Study of Natural Disasters offers insights to save lives
Research into saving lives during times of natural disasters by an academic from our University has recently been published.
Dr Nibedita Ray-Bennett, from our Civil Safety and Security Unit in our School of Business, has examined why deaths continue to occur in natural disasters - despite tremendous advancement in disaster management science and weather forecasting systems, increased sophistication in human-built environments and ongoing economic and policy development worldwide. Her book, Avoidable Deaths, deals with one of the fundamental questions of the 21st Century.
Dr Ray-Bennett said: “In order to address the central question of this book, this highly inter-disciplinary research presents ‘systems failure’ as an analytical tool to explain why deaths occur in disasters and how they may be reduced.
She added: “This book provides several new vignettes for disaster risk management including ‘disaster climate’, ‘indicators’ for avoidable and unavoidable deaths, developing ‘goals’ and targets and how to align disater management system through effective coordination and communication of the early waning information and alerts. The book also brings gender disagregated death data from Odisha and also provides an update on the disater risk management system of India and Odisha from 1999 to date.”
Avoidable Deaths: A Soft Systems Approach in Disaster Risk Management can be purchased here: http://www.springer.com/gb/book/9783319669502