Disaster Law: Emerging Thresholds - Softcover

‘This book is a significant step toward a better understanding of how legal frameworks promote incentives for undertaking risk reduction activities, and how disaster risk reduction (DRR) in turn, help advance legal reform, which includes migrating away from old ways and aligning laws so that they can deliver fresh results. It offers a timely antidote to the existing top–down pattern of DRR.’

Eduardo T. Gonzalez, Professor, Center for Integrative Development Studies, University of the Philippines

This book looks at how legal frameworks can and do reduce risks arising out of disasters. The volume:

• analyses existing disaster laws and the challenges on the ground;
• brings together case studies from some of the most vulnerable regions; and
• proposes solutions to avert existing and possible future crises.

The book offers appropriate legal frameworks for disaster management which could not only offer sustainable institutional reforms towards community resilience and preparedness but also reduce risk within the frameworks of justice, equity and accountability. It examines the intricacies of governance within which governments function and discusses how recent trends in infrastructure development and engineering technology could be balanced within the legal principles of ethics, transparency and integrity. The chapters in the volume suggest that legal frameworks ought to resonate with new challenges of resource management and climate change. Further, these frameworks could help secure citizens' trust, institutional accountability and effective implementation through an unceasing partnership which keeps the community better prepared and more resilient.

This volume will be indispensable to scholars and researchers of disaster management, law, public policy, environment and development studies as well as policymakers and those in administrative, governmental, judicial and development sectors.