Disaster or Catastrophe: Human Adaptation to High-and Low Frequency Landscape Processes--A Reply to Ensor, Ensor, and De Vries (original) (raw)
A Geographers' Imperative Research and Action in the Aftermath of Disaster.pdf
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Natural hazards, disasters and humankind: whither ecosystem management?
2013
Natural hazards such as yearly storm surges that create irreplaceable damage, the December 2004 tsunami that demolished large parts of the Indian coast, and the June 2013 Himalayan floods that swept river banks proved yet again that persistent extreme events have a tremendous damage potential. Loss of life due to storm surges (10,000 people in 1977) and destruction of property (12 lakh houses in 1999) are devastating. Nearly 15,000 people are estimated to have perished in the recent floods in the Himalayas. Monetary loss due to the tsunami touched 3,242 crore rupees. Encroachment of sensitive landforms is a major concern. As such, the relentless natural hazards culminate in disasters when humans come in the way of powerful natural forces. Abandoning vulnerable geomorphic features, managed retreat, or safer setback with intervening forested landforms are feasible long-term options. The incalculable human misery that ultimately follows is an ideal opportunity to focus Indian attention on the need to completely overhaul our national natural hazard policy. More importantly, it is the time for the Indian scientific community to effectively instil the results of scientific research into the political domain, inculcate the habit of public interactions, and make their voices heard in the affairs of natural ecosystems.
Environment and Behavior, 2005
is an assismr professor in the D e p u m n t of Sociology a d Artlhrvpology, UniversiQ of CenEmI Floridn. His current research focus is on disasters, enviromnlrrl jwf ice, and ecosystem management. J, SSTEVEN PICOU is n pmfessor and chair of the Depamnenf of Sociblo~ Anthropology, and Social Work University of South A l a b m u His msemh interests are in enviivnmentd sociology, social policy, and ecological disasters. He is pmsen fly directing resewrh prvjecfs on chronic disaster impacts, risks ofseafood commption, and changes in e m i m m n tul a~s S CHRISTIME A. BEVC is working on her PkD. in sociobgy with a concentration i n envimnmentd sociology at the University of Colomdo ar Boulder. She mceived her M.A. degme in applied sociology from the Universiry of Central Flori&. Her c u m f reseamh intemrs includk disasters, geographic information system applications, and wsemh methods.
Zerihun & Befekadu-2017-Geoenvironmental_Disasters.pdf
Background: The recent trend of increasing incidents of floods in Ethiopia is disrupting the livelihoods of a significant proportion of the country’s population. This study assesses the factors that shape the resilience and the vulnerability of rural households in the face of recurring floods by taking the case of Dembia district of Northwest Ethiopia as one of the flood-prone areas in the country. Results: The data for the study were collected through a survey of 284 households, two focus group discussions, and 12 key informant interviews. Principal Component Analysis and simple linear regression were used for the analysis. The former served both for data reduction and identification of the dominant factors that explain resilience to recurring flood hazards while the latter was used to check the relationship between resilience and vulnerability. Findings indicate that access and use of livelihood resources such as size of farmlands, availability of farm oxen, credit as well as ability to draw help from social networks were found to be the most important factors that determine the resilience of households to floods. Similarly, the coping strategies employed by households were found to be constrained mainly by the scale and impact of the recent floods and lack or shortage of basic infrastructural and social facilities. Conclusions: The results confirmed that most of the traditional coping strategies employed by households failed to effectively help households offset the impacts of flooding. Given the livelihood context of smallholder farming system in the studied area, context specific institutional interventions such as the integrated use of both safety nets and cargo nets may help communities to overcome livelihood predicaments associated with the recurrent flood disasters. This implies that policy should focus more on addressing the factors that expose people to flood disasters and shape their resilience, rather than focusing on short-term emergency responses which seem to be the norm.
The Roles of Harsh and Fluctuating Conditions in the Dynamics of Ecological Communities
The American Naturalist, 1997
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
Places, people and perpetuity: Community capacities in ecologies of catastrophe
ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical …, 2010
Vulnerability is a multifaceted phenomenon brought about over time. Simplified interpretations based upon selective representation of current conditions serve to deny overdue attention to its root causes. As disasters themselves ignore boundaries of place and time, so also must their exploration, as exemplified by the long history of vulnerability reduction research and practice. Descriptions of the causes of vulnerability, therefore, necessarily transgress conventional disciplinary and sectoral boundaries; not to do so would disregard the very nature of the subject. Accordingly, this paper seeks to go beyond some assumed practice-such as viewing vulnerability as a contemporary snapshot of a group of people in a specific place-in an attempt to demonstrate evidence of vulnerability and to begin to reveal its causes, so that national and local, multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral 1 Creative Commons licence: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works Community Capacities in Ecologies of Catastrophe 192