A broad and comprehensive exploration of the role of the ecological sciences in sustainability for undergraduates.The urgent quest for more sustainable patterns of development has placed new and difficult demands on both scientists and policy makers as they seek to establish more informed and effective policy processes and management regimes in the the face of pervasive uncertainty. Written by an international group of authors from a range of disciplines - ecology, geography, law, policy a...

Disasters both natural and human-induced are leading to spiralling costs in terms of human lives, lost livelihoods and damaged assets and businesses. Yet these consequences and the financial and human crises that follow catastrophes can often be traced to policies unsuited to the emerging scales of the problems they confront, and the lack of institutional capacity to implement planning and prevention or to manage disasters. This book seeks to overcome this mismatch and to guide development...

Disasters both natural and human-induced are leading to spiralling costs in terms of human lives, lost livelihoods and damaged assets and businesses. Yet these consequences and the financial and human crises that follow catastrophes can often be traced to policies unsuited to the emerging scales of the problems they confront, and the lack of institutional capacity to implement planning and prevention or to manage disasters. This book seeks to overcome this mismatch and to guide development...

This book assesses critically the British approach to hazard management and emergency planning. It identifies the principal legal, organizational and cultural impediments to more effective hazard management and emergency planning, postulates explanations for the shortcomings in the British approach and examines a number of promising avenues for improving current practice.It comprises 18 chapters written by experts with a wide range of practical experience in the many different aspec...

First published in 1995. Managing today’s rapidly changing environment inevitably involves managing conflicts between the demands of development and conservation; the needs of the present and of the future; and between different community interests, professional positions and political priorities.Risks and Opportunities provides both a guide to managing environmental change, and a training manual to pave the way to successful conflict resolution. It explores the full range of poten...

Problems for environmental management are taking on a new urgency. This book addresses aspects of environmental management that raise fundamental questions about governmental roles and the relationship of humans to the environment. It examines the interaction of local and national governments and the strengths and weaknesses of co-operative vs. coercive environmental management, through a focus on the management of natural hazards. Leading experts in the field examine new and innovative en...

Community Bushfire Safety brings together in one accessible and comprehensive volume the results of the most important community safety research being undertaken within the Australian Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre (CRC). Using perspectives deriving from social science, economics and law, it complements the extensive literature already existing on bushfires, which ranges from ecology and fire behaviour to information about emergency management. In doing so, the book supports the increas...

In some important respects floodplain management and flood hazard research is different in Britain from that in other countries. This collection of papers from a conference provides some comparisons. It covers urban flooding, institutions and policy, land use policy, hazard response, and project appraisal and risk assessment.

In a turbulent world, this timely book offers a distinctive exploration of major global challenges. It identifies the shared, underlying attributes of ‘Complex Unbounded Problems’ that make them so challenging and offers insights into how these challenges form – often unnoticed – how they coalesce, cross boundaries, exceed our response capacities and leave a long tail of impacts, exposing unsoundness in both knowledge and policy.With a particular focus on Earth System change, nucle...

This volume is the proceedings of a NATO-sponsored Advanced Study Institute (ASI) entitled "Coping with Flash Floods" held in Ravello, Italy on 8-17 November 1999. Thirty-five participants from nine countries attended the ASI, representing both developed (United States, England, Italy, and Mexico) and developing (Poland, Uganda, Greece, Ukraine, and Slovenia) countries. Participants from a variety of professions and disciplines were involved including a hydraulics engineering professor fro...