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Climate and disaster resilience mapping has been discussed in detail in Chapter 3. The Climate Disaster Resilience Index (CDRI) as a comprehensive and well-structured methodology for measuring the resilience of cities is presented, as well as the differences between CDRI and various assessment tools. The resilience of cities, or their agglomerations or subzones, is being measured because cities are seen to be at a suitable level to efficiently initiate action, especially in developing countries where unplanned or haphazard urbanization is a major risk factor. But for climate and disaster resilience mapping to be of value, it should be followed by action planning. Having a vision for the future and charting a course to achieve it is what action planning is about. Studies have consistently shown that vision, planning, and goal setting can positively influence cities’ organizational performance. Action planning can compel future thinking, highlight new opportunities and threats, and refocus a city's mission. Productive action planning focuses on the most critical problems, choices, and opportunities. Action planning requires time and a process. If used effectively, it is a powerful tool for self-management and goal-based achievement. Action planning typically includes deciding who is going to do what and by when and in what order for the city to reach its long-term goals. The design and implementation of the action planning depend on the nature and needs of the city.

In recent years, several studies have focused on city clusters like megacities and mega urban areas, as they concentrate a significant part of the world's human population and critical economic assets in potentially hazardous locations (Yusuf, 2007; WWF, 2009; Kraas, 2007; Jones, 2009). Metro Manila is one of such megacities, where even “regular” disasters affect a large number of people. The rapid pace of urbanization, coupled with an ever-increasing population burden, has significantly increased the overall vulnerability of urban agglomerations to natural disasters. By 2050, world population is expected to reach 9 billion people. Large numbers of people will be concentrated in megacities and on fragile lands, making the reduction of vulnerability to disasters in metropolitan areas a critical challenge facing development. Unmanaged rapid urban growth strains the capacity of national and local governments to provide even the most basic of services such as health, food, shelter, employment, and education. The challenge then is for the national government and most especially the local governments to develop effective policies, programs, and strategies that will help them manage urbanization to ensure development.

Community-based disaster risk management (CBDRM) initiatives have strong roots in Philippine society not only because of the country's contributory vulnerability to disasters but also because of a culture of community cooperation known as bayanihan and a history of social movement driven by the citizens’ discontent with bad governance leading to social injustice and environmental degradation (Heijmans, 2009). CBDRM in the Philippines has been a mechanism for change within civil society (Allen, 2006; Heijmans, 2009). In this way, community-based approaches are a fundamental form of empowerment of participants and a compelling strategy for enforcing the transmission of ideas and claims from the bottom up (Allen, 2006).

In addressing disaster management in schools, many researchers and workers in NGOs, UN agencies, and other organizations have pointed out that school-building safety and disaster education are significant factors in developing school safety, especially in the case of earthquake disasters (Izadkhan, 2004; Dixit, 2004; Wisner et al., 2004). School-building safety is useful for disaster reduction in the short term, while disaster education can play a significant role in developing a culture of disaster reduction in the long term. The importance of disaster education at the school level is recognized in the works of Radu (1993), Kuroiwa (1993), Arya (1993), Frew (2002), and Shaw, Shiwaku, Kobayashi, and Kobayashi (2004). Students are viewed as initiates into tradition, and parents are also congregational members (Strike, 2000). Shaw and Kobayashi (2001) stress that schools play an important role in raising awareness among students, teachers, and parents. UNISDR conducted a campaign based on the observation that children are among the most vulnerable population group during disasters (UNISDR, 2007a) and that disaster risk education empowers children and helps build greater awareness of the issue in communities (UNISDR, 2007b).

In the previous chapters, disaster education was discussed based on the aspect of the place where disaster education was conducted – in school, in the household, and in the community. Generally, school disaster education is regarded as formal disaster education, while household and community disaster education as informal disaster education. School-based stand-alone courses are perhaps the easiest programs to implement on a large scale and within a short time frame (Petal, 2009). However, to achieve community-based disaster management, stakeholder involvement is important. If students learn with the community, the learning may be regarded as informal or semi-formal education. When the community, including students, learn about disaster management, local contexts are important to be considered. Anticipated hazards, stakeholders, availability of human and physical resources, extent of threatened or affected area, culture, history, and other various factors can be taken into account. In addition, when the community and students learn together, there are at least two actors. This means that disaster education programs should focus on both community members and students as the target learners. Therefore, such education programs cannot be discussed from the aspect of place of education like school, community, or household. Shaw and Takeuchi (2008) emphasized the importance of the participatory approach. Thus, it is necessary to consider how education programs should be conducted. As described before, it is necessary to consider various factors and situations in order to provide disaster education programs that meet local contexts. In this regard, a standardized disaster education program is not appropriate. Therefore, people/organizations who/that organize disaster education programs should need to play important roles so that the disaster education program becomes effective. In other words, the organizers need to consider how they provide disaster education as well as what they provide.

Cultural portraits usually begin with a description of the context, but as this material is covered elsewhere in this volume, this introduction will be mercifully brief. At any time during the last four decades, there have been dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of Stanford University faculty and doctoral students interested in studying organizations. They have been scattered across the campus, often in small groups within larger schools and departments. They have been based in the Sociology Department and the Organizational Behavior and Strategy areas at the Graduate School of Business. There were always a handful at the Education and Engineering schools, as well as a scattering of individuals doing related work in Psychology, Political Science, and Anthropology. In spite of their numbers, before the Stanford Center for Organizational Research (SCOR) was founded in 1972, many of these faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and doctoral students felt rather isolated. They had little contact with colleagues across campus who shared their interest in organizations and little collective clout when resources were being distributed.

Laws geared toward regulating the employment relationship cling to traditional definitions of workplaces, neglecting the domain of the home and those who work there. Domestic workers, a population of largely immigrant women of color, have performed labor inside of New York City's homes for centuries and yet have consistently been denied coverage under labor law protections at both the state and federal level. This article traces out the exclusions of domestic workers historically and then turn to a particular piece of legislation – the 2010 New York Domestic Worker Bill of Rights – which was the first law of its kind to regulate the household as a site of labor, therefore disrupting that long-standing pattern. However, the law falls short in granting basic worker protections to this particular group. Drawing from 52 in-depth interviews and analysis of legislative documents, The author argues that the problematics of the law can be understood by recognizing its embeddedness, or rather the broader political, legal, historical, and social ecology within which the law is embedded, which inhibited in a number of important ways the law's ability to work. This article shows how this plays out through the law obscuring the specificity of where this labor is performed – the home – as well as the demographic makeup of the immigrant women of color – the whom – performing it. Using the case study of domestic workers' recent inclusion into labor law coverage, this article urges a closer scrutiny of and attention to the changing nature of inequality, race, and gender present in employment relationships within the private household as well as found more generally throughout the low-wage sector.