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Climate change poses increasingly serious risks to human society. Climate change is the outstanding survival and ethical issue of our time. Climate change is now moving the planet into new uncharted risky states since civilization began. Climate change risk management, (climate risk management for short) is a best practice. Urgent action is needed…

This chapter introduces the system for crisis management in Sweden. Over the last century, Sweden has gone from being a poor European backwater to being among the countries with the highest human development in the world. The droughts and harsh winters that killed thousands and drove numerous Swedes to emigrate in the past are mere distractions today and the contemporary system for crisis management is designed to deal with a broader variety of crises than the ones triggered by natural hazards. The system is based on the principles of responsibility, parity and proximity, and distributes sector and area responsibility for crisis management to numerous actors. It is built to a great extent on collaboration between these actors, which is challenging but working relatively well in the cultural context of consensus-seeking and compliance to official guidelines and accepted rules of engagement. However, the system is in itself ambiguous in the sense of distributing responsibility to all kinds of actors and then focusing almost exclusively on public actors in legislation, guidelines and practice. There is also often a gap between policy and practice concerning how area responsibility is exercised, and a lack of clarity in current sector specific legislation.

The hospitality industry has subsequently been struck by a range of disasters. Either; globally or regionally, natural or man-made disasters. Reflecting the hospitality and tourism industry’s vulnerability to hazardous events in the internal and external environment, they have caused dramatic fluctuations in Tourist arrivals and revenue. The chapter investigates the impact of these disasters and crises on hospitality and tourism industry. Aims to review some attempts to investigate the impact of disasters, how emergency planning could mitigate these impacts, and how to recover from it. Furthermore, it reviews the theories and models which could be used as an effective strategies to cope with uncertainty, how to plan, manage, and recover from such events. Emergency plans used by industry players to overcome the effect of such events and quick return to normality. Emergency planning could mitigate the effect of such events and recover from such disasters. The finding also emphasizes the power of media in clearing the ambiguity, which helps marketing efforts towards tourists to change their attitudes and visit safe rather than visiting hazardous destinations. Effective planning and the urgent need for better cooperation, coordination and awareness efforts among the industry stakeholders, government agencies, and local communities could mitigate the negative impact of hazardous events, allowing organizations to learn from the past to prevent the same effects in the future.

This research is about disaster risk reduction and management using learning from past disasters as theoretical framework because disasters and crises continue to re-occur for the same reasons they could have been prevented and mitigated. This chapter has two main aims. First, to consider how lessons from past disasters, may be linked to strategies for disaster risk reduction and management. Second, critically review how lessons from disasters can be made actionable in an organizational context using conceptual model of actionable learning from disasters. Historically, proximate cause and nature of risk, crisis and disaster has generated intense theories and models in both the social and pure sciences. Albeit the applied implications of existing risk and disaster theories are questionable, this research informs the debates about risk, crisis and disaster management theory and practice by considering and reflecting on mindfulness, complexity, modernity, fragility, isomorphic learning, and policies ambiguity; and the application of disasters lessons from cross-organizational isomorphism, event isomorphism and self-isomorphism. One of the fundamental contributions involved using case studies of two emergency and disaster response organizations in Ghana and Nigeria which were used to address the issues raised in the research. In conclusion, the chapter reflected on the challenges of learning from past disasters, devoted to the explanation of disaster risk reduction strategies and its components: identification, prevention, reduction, mitigation and appraisal, evaluation, management and communication, flexibility, resilience and robustness. The main lessons and implications from “actionable learning from disasters model” to disaster risk reduction and management are discussed.