Download or read book Building Resilience written by Daniel P. Aldrich and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-08-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The factor that makes some communities rebound quickly from disasters while others fall apart: “A fascinating book on an important topic.”—E.L. Hirsch, in Choice Each year, natural disasters threaten the strength and stability of communities worldwide. Yet responses to the challenges of recovery vary greatly and in ways that aren’t explained by the magnitude of the catastrophe or the amount of aid provided by national governments or the international community. The difference between resilience and disrepair, as Daniel P. Aldrich shows, lies in the depth of communities’ social capital. Building Resilience highlights the critical role of social capital in the ability of a community to withstand disaster and rebuild both the infrastructure and the ties that are at the foundation of any community. Aldrich examines the post-disaster responses of four distinct communities—Tokyo following the 1923 earthquake, Kobe after the 1995 earthquake, Tamil Nadu after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, and New Orleans post-Katrina—and finds that those with robust social networks were better able to coordinate recovery. In addition to quickly disseminating information and financial and physical assistance, communities with an abundance of social capital were able to minimize the migration of people and valuable resources out of the area. With governments increasingly overstretched and natural disasters likely to increase in frequency and intensity, a thorough understanding of what contributes to efficient reconstruction is more important than ever. Building Resilience underscores a critical component of an effective response.
Download or read book Natural Disasters as a Catalyst for Social Capital written by Kevin F. Adler and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-04-03 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural Disasters as a Catalyst for Social Capital examines the vastly under-explored link between natural disasters and social capital in regards to the unprecedented June 2008 flood in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In-depth qualitative interviews with flood victims and key informants in Cedar Rapids reveal that a resident’s perception of social capital after a natural disaster is shaped by their vulnerabilities and social mobility, which vary substantially and need to be understood contextually. This book, in highlighting the enormous impact of one disaster in a mid-sized Midwestern city, offers a framework for a new theory for why social capital shifts in societies from one generation to another: the transformative impact of shared traumas.
Download or read book The Shock Doctrine written by Naomi Klein and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global "free market" has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq In her groundbreaking reporting, Naomi Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment," losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq. At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.
Download or read book Capital Disasters written by John Withington and published by Sutton Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disasters in London
Download or read book Innovative Community Responses to Disaster written by Brent Hales and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasingly, community leaders around the world face major natural and economic disasters that require them to find ways to rebuild both physical infrastructure and the local economy. Doing this effectively requires an understanding of how various parts of the community are interconnected, as well as information as to which revitalization approaches have succeeded in the past. Community investment in recovery is essential and, in some cases, may require local leaders to rethink how it can be financed and arranged. This book presents a conceptual framework based on the community capitals, and describes approaches that have succeeded in situations where local leaders have coordinated efforts to rebuild and revitalize local conditions. Contributions provide examples of successful approaches around the world, thus analysing potential strategies for addressing disasters of many different types in various cultural settings. In this way, the book provides insights into a variety of approaches based on applications of accepted community development theory and concepts. This book was originally published as a special issue of Community Development.
Download or read book The Impact of Natural Disasters on Systemic Political and Social Inequities in the U S written by Paul S. Adams and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-11-16 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Impact of Natural Disasters on Systemic Political and Social Inequities in the U.S. examines how natural disasters impact social inequality in the United States. The contributors cover topics such as criminal justice, demographics, economics, history, political science, and sociology to show how effects of natural disasters vary by social and economic class in the United States. This volumestudies social and political mechanisms in disaster response and relief that enable natural disasters to worsen inequalities in America and offers potential solutions.
Download or read book Disasters written by Kathleen Tierney and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-05-20 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disasters kill, maim, and generate increasingly large economic losses. But they do not wreak their damage equally across populations, and every disaster has social dimensions at its very core. This important book sheds light on the social conditions and on the global, national, and local processes that produce disasters. Topics covered include the social roots of disaster vulnerability, exposure to natural hazards such as hurricanes and tsunamis as a form of environmental injustice, and emerging threats. Written by a leading expert in the field, this book provides the necessary frameworks for understanding hazards and disasters, exploring the contributions of very different social science fields to disaster research and showing how these ideas have evolved over time. Bringing the social aspects of recent devastating disasters to the forefront, Tierney discusses the challenges of conducting research in the aftermath of disasters and critiques the concept of disaster resilience, which has come to be seen as a key to disaster risk reduction. Peppered with case studies, research examples, and insights from very different disciplines, this rich introduction is an invaluable resource to students and scholars interested in the social nature of disasters and their relation to broader social forces.
Download or read book Economic Modeling of Income Different Types of Capital and Natural Disasters written by Anil Markandya and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper provides empirical estimates of the impacts of natural disasters on different forms of capital (with a focus on human and intangible capital and natural capital), and on real gross domestic product per capita. The types of disaster considered are droughts, earthquakes, floods, and storms and their impacts are measured in terms of the number of people affected or people affected per capita. The authors find statistically significant reductions on the values of human and intangible capital and land capital as a consequence of the disasters, and these reductions are greater when the impacts last for longer periods. Based on the assumption that natural disasters indirectly affect the level of income via losses in capital, the authors estimate a Cobb-Douglas production function using the different forms of capital as inputs. The losses in income are found to vary across different countries and the type of natural disaster studied. However, a common finding is that the losses in income depend generally on two factors: the relative magnitude of impacts of a natural disaster and the values of different forms of capital. The estimates in this paper are national level figures and cannot be useful in predicting the cost of damages at the local level, where much larger amounts can be experienced per capita. Nevertheless, the estimates provide some indication of magnitudes for different disasters and for different groups of countries. More work and more data are needed to get a dynamic profile for the losses of capital and income. But given the study's results, the time profile is estimated to range typically between two and five years.
Download or read book Policy Trade Offs in Building Resilience to Natural Disasters The Case of St Lucia written by Alessandro Cantelmo and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2019-03-08 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Resilience to climate change and natural disasters hinges on two fundamental elements: financial protection —insurance and self-insurance— and structural protection —investment in adaptation. Using a dynamic general equilibrium model calibrated to the St. Lucia’s economy, this paper shows that both strategies considerably reduce the output loss from natural disasters and studies the conditions under which each of the two strategies provides the best protection. While structural protection normally delivers a larger payoff because of its direct dampening effect on the cost of disasters, financial protection is superior when liquidity constraints limit the ability of the government to rebuild public capital promptly. The estimated trade-off is very sensitive to the efficiency of public investment.
Download or read book Snow Disasters for Local State and Federal Governments in the National Capital Region written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Are Losses from Natural Disasters More Than Just Asset Losses The Role of Capital Aggregation Sector Interactions and Investment Behaviors written by Stephane Hallegatte and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The welfare impact of a natural disaster depends on its effect on consumption, not only on the direct asset losses and human losses that are usually estimated and reported after disasters. This paper proposes a framework to assess disaster-related consumption losses, starting from an estimate of the asset losses, and leading to the following findings. First, output losses after a disaster destroys part of the capital stock are better estimated by using the average-not the marginal-productivity of capital. A model that describes capital in the economy as a single homogeneous stock would systematically underestimate disaster output losses, compared with a model that tracks capital in different sectors with limited reallocation options. Second, the net present value of disaster-caused consumption losses decreases when reconstruction is accelerated. With standard parameters, discounted consumption losses are only 10 percent larger than asset losses if reconstruction is completed in one year, compared with 80 percent if reconstruction takes 10 years. Third, for disasters of similar magnitude, consumption losses are expected to be lower where the productivity of capital is higher, such as in capital-scarce developing countries. This mechanism may partly compensate for the many other factors that make poor countries and poor people more vulnerable to disasters.
Download or read book Building Resilience to Natural Disasters An Application to Small Developing States written by Ricardo Marto and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We present a dynamic small open economy model to explore the macroeconomic impact of natural disasters. In addition to permanent damages to public and private capital, the disaster causes temporary losses of productivity, inefficiencies during the reconstruction process, and damages to the sovereign's creditworthiness. We use the model to study the debt sustainability concerns that arise from the need to rebuild public infrastructure over the medium term and analyze the feasibility of ex ante policies, such as building adaptation infrastructure and fiscal buffers, and contrast these policies with the post-disaster support provided by donors. Investing in resilient infrastructure may prove useful, in particular if it is viewed as complementary to standard infrastructure, because it raises the marginal product of private capital, crowding in private investment, while helping withstand the impact of the natural disaster. In an application to Vanuatu, we find that donors should provide an additional 50% of pre-cyclone GDP in grants to be spent over the following 15 years to ensure public debt remains sustainable following Cyclone Pam. Helping the government build resilience on the other hand, reduces the risk of debt distress and at lower cost for donors.
Download or read book Disaster Capitalism written by Antony Loewenstein and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disaster has become big business. Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein travels across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to witness the reality of disaster capitalism. He discovers how companies cash in on organized misery in a hidden world of privatized detention centers, militarized private security, aid profiteering, and destructive mining. What emerges through Loewenstein's reporting is a dark history of multinational corporations that, with the aid of media and political elites, have grown more powerful than national governments. In the twenty-first century, the vulnerable have become the world's most valuable commodity.
Download or read book Black Wave written by Daniel P. Aldrich and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-07-10 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the devastation caused by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 60-foot tsunami that struck Japan in 2011, some 96% of those living and working in the most disaster-stricken region of Tōhoku made it through. Smaller earthquakes and tsunamis have killed far more people in nearby China and India. What accounts for the exceptionally high survival rate? And why is it that some towns and cities in the Tōhoku region have built back more quickly than others? Black Wave illuminates two critical factors that had a direct influence on why survival rates varied so much across the Tōhoku region following the 3/11 disasters and why the rebuilding process has also not moved in lockstep across the region. Individuals and communities with stronger networks and better governance, Daniel P. Aldrich shows, had higher survival rates and accelerated recoveries. Less-connected communities with fewer such ties faced harder recovery processes and lower survival rates. Beyond the individual and neighborhood levels of survival and recovery, the rebuilding process has varied greatly, as some towns and cities have sought to work independently on rebuilding plans, ignoring recommendations from the national government and moving quickly to institute their own visions, while others have followed the guidelines offered by Tokyo-based bureaucrats for economic development and rebuilding.
Download or read book Disaster Resilience written by National Academies and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2012-12-29 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each. One way to reduce the impacts of disasters on the nation and its communities is to invest in enhancing resilience-the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative addresses the broad issue of increasing the nation's resilience to disasters. This book defines "national resilience", describes the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters, and frames the main issues related to increasing resilience in the United States. It also provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience and outlines additional information, data, gaps, and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation's resilience to disasters. Additionally, the book's authoring committee makes recommendations about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States. Enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward. Disaster Resilience confronts the topic of how to increase the nation's resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. Increasing disaster resilience is an imperative that requires the collective will of the nation and its communities. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.
Download or read book Disaster Vulnerability Hazards and Resilience written by Fernando I. Rivera and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph provides valuable lessons in building disaster resilience for rural communities and beyond. With a focus on Florida, the authors present a comprehensive review of the current debates surrounding the study of resilience, from federal frameworks, state plans and local initiatives. They also review evaluation tools and feature first-hand accounts of county emergency managers as well as non-profit and community groups on key issues, including perspectives on vulnerable groups such as the elderly, children and farm workers. Readers will find insightful answers to such questions as: How can the concept of resilience be used as a framework to investigate the conditions that lead to stronger, more sustainable communities? What factors account for the variation across jurisdictions and geographic units in the ability to respond to and recover from a disaster? How does the recovery process impact the social, political and economic institutions of the stricken communities? How do communities, especially rural ones, collaborate with multiple stakeholders (local, regional, state, national) during the transition from recovery to resilience? Can the collaborative nature of disaster recovery help build resilient communities?. The primary audiences of this book are scholars in emergency and crisis management, planning and policy, disaster response and recovery, disaster sociology and environmental management and policy. This book can also be used as a textbook in graduate and advanced undergraduate programs / courses on disaster management, disaster studies, emergency and crisis management, environmental policy and management and public policy and administration.
Download or read book Are Losses from Natural Disasters More Than Just Asset Losses The Role of Capital Aggregation Sector Interactions and Investment Behaviors written by S. Hallegatte and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The welfare impact of a natural disaster depends on its effect on consumption, not only on the direct asset losses and human losses that are usually estimated and reported after disasters. This paper proposes a framework to assess disaster-related consumption losses, starting from an estimate of the asset losses, and leading to the following findings. First, output losses after a disaster destroys part of the capital stock are better estimated by using the average?not the marginal?productivity of capital. A model that describes capital in the economy as a single homogeneous stock would systematically underestimate disaster output losses, compared with a model that tracks capital in different sectors with limited reallocation options. Second, the net present value of disaster-caused consumption losses decreases when reconstruction is accelerated. With standard parameters, discounted consumption losses are only 10 percent larger than asset losses if reconstruction is completed in one year, compared with 80 percent if reconstruction takes 10 years. Third, for disasters of similar magnitude, consumption losses are expected to be lower where the productivity of capital is higher, such as in capital-scarce developing countries. This mechanism may partly compensate for the many other factors that make poor countries and poor people more vulnerable to disasters.
