Suchergebnisse

"Natural hazards, such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, typhoons, and wildfires, present significant challenges for managing risk and vulnerability at a community or national scale. As the 21st century witnesses pronounced trends of greater urbanization and a warming global climate, risk and vulnerability are continually increasing. In that context, understanding how communities, nations, and international regimes and organizations attempt to manage risk and promote resilience in the face of major disruption to the built and natural environment and social systems is essential. Defining, assessing, and understanding governance practices in the area of natural hazards is essential to address these types of challenges. This volume provides a uniquely comprehensive treatment of the range of key governance issues and how they are addressed across global regions, individual countries, and local communities"--

Local governments in the United States have become central actors in addressing climate change as a hazard management challenge. Using evidence from a purposive sample of 10 U.S. cities, this article examines how local government officials view climate change in hazard vulnerability terms, what motivates local efforts in this area, and how officials initiate internal collaboration and external stakeholder outreach. The findings suggest level of hazard risk does influence a city's efforts to address climate change, as does resource availability. In contrast, geographic location and associated hazard type (drought vs. flooding) does not appear to be a key driver of a municipality's actions in this domain. Further, the results point to how addressing the climate hazard and improving commitment to emergency management is relevant to increasing community resilience for future emergencies and disasters.

Climate science has established the underlying pattern of a warming climate on a global scale—along with the implications of such changes. The reality of global warming thus leads inevitably to questions of public policy: how can governments, both across the international system and within individual nation states, regulate activities to help mitigate those factors contributing to global warming? And how can they design systems to become more adaptable to the effects of a changing climate in order to enhance community and national resilience? This symposium issue addresses policy choices and public management efforts by considering the nature of mass and elite opinion on what climate change means and how to address it, how policy innovations are developed, including the utilization of research evidence, and how operational management systems function in practice, particularly at a subnational level.

AbstractEvacuations on a large scale are complex and difficult enterprises. While facilitating the egress, or removal, of people from a hazardous incident site is a major challenge, accommodating a wide range of evacuee needs as they temporarily shelter away from their homes is an equally significant challenge. However, the ingress dimension of evacuations is not as well studied nor understood as its more familiar counterpart. This paper addresses several basic questions about community capacity and preparedness for hosting large numbers of evacuees as the result of disaster incidents. Using evaluations made by local government officials, the analysis presented here indicates reported hosting capacity of evacuees on a large scale is related in part to aspects of the built environment and to geographic effects. Likewise, indicators of local government evacuation preparedness for evacuations generally and evacuation ingress specifically are related to aspects of community hazard vulnerability and administrative capacity. These findings provide a basis for future work investigating other critical dimensions of evacuation ingress management.

AbstractThe articles included in this Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy symposium on emergency evacuation issues are drawn from research findings presented at the National Evacuation Conference, held in New Orleans, Louisiana, in February 2010. Assessment questions related to evacuations are of course highly significant for emergency management practice and disaster management policy. Evacuations are highly complex—and frequently dangerous—endeavors. The problems attendant to the unsuccessful sheltering and secondary evacuation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and the difficulties associated with the evacuation of the Houston and Galveston, Texas, metropolitan areas as a consequence of Hurricane Rita several weeks later are stark and relatively recent reminders of that proposition. There are of course numerous disaster evacuations abroad that likewise underscore the urgency and centrality of sound evacuation planning and preparedness. Unfortunately, roughly five years after Katrina and Rita, the massive dislocation of persons in Pakistan as a result of catastrophic flooding again points to the relevance of disaster management practice, evacuations included. But it would be a mistake to think of evacuation management as primarily a matter of infrequent large‐scale disasters or catastrophes. Instead, the reality is that evacuations on a relatively small scale—either incidents in individual structures, such as building fires or incidents in a specific geographic area such as an accidental chemical spill—occur literally every day in the United States. In other words, a wide range of hazard incidents are sufficient to prompt emergency evacuations, and the high rate of incidence requires taking the topic seriously not only as an emergency management issue but as a research question as well.

The failures associated with the Hurricane Katrina response call attention to the challenges of, and the need to better understand disaster management practices in the United States. This article reviews several recent contributions to the field of disaster research and considers four key issues: the concept of disaster vulnerability, how individuals respond to hazard risks, challenges associated with effective hazard mitigation, and the idea of policy learning in the area of disasters. Beyond a review of these aspects of disaster management, future directions in disaster research is discussed.

AbstractEnvironmental justice (EJ) has represented an important equity challenge in policymaking for decades. President Clinton's executive order (EO) 12898 in 1994 represented a significant federal action, requiring agencies to account for EJ issues in new rulemakings. We examine the impact of EO 12898 within the larger question of how EO are implemented in complex policymaking. We argue that presidential preferences will affect bureaucratic responsiveness and fire alarm oversight. However, EJ policy complexity produces uncertainty leading to bureaucratic risk aversion, constraining presidential efforts to steer policy. We utilise an original data set of nearly 2,000 final federal agency rules citing EO 12898 and find significant variation in its utilisation across administrations. Uncertainty over the nature of the order has an important influence on bureaucratic responsiveness. Our findings are instructive for the twin influences of political control and policy-making uncertainty and raise useful questions for future EJ and policy implementation research.