Difficult Decisions in Disaster Risk and Environmental Management

Dear Colleagues,

Making decisions is a daily business, but some decisions are harder than others. For practitioners working with complex socio-environmental issues, decisions are often made under conditions of uncertainty, unpredictability, and controversy. Given the broad variety of time-, politically-, and socially sensitive issues that practitioners are often dealing with, their decisions can have profound consequences. In supporting the fields of disaster risk and environmental management, an academic focus on understanding decision making has existed for some time. There have been considerable theoretical and methodological efforts to better understand individual and collective reasoning behind decisions, the values and assumptions guiding stakeholders´ views, the use of multi- and inter-disciplinary knowledge, the creation of alternatives and related trade-offs, and the convergence on a consensus or compromise solution. Science-based, economic-multi criteria or consensus-based approaches have so far dominated the academic debate on environmental decision making. However, making progress often requires an integration of these approaches, for example, a combination of analytical methods drawn from the decision sciences with deliberative insights from negotiation theory or an integration of quantitative models and qualitative information from stakeholders.

This Special Issue seeks contributions that illustrate how these approaches can be, or have been used to inform decisions in complex and sensitive disaster risk and environmental management contexts. It also focuses on how research can assist decision makers, individuals, organisations, and communities to improve their decision-making processes.

Key themes for the Special Issue include, but should not be limited to: natural and technical disaster management, water and natural resource management, environmental protection, renewable energy, climate change, and adaptation.

Dr. Tim Prior
Dr. Anna Scolobig
Guest Editors

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Resources is an international peer-reviewed Open Access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. All well-prepared manuscripts submitted to this Special Issue will be published free open access. English correction and/or formatting fees of 250 CHF (Swiss Francs) will be charged in certain cases for those articles accepted for publication that require extensive additional formatting and/or English corrections.