This volume examines how local communities respond and adapt to ecological changes and disasters resulting from climate change. The main aim of the book is to understand the range of human responses to ecological change and to contextualise the reasons for adopting any particular adaptive strategy by a community. Through the help of specific case studies presented as individual chapters, the book aims to find out whether adaptation due to environmental stress is an individual decision and, therefore, is an isolated phenomenon, or if resilience and adaptation are part of the same action paradigm of society as a whole in response to environmental change. Of particular interest are the case studies of climate change or disasters that have rendered the site unsuitable for the return of its community at present, and thus necessitated the relocation of such communities to new locations. The case studies in the book focus on regions in India, but cover different parts of the world as well, and address concepts of resilience, vulnerability, risk, adaptation, and mitigation. The book will be useful for students and researchers in the fields of geography, disaster management, environmental science, and anthropology.

This is the first academic publication to highlight the linkages between Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR). Key issues and challenges related to CCA-DRR synergy and interactions are highlighted throughout, mostly drawing lessons and experiences from the field practices and greatly increasing current awareness.

This volume presents eighteen case studies of natural disasters from Australia, Europe, North America and developing countries. By comparing the impacts, it seeks to identify what moves people to adapt, which adaptive activities succeed and which fail, and the underlying reasons, and the factors that determine when adaptation is required and when simply bearing the impact may be the more appropriate response. Much has been written about the theory of adaptation and high-level, especially international, policy responses to climate change. This book aims to inform actual adaptation practice - what works, what does not, and why. It explores some of the lessons we can learn from past disasters and the adaptation that takes place after the event in preparation for the next. This volume will be especially useful for researchers and decision makers in policy and government concerned with climate change adaptation, emergency management, disaster risk reduction, environmental policy and planning.

Worldwide, disasters and climate change pose a serious risk to sustainable urban development, resulting in escalating human and economic costs. Consequently, city authorities and other urban actors face the challenge of integrating risk reduction and adaptation strategies into their work. However, related knowledge and expertise are still scarce and fragmented. Cities, Disaster Risk and Adaptation explores ways in which resilient cities can be ‘built’ and sustainable urban transformations achieved. The book provides a comprehensive understanding of urban risk reduction and adaptation planning, exploring key theoretical concepts and analysing the complex interrelations between cities, disasters and climate change. Furthermore, it provides an overview of current risk reduction and adaptation approaches taken by both city authorities and city dwellers from diverse contexts in low, middle and high income nations. Finally, the book offers a planning framework for reducing and adapting to risk in urban areas by expanding on pre-existing positive actions and addressing current shortfalls in theory and practice. The importance of a distributed urban governance system, in which institutions’ and citizens’ adaptive capacities can support and complement each other, is highlighted. This book takes a holistic approach; it integrates perspectives and practice from risk reduction and climate change adaptation based on a specific urban viewpoint. The text is richly supplemented with boxed case studies written by renowned academics and practitioners in the field and ‘test yourself’ scenarios that integrate theory into practice. Each chapter contains learning objectives, end of chapter questions, suggested further reading and web resources, as well as a wealth of tables and figures. This book is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of geography, urban studies and planning, architecture, environmental studies, international development, sociology and sustainability studies.

Extreme weather and climate events, interacting with exposed and vulnerable human and natural systems, can lead to disasters. This Special Report explores the social as well as physical dimensions of weather- and climate-related disasters, considering opportunities for managing risks at local to international scales. SREX was approved and accepted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on 18 November 2011 in Kampala, Uganda.

This latest Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will again form the standard reference for all those concerned with climate change and its consequences, including students, researchers and policy makers in environmental science, meteorology, climatology, biology, ecology, atmospheric chemistry and environmental policy.

This book addresses the issue of climate change risks and hazards holistically. Climate change adaptation aims at managing climate risks and hazards to an acceptable level, taking advantage of any positive opportunities that may arise. At the same time, developing suitable responses to hazards for communities and users of climate services is important in ensuring the success of adaptation measures. But despite this, knowledge about adaptation options, including possible actions that can be implemented to improve adaptation and reduce the impacts of climate change hazards, is still limited. Addressing this need, the book presents studies and research findings and offers a catalogue of potential adaptation options that can be explored. It also includes case studies providing illustrative and inspiring examples of how we can adapt to a changing climate.

The major challenges of the 21st century faced by human beings are how to achieve water security, food security, energy security and environmental security. Owing to enhanced natural/anthropogenic disasters worldwide, these challenges become much more complicated and daunting especially for developing countries. Therefore, it is important to highlight the risk of different disasters as well as the modern tools and techniques for minimizing disaster incidence and losses. Disaster management being highly multidisciplinary in nature, a comprehensive book dealing with different aspects of disaster management, and encompassing important disasters faced by humankind is presently not available. This book is an attempt to fulfill this gap. It provides clear, comprehensive, and up-to-date information about different facets of disaster management along with salient case studies. The book highlights the current status of disaster management focusing on developing nations, discusses vital issues such as climate change and sustainable development, modern approaches and tools/techniques, and the challenges of and future R&D needs for sustainable disaster management.

This collection showcases experiences from research and field projects in climate change adaptation on the African continent. It includes a set of papers presented at a symposium held in Addis Abeba in February 2016, which brought together international experts to discuss “fostering African resilience and capacity to adapt.” The papers introduce a wide range of methodological approaches and practical case studies to show how climate change adaptation can be implemented in regions and countries across the continent. Responding to the need for more cross-sectoral interaction among the various stakeholders working in the field of climate change adaptation, the book fosters the exchange of information on best practices across the African continent.

Climate change poses multiple challenges to development. It affects lives and livelihoods, infrastructure and institutions, as well as beliefs, cultures and identities. There is a growing recognition that the social dimensions of vulnerability and adaptation now need to move to the forefront of development policies and practices. This book presents case studies showing that climate change is as much a problem of development as for development, with many of the risks closely linked to past, present and future development pathways. Development policies and practices can play a key role in addressing climate change, but it is critical to question to what extent such actions and interventions reproduce, rather than address, the social and political structures and development pathways driving vulnerability. The chapters emphasise that adaptation is about much more than a set of projects or interventions to reduce specific impacts of climate change; it is about living with change while also transforming the processes that contribute to vulnerability in the first place. This book will help students in the field of climate change and development to make sense of adaptation as a social process, and it will provide practitioners, policymakers and researchers working at the interface between climate change and development with useful insights for approaching adaptation as part of a larger transformation to sustainability.