McCormack Scholar Edits New Book on Disaster Resilience Worldwide

November 2, 2016 by McCormack Speaks | 0 comments

PLanning for Community-based Disaster Resilience Worldwide

The latest edited book by Professor Adenrele Awotona, director of the Center for Rebuilding Sustainable Communities after Disasters (CRSCAD), has been published by Routledge, the world’s leading academic publisher in the humanities and social sciences. It is titled Planning for Community-based Disaster Resilience Worldwide: Learning from Case Studies in Six Continents. The book focuses on a bottom-up approach to disaster risk reduction and the building of community resilience. Case studies from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe systematically investigate and appraise how various communities, in a wide variety of cultural, economic, social, geographical, and political contexts, cope with their defenseless conditions during and after disasters.

Linking together poverty reduction, the development process, and climate justice education, and using a variety of multisectoral and multidisciplinary approaches, the studies examine how local community members participate in all the phases of disaster management. Similarly, the various adaptive abilities that are critical for a resilient community are scrutinized.

Professor Awotona notes that one of the unique features of the book is the “presentation of diverse viewpoints on disaster resilience and demonstration of the intricacies of the interrelationships between humans and nature in rebuilding post-disasters.”

Among the many distinct contributions of this volume are the fact that although the contributors address all the phases of the disaster management spectrum from vastly different conceptual and operational perspectives, they all converge around the issue of the applicability and relevance of lessons learned in other cultural and environmental contexts intercontinentally.The Center for Rebuilding Sustainable Communities after Disasters, an affiliate of the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies, is the only institution of its kind dedicated to raising awareness and possessing the expertise necessary for long-term sustainable reconstruction. Center associates engage in multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary research activities and provide expert advice and training to communities which have been devastated by disasters. Also, through the College of Advancing and Professional Studies, CRSCAD offers several academic programs on post-disaster studies and emergency management.

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