| |
Description: Raging floods, massive storms and cataclysmic earthquakes: every year up to 340 million people are affected by these and other disasters, which cause loss of life and damage to personal property, agriculture and infrastructure. So what can be done?
The key to understanding the causes of disasters and mitigating their impacts is the concept of ‘vulnerability’. Mapping Vulnerability analyses ‘vulnerability’ as a concept central to the way we understand disasters and their magnitude and impact. Written and edited by a distinguished group of disaster scholars and practitioners, this book is a counterbalance to those technocratic approaches that limit themselves to simply looking at disasters as natural phenomena.
Through the notion of vulnerability, the authors stress the importance of social processes and human–environmental interactions as causal agents in the making of disasters. They critically examine what renders communities unsafe – a condition, they argue, that depends primarily on the relative position of advantage or disadvantage that a particular group occupies within a society’s social order. The book also looks at vulnerability in terms of its relationship to development and its impact on policy and people’s lives, through consideration of selected case studies drawn from Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Contents: Introduction: Mapping Vulnerability • Theorizing Vulnerability in a Globalized World • The Historical Geography of Disaster • The Need for Rethinking the Concepts of Vulnerability and Risk from a Holistic Perspective: • Complexity and Diversity • The Lower Lempa River Valley, El Salvador • Science, Vulnerability and the Search for Equity • Vulnerable Regions versus Vulnerable People • From Vulnerability to Empowerment • Assessing Progress in the Analysis of Social Vulnerability and Capacity to the Impact of Natural Hazards • Vulnerability Reduction • Macroeconomic Concepts of Vulnerability • Gendering Vulnerability Analysis • The Communities Do Science! • Conclusion: Vulnerability Analysis as a Means of Strengthening Policy Formulation and Policy Practice • Bibliography, IndexISBN - 9781853839634
|
| |
Pages : 256
|