Complex Disasters

Reviews / Votes

This is an important, timely and provocative book! The authors explore the contested terrain of risk and disaster, challenging the reader through diverse, and at times disruptive, perspectives and analysis. Unusually for material on this subject, I found the book very accessible. It deserves to be widely read and I expect it to have significant influence on thinking and policy. The volume is also a wonderful tribute to Professor Helen James.

-- Emeritus Professor John Handmer, FASSA, Senior Research Scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Vienna

Disasters can compound, cascade and linger. They are increasingly complex as networks grow in their interdependencies, settlements expand, inequality worsens, and climate change intensifies severe weather. Such complexities pose additional challenges to communities as they attempt to prevent, prepare, respond and recover. Exploration of the complexity of disasters in a multi-hazard context is crucial to improving future disaster resilience. The book provides an important contribution to an area of growing academic interest. Insights address both theoretical and practical aspects of disaster complexity. Its many case studies provide an opportunity for readers to gain an appreciation of the challenges that increasing complexity poses and how they are being addressed. For policymakers the book provides evidence of the need to invest in disaster resilience and adaptation to address the growing threats posed by complex disasters. It also provides relevant arguments as to how disaster risk is shaped and how future consideration of complex disasters at local to global levels is vital to ensuring safe and sustainable communities

- Andrew Gissing, Fellow at Macquarie University and General Manager, Risk Frontiers, Sydney, Australia

The authoring of complex disasters: compound, cascading, and protracted is both timely and essential. Timely because Australia as well as many other parts of the world are having lived experiences of complex disasters, and essential because nations can no longer ignore their compounding, cascading, and protracted effects on their communities and the systems that help both create and support them. The authors of the various chapters have done an excellent job in bringing together existing academic and practical insights about systems thinking in disasters as well as introducing us to new insights about how to prepare for a future of greater ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty. With the real potential for exponentially increasing levels of disaster impact driven by climate change versus only incremental levels of capability improvement to manage their effects, it is critical that governments, the private and non-government sectors, and communities embrace a more holistic, long-term, and systemic approach to all aspects of disaster management. As recent lived experience demonstrates, treating disasters as one-off events and seeking to manage their effects through the traditional approach of prevention, preparedness, response and recovery no longer works and cannot continue to be the basis in which we address complex disasters into the future. This book makes a significant contribution in helping policy makers, academics, strategists, operational leaders as well as anyone else who is concerned about the current and future challenges in disaster risk management to think differently about disasters. I commend the authors for their dedication and commitment to this important topic and encourage all who read this book to incorporate its insights into all aspects of disaster management practice. In doing so, we can achieve real and sustainable change and help secure a safer and more sustainable world.

- Mark Crosweller, AFMS, former Director-General Emergency Management Australia and Director at Ethical Intelligence, Canberra, Australia