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This paper aims to analyse the case of Sierra Leone from the lens of economic impact and underlying causes for concern towards economic sustainability in a post-Ebola recovery phase.

Content analysis of literature from various sources, including public and private sectors, non-governmental organisations, multilateral agencies, peer reviewed scholarly articles and media reports was carried out. A total of 77 articles were reviewed. Each document from each source types was then examined for recurring themes that would enhance understanding on the topic addressed here. The NVivo qualitative analysis software was used for coding and extracting of themes from these articles using certain keywords and phrases that relate to the study objectives.

The Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone caused impairment of exports and the capacity to raise revenue via taxes due to significant slump in economic activities. The post-conflict strategy to increase foreign investment had kick-started a gradual recovery, but the Ebola crisis threatened further gains. The crisis also highlighted that the country’s economy depended on foreign investment in a single key sector of iron ore for which global prices fell during Ebola significantly. Although socio-economic impacts of Ebola will linger for some time and health system would have to be vitalised, a sense of optimism was found in many documents.

The research approach is new and comprehensive in that it looks at post-conflict Sierra Leone in combination with ongoing biophysical and hydrometeorological hazards, and how the Ebola outbreak became completely devastating for the country’s economic sustainability.

Disaster risk and vulnerability assessment depends on various factors such as appropriate theoretical concepts and quality and adequacy of information gathered. Accounting for people's perception and partnering with them in the process leads to deeper understanding of community vulnerability, which in turn provides better assessment of disaster risk. The purpose of this paper is to offer an integrated approach for risk and vulnerability assessment that includes theoretical concept, quantitative risk assessment method, and a component representing people's perception.

The Pressure and Release (PAR) model framework is used for basic understanding of the progression of vulnerability through identification of root causes such as: limited access to power and resources; dynamic pressures – lack of education, urbanization and demographics; and unsafe conditions such as dangerous locations. To complement PAR, the Access to Resources (ATR) model is used that expands upon the dynamics of changing decisions, options, livelihood opportunities, available resources, and choices made by the population that is impacted by disaster(s) – in time and space. Conventional risk equation: R=H x V provides community risk profile.

Using a working example, it is demonstrated that risk assessment can have significant influence by introducing an additional component to represent “community perception” in the fundamental risk equation.

The proposed approach: Risk (R) = Hazard (H) x Vulnerability (V) x Community Perception (cp), provides a unique and comprehensive approach to evaluate disaster risk by taking people's perception into account.

The present study seeks to explore the minds and thoughts of emergency management professionals in Ontario in order to better understand the institution, and engage them in a renewed dialogue with communities, academia and other stakeholders. The intention is to strengthen the institution of emergency management, which is the foundation of disaster mitigation.

The study is based on interviews conducted with emergency management professionals from the public, private and non‐governmental organization (NGO) sectors in the Province of Ontario, Canada. The questions were a combination of structured and open‐ended questions to elicit rich details on emergency management professionals’ views. Analysis of interview transcriptions highlighted the attitudes and perceptions of the interviewees with respect to themselves, their own organizations, their role in emergency management, and their jurisdictions. The study also provided an opportunity for respondents to provide examples or comments to illustrate their responses. A total of 43 interviews have been analyzed for this paper.

The research objective of enhancing the understanding of the institution of emergency management through the minds of emergency management professionals in Ontario has been successfully achieved. It is clear that emergency managers and other professionals engaged in consulting, response and humanitarian assistance activities realize their role and responsibilities quite well. The majority of participants felt that politics and a lack of understanding of one anothers’ roles often limit progress. A clear consensus regarding engaging community players in the development of mitigation strategies and resource allocation emerged in this study.

The research conducted is the first of its kind in the province of Ontario in Canada. With the help of personal interviews and survey questionnaire, a better understanding of the emergency management institution and professionals working in this field could be realized.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of activism in determining the identity of the “green” median voter and the influence of the green voter on environmental regulatory stringency in the US states.

Regulatory stringency is measured using output weighted abatement spending and an industry concentration adjusted index of state environmental compliance costs for the period 1989-1994. Activism measures include environmental initiatives, median support for pollution standards and voter ideology. Fixed-effects panel methodology is used in empirical estimation.

The authors find that activism increases stringency in regulating overall as well as media-specific pollution. The results particularly highlight the nuances of different approaches to activism and their varied impact across pollution media.

A drawback of the empirical estimation is the lack of continuous historical abatement spending data. A longer panel with alternative stringency measure(s) would add explanatory power to activism, especially since some activism measures capture slow-changing institutional factors.

The study identifies the conditions under which activism can have the most impact on a society's environmental outcomes since pollution varies in damages, hence abatement costs, across pollution media.

The paper adds to the existing literature by incorporating three alternative measures of environmental activism to systematically investigate its impact on environmental stringency within a fixed-effects regression design. It also promotes a deeper understanding of the efficacy of the activism process by deconstructing policy stringency across pollution media to show that activism and its impacts are more nuanced than previously studied.