We cannot stop natural calamities, but we can and must better equip individuals and communities to withstand them. Those most vulnerable to nature’s wrath are usually the poorest, which means that when we reduce poverty, we also reduce vulnerability. Kofi Annan, Former UN Secretary-General, October 12, 2005 Kofi Annan’s 2005 International Day for Disaster Reduction message followed a year of na...

Governmental responses to Hurricane Katrina are generally cited as policy failures. Media and popular analyses focus on the federal government’s policy failures in hazard preparedness, response, and recovery. Meanwhile, disaster experts realize that disaster response is a shared intergovernmental responsibility. We examine the federal nature of natural disaster policy in the US to consider whet...

Recently, the world has witnessed the increasing occurrence of disasters, some of natural origin and others caused by man. The intensity of the phenomenon that cause such disasters, the frequency in which they occur, the number of people affected and the material damage caused by them have been growing substantially. Disasters are defined as natural, technological, and human-initiated events th...

Bakir (2004) Natural Preparedness, planning, response, recovery Proposed national mitigation strategies for earthquake risk reduction in Turkey from legislative, economic, and technical aspects. The strategies were targeted to different time frames of 1-10 years. Bui et al. (2000) Natural, man-made Pre-crisis, crisis, post-crisis Proposed a framework for designing a Global Information Network (...

OBJECTIVE Study findings suggest that refugees are more vulnerable than the general population to mental disorders from disasters. This pilot study explored the nature of Vietnamese refugees' resilience to a potential natural disaster as a first step toward improving their disaster mental health. METHODS Interviews were conducted with 20 ethnic Vietnamese and Montagnard adult refugees using a...

This study examined the hypothesis derived from Terror Management Theory that reminders of death would influence both belief in a just world and Schadenfreude, in response to reading about members of a religious out-group affect by a natural disaster. Christian students (N = 88, Mage = 19.9) were primed with thoughts of death or dental pain before reading about a natural disaster that destroyed...

During a recent natural disaster public health staff required timely and comprehensive surveillance of priority health conditions, including injury, mental health disorders and selected infectious diseases, to inform response and recovery activities. Although traditional surveillance is of value in such settings it is constrained by a focus on notifiable conditions and delays in reporting. The ...

The increasing number of natural disasters in the last decade necessitates the increase in capacity and agility while delivering humanitarian relief. A common logistics strategy used by humanitarian organizations to respond this need is the establishment of pre-positioning warehouse networks. In the pre-positioning strategy, critical relief inventories are located near the regions at which they...

Natural disasters are extreme events within the earth's system that result in death or injury to humans, and damage or loss of valuable goods, such as buildings, communication systems, agricultural land, forest, natural environment etc. For the management of natural disasters a large amount of multi -temporal spatial data is required. Satellite remote sensing is the ideal tool for disaster mana...