Author: Edited by DS Miller and JD Rivera
ISBN No: 97814 3980 491
Review date: 16/12/2025
No of pages: 427
Publisher: CRC Press, Taylor & Francis
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
We’re seeing some of the most devastating disasters in recent history, a book on global and regional responses to disasters begins.
A pair of American editors have pulled together various case studies, from the Asian tsunami to food shortages in Africa, oil wells blowing out and – nearest to home – contaminated water in Ireland. While, as the editors point out at the end, wars and other human acts can devastate populations, when it comes to natural disasters such as floods and hurricanes, the raw number of people affected and the impact on economies ‘has significantly increased over the past century’. Whether and how to respond is bound up with, as the book shows, climate change science and governance. Will natural disasters such as droughts become so frequent and bad that whole peoples have to migrate, or starve?
