Earthquake Disasters: Prevention and Reconstruction

This book explores practices and approaches on pre-disaster prevention and post-disaster reconstruction for vulnerable countries and areas enhancing earthquake disaster resilience.

Destructive earthquakes have frequently occurred in urban or rural areas around the world, causing severe damage on human societies. Pre-earthquake prevention and post-earthquake reconstruction effect the disaster resilience building and long-term development of the affected communities and areas. In recent years, researchers from around the world have made a lot of efforts to study on the theme ‘earthquake disaster prevention and reconstruction’.

The chapters in this edited volume contribute to the literature of earthquake disaster research from scientific, social and institutional aspects. These interdisciplinary studies mainly focus on human and policy dimensions of earthquake disaster, such as earthquake risk mitigation, social-physical resilience building, resilience capability assessment, healthcare surge capacity, house reconstruction, the roles of schools, households, civil societies and public participation in earthquake disaster prevention and reconstruction. The authors come from several counties, including China, Bangladesh, Iran, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Indonesia, covering the cases from those countries prone to earthquakes.

These nine distinctive chapters have been elaborately selected and integrated from the international, ranked, peer-reviewed journal, Environmental Hazards.

Jiuping Xu is Associate Vice President, Dean of the Business School and Director of the Emergency Management Institute at Sichuan University. He has published more than 700 peer-reviewed journal articles and over 40 books in Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Elsevier, Cambridge University Press, and others.

Yi Lu is a professor in the Business School at Sichuan University. He is the Vice Director of the Emergency Management Institute at Sichuan University, and an editorial board member of Environmental Hazards. His research interests focus on disaster resilience and post-earthquake recovery and reconstruction.

Edmund Penning-Rowsell is Emeritus Professor of Geography and Pro Vice-Chancellor at Middlesex University, where he founded the Flood Hazard Research Centre in 1970. Since 2010 he has been a visiting academic at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. He is also the editor of the journal Environmental Hazards (Taylor & Francis).