Author: Damon Coppola
ISBN No: 978-0-12-382174-4
Review date: 04/05/2024
No of pages: 759
Publisher: Elsevier
Publisher URL:
http://www.elsevier.com/books/introduction-to-international-disaster-management/coppola/978-0-12-382174-4
Year of publication: 12/06/2015
Brief:
Introduction to International Disaster Management, Third Edition
price
£48.99
If a book has the word ‘international’ in its title, you might not think it’s that applicable to you in the UK. An exception is Introduction to International Disaster Management, Third Edition by an American author, Damon Coppola, if your work takes you at all outside the western world.
Having said that, disasters happen anywhere and are no respector of economic development – indeed, economic development might make a bad disaster worse: consider Japan suffered the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, which led to a barely-controlled rupture at the Fukushima nuclear power station. It’s a whopper of a book for a whopper of a subject.
Whether you are unsure of this specialism or at the other extreme you see the difference between emergency management and disaster management, this book is for you as it takes you through the hazards; the risks (what you face from the hazards); and mitigation; then preparedness and response and recovery. You may want to skip the two chapters that go into bewildering detail on all the governmental and United Nations and other agencies that play a part in dealing with disasters. That said those chapters do have pertinent sections for the private security person on aid worker safety and security (against kidnap for instance), and the role of the private sector (and businesses have their own business continuity to plan for).
Just as the first chapter noted that we’ve seen disasters throughout recorded history, so the final summing-up ‘special considerations’ chapter begins with the point that ‘the incidence of disasters is increasing’, and hence disaster management will remain a concern. What’s more, places may well see not one but a compound disaster – in New Orleans in 2005, Hurricane Katrina led to the notorious flooding of the city, for instance.
Disaster management has become more diverse, Coppola argues, taking in communications (and media management); public health (as Ebola is counted as a disaster), and engineering, and climate change (flooding of coastal cities?), besides the basics of feeding people after a disaster strikes. Disaster response, the author suggests, grows in complexity each year, which is partly avoidable as hundreds – even thousands, Coppola says – might converge on the scene. And (needless to say?) many of those don’t coordinate with each other. It’s not all glum messages though: the speed and reach of the mass media means that what Coppola terms ‘slow-onset disasters’ such as droughts and famines get noticed and the world is alerted. That said, the media can fuel donor fatigue – another ‘special consideration’. Coppola sums up the summing up by saying that the future of international disaster management ‘is promising’. Rich and poor countries alike have been hit; and what affects one country may affect – sooner or later – many. While the book came out too late for the Ebola outbreak in Liberia and neighbours, surely that was an example of the wider world acting to make something bad less worse than it could have been.
