1st Edition
Environmental Hazards and Resilience Theory and Evidence
Building resilience to the world’s increasingly damaging environmental hazards has become a priority. This book considers the scientific advances which have been made around the world to enhance this resilience.
Although resilience is not new, it is through the idea of resilience that governments, organisations, and communities around the world are now seeking to address the rapidly increasing losses that environmental hazards cause so that fewer lives are lost, and damage is reduced. Alternative ideas and approaches have been helpful in reducing loss, but resilience offers a fresh and potentially effective means of reducing it further. Adopting a scientific approach and scientific evidence is important in applying the resilience idea in hazard mitigation. However, the science of resilience is at an immature stage of development with much discussion about the concept and how it should be understood and interpreted. Building useful theories remains a challenge although some of the building blocks of theory have been developed. More attention has been given to developing indicators and frameworks of resilience which are subsequently applied to measure resilience to hazards such as flooding, earthquake, and climate change.
Environmental Hazards and Resilience: Theory and Evidence considers the scientific and theoretical challenges of making progress in applying resilience to environmental hazard mitigation and provides examples from around the world – including the USA, New Zealand, China, Bangladesh and elsewhere.
The chapters in this book were originally published in the Environmental Hazards.
Preface
Dennis J. Parker
Introduction: Disaster resilience: developing a challenged science
Dennis J. Parker
1. Using vulnerability and resilience concepts to advance climate change adaptation
Erin P. Joakim, Linda Mortsch and Greg Oulahen
2. Foundations of community disaster resilience: well-being, identity, services and capitals
Scott B. Miles
3. Temporal and spatial change in disaster resilience in US counties, 2010–2015
Susan Cutter and Sahar Derakhshan
4. Assessing community resilience: mapping the community rating system (CRS) against the 6C-4R frameworks
Ajita Atreya and Howard Kunreuther
5. Research on disaster resilience of earthquake-stricken areas in Longmenshan fault zone based on GIS
Bin Liu, Xudong Chen, Zhongu Zhou, Min Tang and Shimming Li
6. Coping and resilience in riverine Bangladesh
Parvin Sultana, Paul M. Thompson and Anna Wesselink
7. Urbanisation and disaster risk: the resilience of the Nigerian community in Auckland to natural hazards
Osamuede Odiase, Suzanne Wilkinson and Andreas Neef
8. The French Cat’ Nat’ system: post-flood recovery and resilience issues
Bernard Barraqué and Annabelle Moatty
9. Stakeholder participation in building resilience to disasters in a changing climate
Pauline Aldunce, Ruth Bellin, John Handmer and Mark Howden
10. How does social learning facilitate urban disaster resilience? A systematic review
Qingxia Zhang, Junyan Hu, Xuping Song, Zhihong Li, Kehy Yang and Yongzhong Sha
11. Local government, political decentralisation and resilience to natural hazard-associated disasters
Vassilis Tselios and Emma Tompkins
Biography
Dennis Parker is Professor at the Flood Hazard Research Centre, Middlesex University, UK. His research has focused on reducing the natural hazard losses across the globe. Dennis lives in Hertfordshire and has two daughters and six grandchildren.
Edmund Penning-Rowsell OBE founded the Flood Hazard Research Centre at Middlesex University in 1970. He has more than 40 years’ experience of research and teaching in the flood hazard field, analysing floods and investment in flood alleviation, river management, water planning, and landscape assessment. Edmund lives in Oxfordshire and is also a member of the Oxford Water Security Network. He has two daughters and four grandchildren.
