Understanding and Addressing Disaster Risk

Who Speaks? Who Suffers?

Ben Wisner, Irasema Alcántara-Ayala, JC Gaillard (University of Auckland, NZ.) , Ilan Kelman (University College London, UK, and University of Adger, Norway)

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English

Routledge
09 May 2025

Development studies; Human geography; Natural disasters; Social impact of environmental issues

In Understanding and Addressing Disaster Risk, the authors explain how people modify the environment and exert power over each other in ways that make nature potentially harmful and put people in harm’s way. Opportunities and challenges faced by those engaging with disaster risk are explored.

Across 11 chapters, the authors show that disasters are not natural, are not events, and do not happen quickly. Instead, they are the result of chronic societal processes emerging from the creation and perpetuation of vulnerabilities and limitations on people’s abilities to respond to hazards. The book also explores the environmental component of disaster risk through the lens of different natural elements and phenomena, including biological-ecological and water-weather-climate processes as well as geological and outer space dynamics. The authors explain the mutual influence of the different components of disasters in creating disaster risk across diverse regions of the world. They critique attempts to reduce disaster risk through top-down, siloed assumptions, attitudes, and values. The value of people’s knowledge of hazards – often ignored or dismissed by authorities – is a central theme. This book is original because of how it re-interprets and advances understanding of the disaster process through the study of such societal processes of vulnerability, risk creation, and power imbalances. It is also unique in diving further into “root causes” of disaster in order to place them within local histories and colonial legacies as well as contemporary, typically misdirected, agendas while upending previous “solutions” which have been shown to do more harm than good.

Understanding and Addressing Disaster Risk is useful for and useable by decision-makers, policy makers, researchers, and students to shatter the vicious cycle of repeating known mistakes which compound detrimental outcomes.

By: Ben Wisner, Irasema Alcántara-Ayala, JC Gaillard (University of Auckland, NZ.), Ilan Kelman (University College London, UK, and University of Adger, Norway), Victor Marchezini
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 453g
ISBN: 9781032274454
ISBN 10: 103227445X
Pages: 270
Publication Date: 09 May 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

1. The challenges of disaster 2. Framing disaster risk reduction 3. Abilities 4. The living world 5. Water, weather, and climate 6. Earthly hazards: earthquakes and volcanoes 7. Living with tsunamis and landslides 8. Beyond the earth 9. Disaster risk construction 10. Understanding risk and living life 11. Afterword: head and heart - Compassion and anger in disaster studies and action

Ben Wisner is an activist scholar who finds himself tempted by nostalgia for the 70s, 80s, and 90s when he worked to understand and address disaster risk with civil society and local government in a number of countries in eastern and southern Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Irasema Alcántara-Ayala is a professor and former director at the Institute of Geography at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. JC Gaillard is Ahorangi / Professor of Geography at Waipapa Taumata Rau / The University of Auckland. Ilan Kelman is Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London, England, and a Professor II at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway. Victor Marchezini is a sociologist at the Brazilian Early Warning Center (Cemaden).

Reviews for Understanding and Addressing Disaster Risk: Who Speaks? Who Suffers?

""A wonderful compendium and source for inspiration in the field of reducing and managing disaster risk. An immense contribution to an essential requirement for sustainable development in the world."" Salvano Briceno, former Director of UNISDR (now UNDRR), 2001-2011. ""This book reinforces inevitable principles from studying disaster risks: Disasters are socially constructed processes. We must look at the global from the local and the local from the global. Always privilege the identification of root causes of disasters. It brings together theoretically, methodologically, and conceptually the disaster risk realities experienced daily around the world."" Virginia García-Acosta, Emeritus Researcher. Professor in History and Anthropology, CIESAS (Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology), Mexico. ""This volume represents a good overall synthesis of existing literature, but also expands beyond traditional topics to include analyses of the COVID-19 pandemic and potential hazards beyond the Earth. This volume continues the extraordinary work of Ben Wisner and his colleagues, providing insights into existing and evolving hazards and suggesting pathways for action."" Michèle Companion, Professor of Sociology, University of Colorado- Colorado Springs, and President of the Research Committee on Sociology of Disasters (RC-39) at the International Sociological Association (ISA).