Hazards, Risks and Disasters in Society

Hazards, Risks, and Disasters in Society provides analyses of environmentally related catastrophes within society in historical, political and economic contexts. Personal and corporate culture mediates how people may become more vulnerable or resilient to hazard exposure. Societies that strengthen themselves, or are strengthened, mitigate decline and resultant further exposure to what are largely human induced risks of environmental, social and economic degradation. This book outlines why it is important to explore in more depth the relationships between environmental hazards, risk and disasters in society. It presents challenges presented by mainstream and non-mainstream approaches to the human side of disaster studies.

By hazard categories this book includes critical processes and outcomes that significantly disrupt human wellbeing over brief or long time-frames. Whilst hazards, risks and disasters impact society, individuals, groups, institutions and organisations offset the effects by becoming strong, healthy, resilient, caring and creative. Innovations can arise from social organisation in times of crisis. This volume includes much of use to practitioners and policy makers needing to address both prevention and response activities. Notably, as people better engage prevalent hazards and risks they exercise a process that has become known as disaster risk reduction (DRR). In a context of climatic risks this is also indicative of climate change adaptation (CCA). Ultimately it represents the quest for development of sustainable environmental and societal futures. Throughout the book cases studies are derived from the world of hazards risks and disasters in society.

• Includes sections on prevention of and response to hazards, risks and disasters
• Provides case studies of prominent societal challenges of hazards, risks and disasters
• Innovative approaches to dealing with disaster drawing from multiple disciplines and sectors

Dr. John (Jack) F. Shroder received his bachelor’s degree in geology from Union College in 1961; his masters in geology from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst in 1963, and his Ph.D. in geology at the University of Utah in 1967. He has been actively pursuing research on landforms and natural resources in the high mountain environments of the Rocky Mountains, the Afghanistan Hindu Kush, and the Karakoram Himalaya of Pakistan for over a half century. His teaching specialties have been primarily geomorphology, but also physical and historical geology and several other courses at the University of Nebraska at Omaha where he was the founding professor of the Geology major. While there he was instrumental in founding the Center for Afghanistan Studies in 1972, and he was the lead geologist for the Bethsaida Archaeological Project in Israel in the 1990s. He taught geology as an NSF-, USAID, and Fulbright-sponsored professor at Kabul University in 1977-78, as well as a Fulbright award to Peshawar University in 1983-84. He has some 63 written or edited books to his credit and more than 200 professional papers, with emphases on landslides, glaciers, flooding, and mineral resources in Afghanistan. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has received Distinguished Career awards from both the Mountain and the Geomorphology Specialty Groups of the Association of American Geographers. In the recent decade as an Emeritus Professor, he served as a Trustee of the Geological Society of America Foundation where he set up a research scholarship, the Shroder Mass Movement award for masters and doctoral candidates. For the past two decades, he has been the Editor-in-Chief for the Developments in Earth Surface Processes book series of Elsevier Publishing, as well as the 10-volumes of the Treatise on Geomorphology, and the Hazards, Risks, and Disasters book series, both in second editions. Recently, Dr. Shroder was ranked among the top 2 percent of researchers worldwide by the October study conducted by Stanford University.