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1Introduction
Caterina De Lucia, Dino Borri, Atif Kubursi, and Abdul Khakee
DOI: 10.4324/9781003123385-1
Socio-economic activities and natural ecosystem variations affect the relationship between humans and the environment through direct and indirect mechanisms (Nguyen and Liou, 2019). Modelling, quantifying, and understanding these relationships are needed for sustaining socio-economic and environmental protection and the restoration of regions, territories, and environments.
In the recent years, the awareness of the risks that climate change poses to our planet is notably increasing. Higher temperatures, sea level rise, a noticeable increase in the events of extreme rainstorms, droughts and heat waves place particular pressures on agriculture and water management as well as on urban interface involving the rehabilitation of infrastructures, transport disruptions, and increased emergency management (IPCC, 2007, NPCC, 2009; Haddow et al., 2014). Also, the intensifying of natural disasters events, which impose high costs on urban spaces, shorelines erosion, and loss of lives has increased the need for emergency management (Purpura, 2019).
The 2018 volcanic-eruption triggered landslides in the island of Java and Sumatra, the 2018 Sulawesi tsunami and earthquake, the 2016 earthquake in New Zealand, the 2015 earthquake in Chile, or the recent 2019 earthquake in Albania, are just a few examples among a long list of catastrophic disasters occurring in many parts of the world. Crucially, the main concern is not the climate change per se but managing global environmental change, the rise of unpredictable events (Stokols, 2018) and the subsequent emerging risk that communities and ecological systems face. Clearly, in order to increase the safety and wellbeing of humans, to mitigate climatic induced disasters in cities and natural systems, and to reduce the risks and impacts of these hazards, communities and biological environments must become more resilient to address these threats. If they are not, a Business As Usual (BAU) scenario will leave more vulnerable cities and communities subject to the increased risks and unavoidable consequences (UNISDR, 2010).
The question at hand is how resilient are cities, places, societies, and their communities? Are they ready to face the challenges, doubts, and uncertainties of unpredictable events? What should societies and communities do, at the present time, to shift from being vulnerable to being more resilient? Also, since the contribution of human actions to trigger climate change and unpredictable events (Mason and Fragkias, 2018; Woodward, 2019), what role should planning and policies play to protect communities and the natural environment by making them more resilient?
These issues have a profound influence on the economics, planning, and policies of managing unpredictable events: the prediction of drought risks, the price variations of properties following an earthquake or a landslide event, the agricultural damages caused by invasive species, the flows of immigrants as a result of emergency situations, and the setting of an adequate institutional design for environmental and planning policies. These kinds of questions are central to managing economic emergencies, to answering planning dilemmas, and designing suitable engineering models.
This book brings together contributions from experts in the fields of economics, planning, regional science, and engineering to tackle the emerging agenda of managing unpredictable events. The book sheds light on managing unpredictable events in the wider context of economic insight, policy practice, and engineering models. It presents academic debates, concepts and reflections, case studies, methods, and planning strategies to assert, examine and assess organizational issues of unpredictable events.
1.1 Aims and coverage of the book
This book aims at presenting an integrated view of unpredictable events and covers three main aspects:
- Part I: Economic emergencies;
- Part II: Planning dilemmas;
- Part III: Engineering models.
Following this introductory note, Part I presents the economic aspects of unpredictable events in the field of landslides, water flows, risk, and damage in agriculture, property values, evacuation, and immigration. Part II describes planning dilemmas and proposes several governance frameworks and strategies in the field of climate change, landscape, nuclear power, uncertainty, innovation, and risk management. Part III, offers attractive engineering solutions to the issues of drought, water management, and urban climatic resilience, and proposes modelling approaches using agent-based modelling, ontology, risk perception, and social network.
References
- Haddow, G. D., Bullock, J. A., and Coppola, D. P., 2014. Introduction to Emergency Management. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.
- IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, 2007. Climate Change 2007: Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
- Mason, S. G., and Fragkias, M., 2018. Metropolitan planning organizations and climate change action. Urban Climate (25), September 2018, 37−50.
- Nguyen, K-A., and Liou, Y-A., 2019. Global mapping of eco-environmental vulnerability from human and nature disasters. Science of the Total Environment, 664, 995−1004.
- NPCC – New York City Panel of Climate Change, 2009. New York City Panel on Climate Change: Climate Risk Information. Available at: www.nyc.gov/html/om/pdf/2009/NPCC_CRI.pdf [Accessed October 21, 2018].
- Purpura, P. P., 2019. Security and Loss Prevention. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, Elsevier. 7th Edition.
- Stokols, D., 2018. Social Ecology in the Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: Academic Press. 1st Edition.
- UNISDR-International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, 2010. Making Cities Resilient: My City Is Getting Ready, 2010–2011. World Disaster Reduction Campaign.
- Woodward, A., 2019. Climate change, disruption risk and opportunity. Global Transitions. In press. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.glt.2019.02.001.
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Economic emergencies, by definition, cause harm to socio-economic systems including people, settlements, environments. Over the last twenty years the Asian crisis of 1997, for example, caused the collapse of global markets due to the decision of the Thai government of devaluating the national currency. Between the end of 1990s and the beginning of 2000s, the dot-com bubble triggered an impressive speculative period following the adoption of the internet in the United States and Europe. The September 2011 terroristic attacks of the Twin Towers as well as the Dow Jones drop in the following days set one of the biggest loss to the American economy.1 In 2008, the world sub-prime mortgage crisis in the United States caused the collapse of Lehman Brothers; people could not afford to pay for mortgages and property values fell; unemployment increased and the crisis developed further at global level. Europe realized that a default could be a probable event for high indebted countries like Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Spain with a consequent fall-out of the banking system. Lastly, the Brexit referendum of June 24, 2016 caused a fall of the exchange rate Sterling Pound to Dollar. This event had not occurred in 31 years.
Economic emergencies are also the result of natural disasters as in the case of floods, earthquakes, landslides, storms, droughts.
The 2005 hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in the United States with estimated property damages of over 108 million dollars and loss of 1,200 lives.2 The 2010 Haiti earthquake hit the Island such that approximately 3 milli...
