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Game theory in pandemics, social media rumors, and disasters, is reviewed. Evolutionary game theory is commonly used to account for the time dimension. Overarchingly, the game-theoretic precautionary principle accounts for threat, uncertainty, action, and command. Players pursue uncertainty thresholds repeatedly, with uncertainty about which game is played, which players participate, strategy sets, payoffs, incomplete information, risk attitudes, and bounded rationality. Pandemics involve games between multiple societal actors, i.e., companies and various sectors of the economy, countries, governments, individuals, etc. Individuals may choose whether to behave riskily or safely, whether to buy vaccines and drugs, mask-wearing, distancing, etc. Companies may produce vaccines and drugs. Policymakers and the international community may free ride on who shall bear the costs. Social media platforms play censorship games classifying the information as true or false. Organizations may identify ideologically in various ways, and may play games through time as updated evidence becomes available. Governments and companies play regulation games during disasters. Companies weigh profit against safety while the governments may subsidize, penalize, and tax. Games between nongovernmental organizations, donors, and individuals are considered.

Disasters bring uncertainties and substantial health, economic, social and psychological challenges. Effective management of disasters requires thorough understanding of their causes, nature and consequences. Affected individuals may, therefore, seek instant, trustworthy information from different sources including social networking sites (SNSs). This study investigates what leads individuals to seek disaster information on SNSs. The investigated potential drivers are source credibility, argument quality, self-efficacy, perceived usefulness of information and behavioural intention. The Structural Equation Modelling analysis of 867 responses confirms that source and argument quality, self-efficacy and perceived usefulness are all significant antecedents of behavioural intention, which in turn influences disaster information seeking on SNSs. This study’s empirical findings augment the sparse literature on factors influencing SNS use to source the much-needed information amid the uncertainty and ambiguity of a disaster. Policymakers can establish SNSs as a vital source of catastrophe information by understanding people’s SNS interactions during catastrophes. Our findings may help government authorities and crisis managers integrate SNSs into disaster management and public engagement.

The last few years have seen an explosion of economic research on the consequences of natural disasters. This new interest is attributable first and foremost to a growing awareness of the potentially catastrophic nature of these events, but also a result of the increasing awareness that natural disasters are social and economic events: their impact is shaped as much by the structure and characteristics of the countries they hit as by their physical characteristics. Here, we survey the literature that examines the direct and indirect impact of natural disaster events specifically on the poor and their impact on the distribution of income within affected communities and societies. We also discuss some of the lacunae in this literature and outline a future agenda of investigation.

Disaster research has been concerned with the role of adverse environmental conditions vis-à-vis adverse social conditions in determining food access during catastrophes. This paper investigates the issue, and presents household-data from flood-devastated Bangladesh to argue that, while hunger is clearly associated with exposure to disaster conditions, prior deficits in resources (given the education, occupation and ownership of productive assets of household-members) are more significant in determining the risk of consumption failure during catastrophes. The paper finds that, the risk-generating factors are often interrelated, but, their relative contributions vary across households having varying locations of natural hazards and in consumption distribution.

In 1995, the Kobe earthquake occurred in the second largest economic region of Japan, and its economic damages were accounted around 10 trillion yen. This paper presents an empirical investigation of long-run economic effects of the event based on a time-series data. The results indicate that the event had created statistically significant deviations from the pre-earthquake growth path of Kobe. In addition, the comparison with the projected pre-event growth path revealed that the long-run effects have resulted in a steady decline of per capita GRP, while the short-run impacts led to some positive impacts from recovery and reconstruction during the first several years.

We study a M/M/1 queue in a multi-phase random environment, where the system occasionally suffers a disastrous failure, causing all present jobs to be lost. The system then moves to a repair phase. As soon as the system is repaired, it moves to phase i with probability q_i ≥ 0. We use two methods of analysis to study the probabilistic behavior of the system in steady state: (i) via probability generating functions, and (ii) via matrix geometric approach. Due to the special structure of the Markov process describing the disaster model, both methods lead to explicit results, which are related to each other. We derive various performance measures such as mean queue sizes, mean waiting times, and fraction of lost customers. Two special cases are further discussed.

Extreme events often bring unexpected situations and impacts, as the sequence of hurricanes and other natural disasters in summer and fall 2017 demonstrated. To reduce the risks associated with such events, many have focused on reducing uncertainty in prediction or reducing vulnerability. Although both are worthy goals, we suggest that the research community should also be focusing on the nature of surprise itself, to investigate the role of surprise in extreme events and its implications. Surprise arises when reality differs from people’s expectations. Multiple factors contribute to creating surprise, including the dynamic nature of natural and human systems, the limitations of scientific knowledge and prediction, and the ways that people interpret and manage risks, not to mention climate variability and change. We argue that surprise is an unavoidable component of weather and climate disasters — one that we must acknowledge, learn to anticipate, and incorporate into risk assessment and management efforts. In sum, although it may seem paradoxical, we should be learning how to expect surprise.

This chapter will aim to present a broader picture of the current situation in the Arctic region, including military, economic, minority security etc. Considerations will be given to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and as a result, this chapter will present a more pessimistic assessment concerning the potential for cooperation and engagement between the western countries and Russia in the light of the Russian aggression. The combination of threats to and in the Arctic region will accelerate global warming and natural disasters in a way that could further increase the security threats and necessitate new and stronger measures form the international community.

The contemporary climate change crisis is fundamentally different from what is classically understood as natural disasters, which refer to events whose impacts are restricted in both time and space. In the Anthropocene epoch, climate change disasters are being interpreted in a new language of crisis and unknown risks; it is riddled with divergent interpretations of climate responsibilities and binary framings of utopian and dystopian future. This chapter argues that the tragedy of the commons on a planetary scale will be hard to avoid unless the ideological and political roots of present-day understanding of disasters are explored and rendered visible. The language of boundaries and limits which dominate the Anthropocene discourse tends to collide with the narratives of development and global distributive justice, which remain dominant in the Global South. This chapter argues that an ahistorical framing of the Anthropocene presents an analytical challenge to multiple disciplines and especially for the study of International Relations, where the collision of world history with planetary history will be the first to become most visible. The chapter contends that the politics of climate change that seems so far driven by dystopian/utopian futures tends to obfuscate the questions of moral culpability, accountability, and asymmetry of state power and climate justice, which must be the dominant concerns in the present.

This chapter provides guidance for solving practical, high-level management and policy challenges in sustainability and disaster resilience. These two fields must be considered together so that they do not work at cross-purposes. Sustainability is framed in a positive and useful way that transcends shallow and self-serving treatments that are all too common. Although sustainability is a multi-faceted problem, climate change is the focus because it is globally important and because it is particularly troublesome due to its global and long-term scale. The discussion on sustainability highlights the challenge of extreme uncertainty. Knowledge of system complexity is necessary for understanding and contending with extreme uncertainty. Thus, this chapter summarizes some fundamental knowledge and draws from it recommendations for decision-making. An example illustrates the suggested approach and provides additional insight. Complex systems are hard to understand and no course of action is guaranteed to be successful. However, without systems thinking, failure is almost assured. The recommendations in this chapter, although not infallible, will help find effective ways to intervene in societal systems to meet stated objectives while avoiding unintended consequences.

In 2015 Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) ends its term after ten years of implementation. International community is involved in the Post-HFA consultation process towards a new post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction (DRR). Although HFA has proved to be effective in enhancing disaster risk reduction strategy in many fields, disaster risk is increasing. This chapter aims at evaluating how HFA has changed the way in which DRR is conceived and managed and what could be the prospective strategy for future decades. This chapter is organized in four sections. The first one contains a brief description of HFA main characteristics and innovative features. In the second section, an analysis of HFA impact during these ten years is carried out, underlining what priorities and activities have been really implemented in practice, what activities has been pervasively developed and what elements are still in need of further actions. The drivers of success or failure of HFA priorities and actions are identified and discussed. The third section is oriented to identify how risk scenario has changed during these ten years and what are the new needs and new occurrences emerged that should be considered in the future strategy for DRR. For instance, the deepening of climate change problem will not only add to the existing drivers of risk new menaces, it needs a decisive change in urban development approach: a significant increase in the extremes and their intensities needs for a transformed development paradigm. In the last section, main themes of a renewed approach to DRR are identified. Main results include: weaknesses and strengths in HFA implementation are identified; factors that appear to interfere with an integrated approach are pinpointed and discussed; emerging features of future risk scenarios are outlined; main issues of a renewed approach are illustrated.

Disaster is a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society causing widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses which exceed the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources. Although the occurrence of disaster declined between 2003 and 2012, the number of people killed and affected by disaster is still extremely high. The high rate of destruction caused by both natural and anthropogenic hazards necessitated a shift from post disaster response and service — delivery towards to the formulation and implementation of disaster risk reduction measures at the community level. This chapter examines the aim, principles and process of community disaster management. The community plays a significant role in the design and implementation of disaster prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery strategies and measures. A review of the community disaster management strategy implemented in some countries indicates that the approach was effective at reducing the impact of subsequent disasters on such community particularly in terms of loss of lives, properties and destruction of livelihood.

Thailand is a rising economy in the South Asia and it has been growing at a considerable rate than it neighbors. The economic growth has been halted by reoccurring natural disasters may it be consistent floods, droughts, earthquakes or Tsunamis. The country being diverse in geographical setting is prone to many natural hazards. The disaster management structure in Thailand is present but lacks in several aspect due to political instability and emphasis on the indigenous knowledge. This chapter tries to explore various aspects of disasters in Thailand in the context of social, economic and framework at the government level.

Hurricane Katrina was the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history and one of the deadliest. In 2006, the University of Southern Mississippi established the Katrina Research Center (KRC) as an multi-disciplinary center for research and education to facilitate the gathering of information on the effects of and recovery from catastrophic natural disasters such as Katrina. The purpose of this case study is to document the creation and development of the Katrina Research Center, including its mission, vision, organizational structure, funding, collection development, community outreach, research and educational activities.