Understanding and Addressing Disaster Risk Who Speaks? Who Suffers?

1. The challenges of disaster

2. Framing disaster risk reduction

3. Abilities

4. The living world

5. Water, weather, and climate

6. Earthly hazards: earthquakes and volcanoes

7. Living with tsunamis and landslides

8. Beyond the earth

9. Disaster risk construction

10. Understanding risk and living life

11. Afterword: head and heart - Compassion and anger in disaster studies and action

Biography

Ben Wisner is an activist scholar who finds himself tempted by nostalgia for the 70s, 80s, and 90s when he worked to understand and address disaster risk with civil society and local government in a number of countries in eastern and southern Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

Irasema Alcántara-Ayala is a professor and former director at the Institute of Geography at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

JC Gaillard is Ahorangi / Professor of Geography at Waipapa Taumata Rau / The University of Auckland.

Ilan Kelman is Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London, England, and a Professor II at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway.

Victor Marchezini is a sociologist at the Brazilian Early Warning Center (Cemaden).

"A wonderful compendium and source for inspiration in the field of reducing and managing disaster risk. An immense contribution to an essential requirement for sustainable development in the world."

Salvano Briceno, former Director of UNISDR (now UNDRR), 2001–2011.

"This book reinforces inevitable principles from studying disaster risks: disasters are socially constructed processes; we must look at the global from the local and the local from the global; always privilege the identification of root causes of disasters. It brings together theoretically, methodologically, and conceptually the disaster risk realities experienced daily around the world."

Virginia García-Acosta, Emeritus Researcher, Professor in History and Anthropology, CIESAS (Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology), Mexico.

"This volume represents a good overall synthesis of existing literature, but also expands beyond traditional topics to include analyses of the COVID-19 pandemic and potential hazards beyond the Earth. This volume continues the extraordinary work of Ben Wisner and his colleagues, providing insights into existing and evolving hazards and suggesting pathways for action."

Michèle Companion, Professor of Sociology, University of Colorado–Colorado Springs, and President of the Research Committee on Sociology of Disasters (RC-39) at the International Sociological Association (ISA).