Health, Wellbeing and Community Recovery in Fukushima


Book Description

This book examines the issue of disaster recovery in relation to community wellbeing and resilience, exploring the social, political, demographic and environmental changes in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster. The contributors reflect on the Fukushima disaster of earthquake, tsunami and radiation contamination and its impacts on society from an interdisciplinary perspective of the social sciences, critical public health, and the humanities. It focuses on four aspects, which form the sections of the work: Living with Risk and Uncertainty Vulnerability and Inequality Community Action, Engagement and Wellbeing Notes from the Field The first three sections present research on the long-term consequences of the disaster on community health and wellbeing. These findings are enhanced and developed in the ‘Notes from the Field’ section where local practitioners from medicine and community recovery reflect on their experiences in relation to concepts developed in the previous sections. This work significantly extends the literature on long-term wellbeing following disaster. The case study of Fukushima is a multi-faceted process that illuminates wider issues around post-disaster regeneration in Fukushima. This problem takes on new importance in the context of Covid-19, including direct parallels in the issues of risk measurement, social inequality, and wider wellbeing impacts, which public health disciplines can draw from.




Environmental Hazards


Book Description

The seventh edition of Environmental Hazards provides a much expanded and fully up-to-date overview of all the extreme environmental events that threaten people and what they value in the 21st century globally. It integrates cutting-edge materials to provide an interdisciplinary approach to environmental hazards and their management, illustrating how natural and human systems interact to place communities of all sizes, and at all stages of economic development, at risk. Part 1 defines basic concepts of hazard, risk, vulnerability and disaster and explores the evolution of hazards theory. Part 2 employs a consistent chapter structure to demonstrate how individual hazards occur, their impacts and how the risks can be assessed and managed. This extensively revised edition includes: Fresh perspectives on the reliability of disaster data, disaster risk reduction, risk and disaster perception and communication, and new technologies available to assist with environmental hazard management The addition of several new environmental hazards including landslide and avalanches, cryospheric hazards, karst and subsidence hazards, and hazards of the Anthropocene More boxed sections with a focus on both generic issues and the lessons to be learned from a carefully selected range of up-to-date extreme events An annotated list of key resources, including further reading and relevant websites, for all chapters More colour diagrams and photographs, and more than 1,000 references to some of the most significant and recent published material New exercises to assist teaching in the classroom, or self-learning This carefully structured and balanced textbook captures the complexity and dynamism of environmental hazards and is essential reading for students across many disciplines including geography, environmental science, environmental studies and natural resources.




Nuclear Ghost


Book Description

"'There is a nuclear ghost in Minamisåoma,' explained an elderly local who had a mysterious experiencing following the 2011 nuclear disaster in coastal Fukushima. In his highly original book, Ryo Morimoto explores the nuclear ghost that lives among the graying population that remained in the contaminated region after the fallout. Encountering radiation's shape-shifting effects on residents' livelihoods, nonhuman others, and local ecologies at the edges of evacuation zones, Morimoto asks: what happens if the state authority, scientific experts, and the public dispute over the extent, threshold, and nature of the harm from the accident? As one of the first in-depth ethnographic accounts of life after Fukushima in English, Nuclear Ghost offers dazzling stories from a diverse group of residents who aspire to live and die well in their now irradiated homes, offering a compelling case for reimaging relationality and accountability in the ever-atomizing world"




Empowerment and Social Justice in the Wake of Disasters


Book Description

This book taps into discussions about social vulnerability, empowerment, and resistance in relation to disaster relief and recovery. It disentangles tensions and dilemmas within post-disaster empowerment, through a rich ethnographic narrative of the work of Occupy Sandy in Rockaway, New York City, after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. It details both a remarkable collaborative relief phase, in which marginalized communities were empowered to take active part, as well as a phase of conflict and resistance that came about as relief turned to long-term recovery. This volume particularly aims to understand how community empowerment processes can breach pre-disaster marginalization in the aftermath of disasters. It connects with broader emancipatory literature on dilemmas involved in empowerment ‘from the outside’. In a future of potentially harsher climate related disasters and increased social vulnerability for certain communities, this book contributes to a full and nuanced understanding of community empowerment and vulnerability reduction. This book will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, political scientists, and urban studies researchers, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in disaster management, disaster risk reduction, social vulnerability, community empowerment, development studies, local studies, social work, community-based work, and emancipatory theory.




Slow Disaster


Book Description

This book presents a fascinating, ethnographic account of the challenges faced by communities living in Majuli, India, one of the largest river islands in the world, which has experienced immense socio-environmental transformations over the years, processes that are emblematic of the Brahmaputra Valley as a whole. Written in an engaging style, full of the author's insider perspectives, this insightful volume explores the processes of flooding and riverbank erosion in Majuli, including re-configuration of the island’s geographies, loss of local livelihoods, and large-scale displacement of the population. The book begins with an examination of the physical geography of Majuli and its ecological complexities, leading to discussion on the role of the state in water governance and hazard management, as well as popular resistance by the rural communities on the island. The book focuses on livelihoods as a way of offering economic context to living in challenging environmental conditions and examines the interactions between the state and a whole host of non-state actors, and the everyday, arbitrary functioning of the bureaucracy in a hazardscape. This volume is an invaluable resource for scholars interested in political ecology of hazards and vulnerability, water and hydraulic infrastructure, rural livelihoods and agrarian questions, state theorizations, island studies, and resistance and social movements, as well as those with an interest in northeast India more generally across various disciplines.




Gender-Based Violence and Layered Disasters


Book Description

This book investigates the widespread and persistent relationship between disasters and gender-based violence, drawing on new research with victim-survivors to show how the two forms of harm constitute ‘layered disasters’ in particular places, intensifying and reproducing one another. The evidence is now overwhelming that disasters and gender-based violence are closely connected, not just in moments of crisis but in the years that follow as the social, economic and environmental impacts of disasters play out. This book addresses two key gaps in research. First, it examines what causes the relationship between disasters and gender-based violence to be so widespread and so enduring. Second, it highlights victim-survivors’ own accounts of gender-based violence and disasters. It does so by presenting findings from original research on cyclones and flooding in Bangladesh and the UK and a review of global evidence on the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on feminist theories, it conceptualises the coincidence of gender-based violence, disasters and other aggravating factors in particular places as ‘layered disasters.’ Taking an intersectional approach that emphasises the connections between culture, place, patriarchy, racism, poverty, settler-colonialism, environmental degradation and climate change, the authors show the significance of gender-based violence in creating vulnerability to future disasters. Forefronting victim-survivors’ experiences and understandings, the book explores the important role of trauma, and how those affected go about the process of survival and recovery. Understanding disasters as layered casts light on why tackling gender-based violence must be a key priority in disaster planning, management and recovery. The book concludes by exploring critiques of existing formal responses, which often ignore or underplay gender-based violence. The book will be of interest to all those interested in understanding the causes and impacts of disasters, as well as scholars and researchers of gender and gender-based violence.




Why Vulnerability Still Matters


Book Description

We think vulnerability still matters when considering how people are put at risk from hazards and this book shows why in a series of thematic chapters and case studies written by eminent disaster studies scholars that deal with the politics of disaster risk creation: precarity, conflict, and climate change. The chapters highlight different aspects of vulnerability and disaster risk creation, placing the stress rightly on what causes disasters and explaining the politics of how they are created through a combination of human interference with natural processes, the social production of vulnerability, and the neglect of response capacities. Importantly, too, the book provides a platform for many of those most prominently involved in launching disaster studies as a social discipline to reflect on developments over the past 50 years and to comment on current trends. The interdisciplinary and historical perspective that this book provides will appeal to scholars and practitioners at both the national and international level seeking to study, develop, and support effective social protection strategies to prevent or mitigate the effects of hazards on vulnerable populations. It will also prove an invaluable reference work for students and all those interested in the future safety of the world we live in.




Climate Change and Risk in South and Southeast Asia


Book Description

This book, focuses on South and Southeast Asia, upgrades our understanding of the influence of multiple sociopolitical and governance factors on climate change and risks. Moving beyond science and technology-oriented discussions on climate change, it argues that the real solutions to climate change problems lie in societies, governance systems, non-state actors, and the power and politics underpinning these systems. It presents a range of detailed conceptual, empirical, and policy-oriented insights from different nations of South and Southeast Asia, including India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Vietnam, Maldives, and Bhutan. The chapters bring forth critical discussions of climate change, covering a diverse range of topics including livelihoods, gender, community perspectives, relocation, resilience, local politics, climate change communication, governance, and policy responses. By investigating climate change vulnerabilities and as well as offering feasible solutions to the states and other non-state actors in responding to climate change and risks, this book deepens our existing knowledge of the social and political dimensions of climate change. With interdisciplinary perspectives, this book will appeal to all students, researchers, and scholars of environmental studies, geography, disaster studies, sociology, policy studies, development studies, and political science. It provides valuable reading to practitioners, policymakers, and professionals working in related fields.




Return to Fukushima


Book Description

Following on from her epic photographical journey behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Ghosts The Soviet Union Abandoned: A Communist Empire in DecayRebecca Bathory undertakes an emotional and thought provoking journey to Fukushima. As one of the first photographers to be granted access to the site, Bathory now presents never-before-seen images which provide a unique and moving meditation on human failure seen through the lens of an accomplished artist. Bathory's images take you behind the scenes of the ghost town that is Fukushima, at turns heartbreaking and devastating. These photographs ask the question - what next for a nuclear future?




After Great Disasters


Book Description

Great natural disasters are rare, but their aftermath can change the fortunes of a city or region forever. This book and its companion Policy Focus Report identify lessons from different parts of the world to help communities and government leaders better organize for recovery after future disasters. The authors consider the processes and outcomes of community recovery and reconstruction following major disasters in six countries: China, New Zealand, India, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States. Post-disaster reconstruction offers opportunities to improve construction and design standards, renew infrastructure, create new land use arrangements, reinvent economies, and improve governance. If done well, reconstruction can help break the cycle of disaster-related impacts and losses, and improve the resilience of a city or region.