Especially in an era of rapid global environmental change, questions and issues about and around natural hazards and disasters are dizzying in their complexity—and urgency. Answering the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of this fast-moving area, and its vast and multidisciplinary corpus of scholarly literature, Disaster Risk is a new title from the acclaimed Routledge series, Critical Concepts in the Environment. Edited by a trio of expert researchers, this new collection of major works embraces a wide variety of methodological traditions to bring together in four volumes the foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship. The collection enables users to access—and to make sense of—the most important research and practice. It provides a synoptic view of all the key issues, current debates, and controversies.

Disaster Risk is fully indexed and includes comprehensive introductions, newly written by the editors, which place the collected materials in their historical and intellectual context. It is an essential reference collection and is destined to be valued by scholars and students—as well as policy-makers and practitioners—as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

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Disaster Risk is edited by three leading scholars in the field: Ben Wisner, formerly Director of International Studies at California State University at Long Beach, with a long career before that in research and teaching. He is presently engaged in full-time research and writing and has recently completed a four-year project for the United Nations University on defining and managing urban social vulnerability to disasters in six megacities (Johannesburg, Tokyo, Manila, Mumbai, Mexico City, and Los Angeles). The other co-editors of this Routledge Major Works collection are J. C. Gaillard of the University of Auckland, New Zealand; and Ilan Kelman, based at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, Oslo, Norway.