remarkable collaborative relief phase, in which marginalized communities were empowered to take active part, as well as a phase of conflict and resistance that came about as relief turned to long-term recovery.This volume particularly aims to understand how community empowerment processes can breach pre-disaster marginalization in the aftermath of disasters. It connects with broader emancipatory literature on dilemmas involved in empowerment 'from the outside'. In a future of potentially harsher climate related disasters and increased social vulnerability for certain communities, this book contributes to a full and nuanced understanding of community empowerment and vulnerability reduction.This book will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, political scientists, and urban studies researchers, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in disaster management, disaster risk reduction, social vulnerability, community empowerment, development studies, local studies, social work, community-based work, and emancipatory theory.

This book presents a fascinating, ethnographic account of the challenges faced by communities living in Majuli, India, one of the largest river islands in the world, which has experienced immense socio-environmental transformations over the years, processes that are emblematic of the Brahmaputra Valley as a whole.Written in an engaging style, full of the author's insider perspectives, this insightful volume explores the processes of flooding and riverbank erosion in Majuli, including re-configuration of the island's geographies, loss of local livelihoods, and large-scale displacement of the population. The book begins with an examination of the physical geography of Majuli and its ecological complexities, leading to discussion on the role of the state in water governance and hazard management, as well as popular resistance by the rural communities on the island. The book focuses on livelihoods as a way of offering economic context to living in challenging environmental conditions and examines the interactions between the state and a whole host of non-state actors, and the everyday, arbitrary functioning of the bureaucracy in a hazardscape.This volume is an invaluable resource for scholars interested in political ecology of hazards and vulnerability, water and hydraulic infrastructure, rural livelihoods and agrarian questions, state theorizations, island studies, and resistance and social movements, as well as those with an interest in northeast India more generally across various disciplines.

This book examines the issue of disaster recovery in relation to community wellbeing and resilience, exploring the social, political, demographic and environmental changes in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster.

We think vulnerability still matters when considering how people are put at risk from hazards and this book shows why in a series of thematic chapters and case studies written by eminent disaster studies scholars that deal with the politics of disaster risk creation: precarity, conflict, and climate change.

We think vulnerability still matters when considering how people are put at risk from hazards and this book shows why in a series of thematic chapters and case studies written by eminent disaster studies scholars that deal with the politics of disaster risk creation: precarity, conflict, and climate change.

The frequency and intensity of hazards and disasters is increasing worldwide. This book provides a comprehensive overview of cutting edge trends in governance research, exploring how risks, hazards, and disasters can be mainstreamed into a governance framework.

This book sheds light on the management challenges of crisis and emergency response in an arctic environment. It explores how the complexity of the operational environment impacts on the risk of operations and addresses a need for tailor-made emergency response mechanisms.

The book explores the ways of working with communities in transition or trauma and particularly in their recovery phases in the array of case studies of practical experience, so that the book as a whole can offer practical suggestions on how to give more substance to the rhetoric of community consultation and engagement in these areas of work. It suggests a need to work with a dynamic understanding of community formation that is particularly relevant when people experience unforeseen challenges and traumatic experiences.

This book focuses on the challenges of living with climate disasters, in addition to the existing gender inequalities that prevail and define social, economic and political conditions.

This book examines climate hazards crises in contemporary Asia, identifying how hazards from the Middle East through South and Central Asia and China have the power to reshape our globalised world. By integrating human exposure to climate factors and disaster episodes, the book explores the environmental forces that drive disasters and their social implications. The chapters address several scales, hazard types (drought, flood, temperature, storms, dust), environments (desert, temperate, mountain, coastal) and issues (vulnerability, development, management, politics). It will be of interest to those working in Geography, Development Studies, Environmental Sciences and Political Science.

Rebuilding Fukushima gives an account of how citizens, local governments, and businesses responded to and coped with the crisis of Fukushima. It addresses principles to guide reconstruction and international policy environments in which the current disaster is situated. It explores how reconstruction is articulated and experienced at different spatial scales, ranging from individuals to communities and municipalities, and details recovery efforts, achievements, and challenges in the realms of public transportation, agriculture and food production, manufacturing industries, retail sectors, and renewable energy industries.

This book elaborates on diverse dominant practices of masculinity in disasters and how this shapes recovery and resilience. Original studies in diverse environmental, hazard, and cultural contexts highlight the high costs paid by men emotionally, and how diverse forms of masculinities shape their efforts to respond and recover from disasters and to cope with extreme weather and other climate challenges. The final chapters demonstrate men¿s diverse strategies for challenging hierarchies in disasters, including around gender, sexuality, disability, age, and culture.

This book explores the role and practice of risk communication in building community resilience to natural and social hazards. It examines how risk communication can be used to reduce the hazardous outcomes to communities from natural disasters, and therefore improve resilience to those events.

This book argues that the domination of Western knowledge in disaster scholarship has allowed for normative policies and practices of disaster risk reduction to be imposed all over the world. It takes a postcolonial approach to deconstruct concepts, methods, and forms of governments inherited from the Enlightenment.

Why did the people of the Zambesi Delta affected by severe flooding return early to their homes or even choose to not evacuate? How is the forced resettlement of small-scale farmers living along the foothills of an active volcano on the Philippines impacting on their day-to-day livelihood routines? Making sense of such questions and observations is only possible by understanding how the decision-making of societies at risk is embedded in culture, and how intervention measures acknowledge, or neglect, cultural settings. The social construction of risk is being given increasing priority in understand how people experience and prioritize hazards in their own lives and how vulnerability can be reduced, and resilience increased, at a local level.Culture and Disasters adopts an interdisciplinary approach to explore this cultural dimension of disaster, with contributions from leading international experts within the field.

Why did the people of the Zambesi Delta affected by severe flooding return early to their homes or even choose to not evacuate? How is the forced resettlement of small-scale farmers living along the foothills of an active volcano on the Philippines impacting on their day-to-day livelihood routines? Making sense of such questions and observations is only possible by understanding how the decision-making of societies at risk is embedded in culture, and how intervention measures acknowledge, or neglect, cultural settings. The social construction of risk is being given increasing priority in understand how people experience and prioritize hazards in their own lives and how vulnerability can be reduced, and resilience increased, at a local level.Culture and Disasters adopts an interdisciplinary approach to explore this cultural dimension of disaster, with contributions from leading international experts within the field.