Preparing for Disaster: Building Household and Community Capacity

Despite the evident advantages that being prepared for natural life-threatening events confers on people and communities, research has consistently found that individual, community, and business preparedness levels are low. This book examines why this is so and identifies what can be done to expedite the development of sustained preparedness, at household, community, and societal levels. The text emphasizes the need for this aspect of social risk management to be based on engagement principles: how people engage with their natural environment, how they engage with each other, and how people and agencies and businesses engage with each other. Following a discussion of how people relate to the environmental hazards they need to prepare for, the book introduces the areas of comprehensive preparedness. Major topics include: Coexisting with a Hazardous Environment; People, Hazards, and Hazard Mitigation; Hazard Readiness and Preparedness; People’s Beliefs and Hazard Preparedness; Predicting Hazard Preparedness and Social Cognitive Influences; Social Influences on Hazard Beliefs; Hazard Preparedness and Community Engagement and Empowerment; Cross-cultural Perspectives; Business Preparedness; and Future Issues with Engaging People, Science, and Practice. This unique text will provide practitioners and academics with a comprehensive account of what can currently be done to increase the capacity of people, communities, societies, and businesses to anticipate what hazard consequences they may have to contend with, cope with, adapt to, and recover from, and also to learn from experiences in ways that contribute to the development of future societal resilience and adaptive capacity.