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As glacier retreat threatens people worldwide, this study raises crucial concerns about the successes, failures, and issues that societies might face as they grapple with climate change and shrinking glaciers. This case of climate change adaptation and hazard mitigation in response to glacier disasters over seventy years yields several broadly applicable conclusions. Residents living close to glaciers or in glacially fed watersheds endured the highest cost of glacier retreat because they lost their lives, families, and communities. Disaster responses brought new historical actors—scientists, engineers, water developers, tourists, the nation state, and most recently, the World Bank—to a region where these groups previously had little knowledge about or control over. Each group brought its own ideas about how to define, manage, and utilize the glaciated landscape. Power dynamics among the groups influenced environmental management policies and whose vision for the Andes, its glaciers, and its water ultimately won out.

This chapter discusses the role of social work in disaster relief and management. Social workers need to be prepared in anticipation of disaster rather than waiting until disaster strikes. Social work curricula need to incorporate disaster management so that a new generation of social workers will be trained and prepared for disasters. Ongoing training must also be developed for practicing social workers. However, social work has not yet developed or prioritized disaster management as an integral part of curriculum and practice. The social work profession is highly grounded in the principles of social justice and human rights. Its active involvement in disaster management is pivotal to creating a plan that links vulnerable populations to required resources before, during, and after a disaster.

Emergency preparedness to health risk and disaster response to health needs are essential health protection skills and competencies to protect community health and well-being in times of crisis. Emergencies and extreme events may disrupt the environmental context and destroy essential life- and health-sustaining infrastructure and environmental context. Crisis often renders a health system ineffective to protect a community from health risks and provide for the overwhelming health and medical needs associated with the disruption. In addition, in the twenty-first century, many of the emergencies and disasters transcend national boundaries and require transnational cooperation. Such a response requires global involvement and collaborations to respond effectively and efficiently. Natural disasters (e.g. hurricanes/typhoons), global disease outbreaks of old and emerging infectious diseases, and population displacements as a result of war, famine, or natural disaster often require just the response capacity of more than a single nation.

This chapter examines the evolution of disaster management systems and its impact on land use controls that consider hazard mitigation, relying on examples from Japan, Indonesia, and the US, where various types of natural disasters have played a large role in articulating mitigation-reflected planning systems. Slovakian and German cases provide additional understanding. Analysis showed that mitigation-considered land use systems are likely to be enhanced after major disasters, and that efforts over the past decade – such as hazard mapping – have progressed in an effort to mitigate future disaster impacts. However, land use systems and disaster management systems are often implemented in parallel instead of being integrated, and hazard-reflected land use decisions often remain unrealized. Yet, involving local residents in the process provides some promising examples of mitigation-reflected land use. A process that values local participation is thus critical to advance spatial control for disaster impact mitigation.

This chapter discusses the potential of applying cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to the assessment of the economic efficiency of natural disaster risk management and climate adaptation projects. CBA is a standard tool for assessing the economic efficiency of projects and policies, yet it has generally not been applied sufficiently and robustly to climate adaptation and disaster risk management projects, particularly in a development assistance context. The analysis is contextualized by a case study on flood proofing homesteads against flood risk to riverine islands, known as Chars, in Bangladesh. We discuss the key methodological elements of our approach involving a consideration of the dynamic driving forces of hazard, vulnerability, and exposure. A key concept employed in this analysis is the probabilistic representation of risks by loss-frequency functions. We consider monetary and economic risks, which generate benefits when they are avoided, in terms of structural risk to dwellings, inventory risk, income risk and other potential losses, such as due to cleanup costs. While the results indicate that overall the options studied seem to be economically efficient based on CBA decision rules, we stress that estimating extreme event risk and the benefits of risk reduction is fraught with large and many uncertainties. These uncertainties importantly reduce the economic viability of options studied and should thus be factored into any decision process.

Over the past several decades the Japanese government has iteratively improved institutional and legislative frameworks for risk management after major natural disasters. Recently, reducing spatial vulnerability has been emphasized and laws related to land use and disaster management acts have been refined for implementation. Nevertheless, actual risk control via land use had been limited prior to the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 (GEJE). Since Japan has relatively little residential land compared to their large population, designating hazardous areas was considered impractical and financially infeasible. In post-GEJE rebuilding, however, a paradigm shift has been observed – land use control has been strictly enforced, with an unprecedented amount of land designated as hazardous. This chapter explains the foundation of the disaster management system and land use control in Japan by introducing institutional and legislative frameworks that relate to water-related disasters.

This chapter describes disaster worker protection strategies and health surveillance activities in terms of temporal phases to address disaster safety management before, during, and after a disaster event. The protective strategies discussed in the chapter integrate assessments of on-scene hazards and health or safety impacts and require pre-event planning and coordination across multiple entities. The chapter also addresses the integration of physical, psychological and behavioral health approaches. The chapter addresses the complexities of hazard assessment and control, worker education and training, worker illness and injury surveillance, and access to healthcare services, along with a box on community preparedness. These activities are performed by diverse groups of occupational and environmental health professionals. Various illustrative examples are presented to describe how basic concepts of protection and medical evaluation are applied in specific situations. The U.S. federal system for protecting disaster rescue and recovery workers is described in detail.

Decisions in the area of natural hazards are normally based on probabilities. However, the baseline trend is evolving due to climate change and other changing processes (demographic change, globalization etc.). In parallel, during the last years, the understanding of the role of government has been changed from a traditional approach where the state itself provides all kinds of public services to a model, which is characterized mainly by private services, while the state only guarantees the quality of those services that are of public interest. Thus, societies go from a “predict-and-control” type of governance systems to a more reflexive and adaptive practice of disaster risk management. The main aim of this chapter is to understand the extent to which present governance systems are capable of managing deep uncertainty related to future disasters, as well as to develop proposals and strategies to strengthen this response capacity.

Regular occurrences of flood, drought, cyclones, and heat waves, occasional occurrences of hailstorm, whirlwind, tornado, and landslide and the consequent loss of lives and properties is a constant phenomenon in the state of Odisha. The state is ranked one of the most vulnerable in India and is called the disaster capital of the country. The chapter first provides some theoretical arguments and examples on natural disaster impact on national economies to make a case whether economic backwardness of Odisha can be linked to the natural disasters incidences as frequent disasters limit the capital accumulation and investment capacity of the people. Then a detailed description of the occurrences, the spatial spread, and the intensity of the four frequent disasters and a brief report on each of the other less frequent ones that has befallen the state is presented. Using some econometric analysis, the chapter shows the impact of severe disaster years on State’s Gross Domestic Product.

This chapter focuses on the distribution of disaster costs and benefits over both the short and long run, and looks at the humanitarian consequences of earthquakes, floods, drought, hurricanes and other natural hazards. The chapter discusses the rise of financial instruments such as disaster-risk insurance and risk-linked securities, which transfer disaster costs onto global capital markets. It examines the political-economy constraints that prevent the scaling-up of such financial products, and questions the role of public-private partnerships in overcoming these barriers.

This chapter discusses what to do in the event of a disaster. Disaster is an overused word which can cover many things, from a mild annoyance to an absolute catastrophe. Here, a disaster is any unexpected and unplanned event that severely curtails the ability to carry on ‘business as usual’. This could be because of a catastrophic event, such as a fire or an earthquake that destroys a significant part of the real estate including, perhaps, the main filing system, or something less physical but equally catastrophic like the sudden loss of significant funding or the simultaneous departure of several key personnel. Disasters do happen, albeit rarely. If disaster strikes, it will be very disruptive, but disaster management, with the help of a business continuity plan, a disaster team and a well-designed and tested recovery plan, will reduce its impact.

Humans try to predict the timing and severity of disturbances to better reduce their negative impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services, yet disturbances are an integral part of our lives. To survive, humans have adapted to disturbances that we cannot manage and manipulated those that we can. The recent and rapid growth of human populations has exacerbated interactions between humans and disturbances and made modern disaster management a necessary survival strategy. Expanding our knowledge about disturbance regimes (the sum of all disturbances at a given site) can help reduce future impacts. Wise stewardship of ecosystems includes conservation of natural areas and efficient restoration of ecosystems following a disturbance. It also includes managing the disturbance regime to maximize not just biodiversity or ecosystem services, but the particular use of a chosen parcel of land. This chapter first addresses historical management of disturbance through agriculture and aquaculture, then examines the goals and approaches of conservation and restoration.

Innovation 25 was introduced in 2007 as Prime Minister Abe’s visionary and futuristic blueprint for robotizing Japan by 2025. This policy proposal was supported by subsequent administrations and then revamped following Abe’s reelection in 2012. The conservative sociopolitical aspects of the proposal are elaborated and the use of graphic propaganda to promote Abe’s nationalist policies is reviewed. Members of the Innovation 25 Strategy Council are identified, and opposition to Innovation 25 is summarized. Corporate mismanagement in the aftermath of the trifold disaster of March 11, 2011 (3/11), is critiqued. Contrary to pre-disaster expectations, robots proved incapable of navigating the tsunami-damaged nuclear reactors in Fukushima. The Abe administration’s fostering of “robot dreams” among children and the general public is reviewed and characterized in terms of reactionary postmodernism.