Risk Mitigation, Vulnerability Management and Resilience under Disasters

Dear Colleagues,

Disasters are the most harmful processes affecting sustainability and sustainable development. Disasters and disaster losses continue to increase and expand in area, value and frequency, despite intense management efforts at local, national, regional and international levels. The reasons lie with deterioration and increasing trends of the causal factors of disasters: the hazards (the triggering extreme phenomena) and the exposure to hazards and vulnerability (propensity for losses). The increase in hazards is due to climate change; exposure is due to the location of spatial developments and their expansion into hazard-prone areas and also to technology-based systemic interconnections; and vulnerability increase originates from growing social inequalities, marginalization and poverty, forced migration and the low-risk perceptions of institutions, communities and individuals.

Obviously, disaster risk mitigation is a major policy stake at all levels, from global to the local community and individual households. This stake is even more important for the most vulnerable groups, communities, regions and countries, which are not necessarily the least developed but are probably those with poorly functioning institutions, as COVID-19 management failures have pointed to.

Our available means versus disaster risk are planning measures, technologies and actions opposing hazards, restricting exposure, reducing/controlling vulnerability and/or enhancing resilience (the capacity to anticipate, absorb, resist, adapt to, transform and recover from disasters). Some of these measures put limits on development or necessitate resource engagement. Hence, their societal acceptance is a challenge for disaster management and appropriate risk communication and governance—the only means to meet this challenge.

The Special Issue will discuss the economic, social, cultural, political, behavioral, technological and other processes in producing, increasing and transferring risks; identify successful resilience/adaptation practices of institutions, social groups and individuals at all levels in various geographical contexts; offer examples of sectoral policies targeting vulnerability and exposure inequalities and dynamics; and present significant risk communication efforts in changing risk culture and achieving the alignment of subjective with objective risks.

Prof. Dr. Kalliopi Sapountzaki
Guest Editor

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