Geomorphology and Natural Hazards: Understanding Landscape Change for Disaster Mitigation [Pehme köide]

Naturally triggered disasters are making the headlines in the news more and more frequently. Scarcely a month goes by without a major earthquake, a volcanic eruption or a huge flood, with dramatic footage of fallen buildings, billowing ash clouds and devastated victims on the evening news. Every few years some truly catastrophic event captivates both public attention and political opinion—recent examples include the Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Harvey, the Pakistan floods, and the Wenchuan, Christchurch, and Tohoku earthquakes. News reports proclaim the numbers of people killed or injured or assets destroyed, but rarely illuminate the causes and consequences, or whether these losses could have been predicted, let alone avoided. The decade from 2000 to 2010 saw more than 1.1 million people killed in naturally triggered disasters, and more than 2.5 billion people affected. Hence, more than one out of three persons on Earth has had to deal with naturally triggered disasters in some way recently. Is it possible for this situation to be improved in the future  

In order to reduce future disaster impacts, developing a comprehensive understanding of natural hazards and the disasters they trigger requires us to go beyond matters of applied earth science to involve human societal, economic and political dimensions. This important work attempts to approach this multidisciplinary problem directly, based on the authors’ experience of applying earth science to hazard and risk management in real-life situations. The book addresses potentially damaging hazard events as geomorphic processes, and how the threats these events pose to society can be communicated in the form of impacts and risks.  

In this book, the authors go beyond the view that natural hazards and disasters have adverse implications for human assets by definition. They argue that understanding the forms and processes of Earth’s surface—encapsulated in the science and practice of geomorphology—is essential in order to assess natural hazards and anticipate their impacts on Earth’s surface, and hence on society; this anticipation holds the hope of prior adaptation to reduce disaster impacts. By approaching the problem from an applied geomorphological perspective, the authors shed some light on what can and cannot be achieved in the way of hazard mitigation and disaster impact reduction in a range of situations in the future.