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In this chapter, the authors use emerging works on geopolitical ecologies to analyze the relations between tourism and the transboundary haze disaster in northern Thailand. The region’s ‘smoky season’, which occurs between February and April of each year, has become a recurring seasonal haze disaster that is reported to be the combined result of biomass burning and urban air pollution. Drawing on ethnographic research among urban tourism practitioners, as well as a critical discourse analysis of popular and social media reports and commentaries, the authors argue that geopolitical discourses of transboundary haze production are shaped by tourists and the tourism industry in ways that perpetuate inequitably distributed disaster risk. Transboundary haze, the authors further contend, has become an ecological actor that co-produces discourses of escape among mobile tourists and residents. This research contributes to emerging work that conceptualises the geopolitical ecologies of transboundary environmental disasters in relation to tourism mobilities in southeast Asia.

This chapter reviews and compares Southeast Asia country practices on global, regional, and local practices for disaster risk assessment (DRA). DRA research and practices include and create a disaster risk management (DRM) solution. There are 11 countries in Southeast Asia, but only 10 countries are members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), except Timor-Leste. The key objective of ASEAN’s formation is cooperation in economic growth, social, regional peace and cultural development, disaster management cooperation, and humanitarian assistance at the regional level. The DRM system practiced in ASEAN member countries is discussed in this chapter. Furthermore, the system and findings of DRAs are also addressed. Globally, two DRA structures are discussed and compared, namely Index of Risk Management (INFORM) and World Risk Index (WRI). In addition, regional vulnerability assessment guidelines for regional and national levels are discussed. However, several selected studies and practices such as the Indonesian Risk Index (InaRISK) are being discussed at the local level. Overall, there is space for improvement of coordination in terms of data and technology sharing for DRM, especially for assessment. The finding of this review highlighted the complexity of DRA at the global and regional levels and encouraging community DRA among the ASEAN members.

The transformational prospects of the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are doubtless. Nonetheless, finding the appropriate implementation mechanisms to accomplish these goals and their targets and deliver on the promise of Agenda 2030 is proving challenging. Using publicly available documentary evidence from Voluntary National Reviews and Sustainable Development Reports, we analysed the progress of environmental SDG implementation in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and MINT (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey) countries. The findings reveal an overall implementation progress level of 64% and 62% in BRICS and MINT, respectively. Relatively, countries in BRICS outperformed their MINT counterparts in five of the six environmental SDGs analysed. Our assessment broadly notes a promising engagement with environmental SDGs in these blocs, albeit with limited progress, and the presence of impressionistic practices in reportage of successes compared with challenges. We highlight the critical environmental goals and areas for practical actions to accomplish Agenda 2030 moving forward. The study specifically draws the attention of policymakers to issues of climate action (SDG13) and affordable and clean energy (SDG7), where immediate actions are needed to ramp up environmental actions. Given the limited time left to accomplish Agenda 2030, the findings of this study provide timely insight into the environmental SDGs that are at risk of failure in these developing countries. The study significantly implicates developing countries' ability to achieve Agenda 2030 and provides practical and actionable policy measures that are urgently needed to address the situation.

The law of catastrophic wildfire prevention and response in the Mediterranean member states of the European Union stands in stark contrast to that of common law nation states such as Australia and the United States. This is due primarily to the higher levels of reciprocal moral and legal obligations between governments and citizens established in various sources of European law. Focusing on the relationship between the EU, Spain, and the Autonomous Community of Catalonia within Spain, this chapter describes these three legal frameworks as they are nested within each other, followed by some case law examples of these laws in action. We compare and contrast the philosophical assumptions underlying the utilitarian cost–benefit approach to regulatory justification used in the United States with the precautionary principle model emblematic of the European Union, the member state of Spain, and its Autonomous Community of Catalonia. Regardless of approach, protection of the public health, safety, and welfare will only be as robust and effective as the government agencies that have that responsibility, and the degree of cooperation with those agencies of the citizens they serve.

Recent hurricanes, dust storms, and wild fires have presented great learning opportunities that have largely been missed, yet still may stimulate improvements in currently dominant policies driving settlement of large numbers of Americans into places exposed to fire, dust, and flood. Equivalent opportunities led to large and beneficial alterations in policy during the administrations of Presidents Hayes, Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Franklin Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, when changes sprang from recognition that federal subsidy programs and land allocations channel settlement. Induced by public policies acting like magnets under the tables of their lives, millions of Americans, like iron filings, have been migrating into increasing peril of fire and flood; it is not only possible to slow this down, but even to encourage settlement away from areas recurrently subject to natural disaster. Tax-payer subsidies, systematically contrived in the Cold War period to disperse the older industrial centers lest they be readily obliterated by Soviet nuclear weapons, are still in place, though the Cold War has thawed, and the world now presents challenges toward which Cold War policy is not only inept but making matters worse.

The Cassandra Zone is that time period – and the events that occur within it – from the voicing of the first credible warnings of foreseeable future disaster until society either awakens to the threat and proactively mitigates against it, or chooses to ignore such warnings and subsequently suffers the consequences when the foretold disaster comes to pass. Whether or not that society manages to learn from its own history of disaster and use the power of state to mitigate against foretold future ones is one of the definitive criteria for determining whether, in social theorist Phillip Selznick’s terms, such a society can be deemed to constitute a moral community.

Community-based fire management (CBFiM) integrates community action with the standard elements of fire management and mitigation, such as prescribed fire (managed beneficial fires for reducing hazardous fuel loads, controlling weeds, preparing land for cultivation, reducing the impact of pests and diseases, etc.), mechanical fuel treatment, defensible space planning, wildfire awareness and prevention, preparedness planning, and suppression of wildfires. In developed examples of CBFiM, communities are empowered to have effective input into land and fire management and problem solving and to self regulate to respond to fire and other emergencies. Its premise is that local people usually have most at stake in the event of a harmful fire, so they should clearly be involved in mitigating these unwanted events.

Climate change during the next century is likely to significantly influence forest ecosystems in the western United States, including indirect effects on forest and shrubland fire regimes. Further exacerbation of fire hazards by the warmer, drier summers projected for much of the western U.S. by climate models would compound already elevated fire risks caused by 20th century fire suppression. This has potentially grave consequences for the urban–wildland interface in drier regions, where residential expansion increasingly places people and property in the midst of fire-prone vegetation. Understanding linkages between climate variability and change, therefore, are central to our ability to forecast future risks and adapt land management, allocation of fire management resources, and suburban planning accordingly. To establish these linkages we review previous research and draw inferences from our own retrospective work focused on 20th century climate–fire relationships in the U.S. Pacific Northwest (PNW). We investigated relationships between the two dominant modes of climate variability affecting the PNW, which are Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and historic fire activity at multiple spatial scales. We used historic fire data spanning most of the 20th century for USDA Forest Service Region 6, individual states (Idaho, Oregon, and Washington), and 20 national forests representative of the region's physiographic diversity. Forest fires showed significant correlations with warm/dry phases of PDO at regional and state scales; relationships were variable at the scale of individual national forests. Warm/dry phases of PDO were especially influential in terms of the occurrence of very large fire events throughout the PNW. No direct statistical relationships were found between ENSO and forest fires at regional scales, although relationships may exist at smaller spatial scales. However, both ENSO and PDO were correlated with summer drought, as estimated by the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), and PDSI was correlated with fire activity at all scales. Even moderate (±0.3°C decadal mean) fluctuations in PNW climate over the 20th century have influenced wildfire activity based on our analysis. Similar trends have been reported for other regions of the western U.S. Thus, forest fire activity has been sensitive to past climate variability, even in the face of altered dynamics due to fire suppression, as in the case of our analysis. It is likely that fire activity will increase in response to future temperature increases, at the same or greater magnitude as experienced during past climate variability. If extreme drought conditions become more prevalent we can expect a greater frequency of large, high-intensity forest fires. Increased vulnerability to forest fires may worsen the current fire management problem in the urban–wildland interface. Adaptation of fire management and restoration planning will be essential to address fire hazards in areas of intermingled exurban development and fire-prone vegetation. We recommend: (1) landscape-level strategic planning of fire restoration and containment projects; (2) better use of climatic forecasts, including PDO and ENSO related predictions; and (3) community-based efforts to limit further residential expansion into fire-prone forested and shrubland areas.