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Introduction to International Disaster Management
Introduction to International Disaster Management, Third Edition, continues to serve as the leading comprehensive overview of global emergency management. This edition provides practitioners and students alike with a comprehensive understanding of the disaster management profession by utilizing a global perspective and including the different sources of risk and vulnerability, the systems that exist to manage hazard risk, and the many different stakeholders involved. This update examines the impact of many recent large-scale and catastrophic disaster events on countries and communities, as well as their influence on disaster risk reduction efforts worldwide. It also expands coverage of small-island developing states (SIDS) and explores the achievements of the United Nations Hyogo Framework for Action (2005–2015) and the priorities for action in the Post-2015 Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction currently under development. This useful, relevant text includes many changes that have occurred since the last edition for a better understanding of the rapidly advancing field of international disaster management. Includes updated perspectives on recent events that have shaped the direction emergency management is taking today Examines outcomes of the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) decade, such as insight into how disaster risk reduction has advanced globally, and how it differs among countries and regions Updated statistics on disaster frequency and impact provide a better understanding about how and why risk and vulnerability are changing Presents information on multilateral emergency management agreements as well as profiles of important NGOs and international organizations Key terms and summaries are provided at the beginning of each chapter to ease student comprehension Offers customized and updated instructor materials, including PowerPoint lecture slides, test banks, and a detailed instructor's guide
- GenresNonfiction
744 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 23, 2020
I'm always a little skeptical of hefty textbooks. It's not that there's any lack of concepts to learn in emergency management. Indeed, there's plenty of material that needs to be covered. But, it's all to rare to meet a textbook that's long because it /productively/ uses that space... and, unfortunately, IIDM doesn't buck that trend.
The Coppola volume is a wide ranging and encompassing tour of a variety of issues in emergency management. The organizational structure kind of follows the conventional approach (separating out emergency management into phases of mitigation, preparedness, recovery, and response), although it tacks on a whole series of chapters at the end that would likely be better integrated (e.g., role of government, role of non-governmental actors, etc.) directly into the body text.
The biggest challenge I have with the volume, frankly, is the haphazard organization and approach to inclusion of content. For instance, the incident command system - the backbone of most response organizations - is accorded a couple of pages; the same length that is given to discussion of debris management in Japan post Fukushima, and barely more than is given to a checklist of how to assess dams after a generic/unspecified disaster. And, for no clear reason, a full seven pages have been dedicated to listing, country by country, different emergency numbers (e.g., 911, 112) around the globe. Examples like these just left me scratching my head at how the contents had been determined.
Of course, there are the typical textbook problems too. Some are vaguely understandable (e.g., the Canadian International Development Agency no longer exists, a shift that happened two years before the volume was published), while others are just odd (e.g., the Canadian "placement of emergency management functions" is listed as the Department of Defence, which is... just plain wrong). Emphases are sometimes really striking: in a rather long section on barriers to risk communication, there's a litany of (what I would argue as somewhat overplayed) features like language barriers and lack of educational materials, with not a mention at all of psychological and cognitive dimensions. And, scattered throughout what is marketed as an academic volume are all sorts of claims (e.g., "no system has proved more effective than the news media in alerting... [about disasters]") that are accompanied by no evidence other than the overconfident assertion itself.
I probably should admit a bias: I don't like textbooks in general. They're too expensive, they're often out-of-date by the time they're published, and they rarely manage to blend the functions of providing training for beginners while still being useful long-term resources. There are exceptions, of course (Bernard; Jensen & Laurie), but, unfortunately, this one is not to be found within that category. This is a hefty book, but I emerged from reading it fatigued from the relentless barrage of text rather than equipped through careful and concise curation.
Overall, I struggled with this volume. While it covers a lot of important ground, I wouldn't assign it in an EM class for precisely that reason. Students need a map that helps them to locate important features of the landscape, not a life-size replica of the terrain they're trying to learn (complete with a seven page list of emergency numbers). They need a guide that remains relevant after they've taken the course, that can continue to be a useful reference and contains material they can't find more quickly via Google. The volume here is overwhelming, when what was actually needed was a clearer, more concise, more judicious, more audience-oriented restructuring.
The Coppola volume is a wide ranging and encompassing tour of a variety of issues in emergency management. The organizational structure kind of follows the conventional approach (separating out emergency management into phases of mitigation, preparedness, recovery, and response), although it tacks on a whole series of chapters at the end that would likely be better integrated (e.g., role of government, role of non-governmental actors, etc.) directly into the body text.
The biggest challenge I have with the volume, frankly, is the haphazard organization and approach to inclusion of content. For instance, the incident command system - the backbone of most response organizations - is accorded a couple of pages; the same length that is given to discussion of debris management in Japan post Fukushima, and barely more than is given to a checklist of how to assess dams after a generic/unspecified disaster. And, for no clear reason, a full seven pages have been dedicated to listing, country by country, different emergency numbers (e.g., 911, 112) around the globe. Examples like these just left me scratching my head at how the contents had been determined.
Of course, there are the typical textbook problems too. Some are vaguely understandable (e.g., the Canadian International Development Agency no longer exists, a shift that happened two years before the volume was published), while others are just odd (e.g., the Canadian "placement of emergency management functions" is listed as the Department of Defence, which is... just plain wrong). Emphases are sometimes really striking: in a rather long section on barriers to risk communication, there's a litany of (what I would argue as somewhat overplayed) features like language barriers and lack of educational materials, with not a mention at all of psychological and cognitive dimensions. And, scattered throughout what is marketed as an academic volume are all sorts of claims (e.g., "no system has proved more effective than the news media in alerting... [about disasters]") that are accompanied by no evidence other than the overconfident assertion itself.
I probably should admit a bias: I don't like textbooks in general. They're too expensive, they're often out-of-date by the time they're published, and they rarely manage to blend the functions of providing training for beginners while still being useful long-term resources. There are exceptions, of course (Bernard; Jensen & Laurie), but, unfortunately, this one is not to be found within that category. This is a hefty book, but I emerged from reading it fatigued from the relentless barrage of text rather than equipped through careful and concise curation.
Overall, I struggled with this volume. While it covers a lot of important ground, I wouldn't assign it in an EM class for precisely that reason. Students need a map that helps them to locate important features of the landscape, not a life-size replica of the terrain they're trying to learn (complete with a seven page list of emergency numbers). They need a guide that remains relevant after they've taken the course, that can continue to be a useful reference and contains material they can't find more quickly via Google. The volume here is overwhelming, when what was actually needed was a clearer, more concise, more judicious, more audience-oriented restructuring.
April 25, 2022
Essentielle begreber og definitioner. Fine eksempler, men utrolig megen overflødig tekst.
October 29, 2014
DEMN 502 course text. Easy to read and well laid out. Not as theoretical as I hoped and because of this the course supplemented with individual articles and the Handbook of Disaster Research by Rodriguez
October 21, 2016
i find much interest to read this book than others
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews