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To highlight the failure of the tsunami early warning system and the challenges of successfully responding to, and managing a transnational catastrophe of this nature. The paper also highlights unique challenges in the management of this catastrophe and suggests potential strategies for good disaster response and management in this response and beyond.

Primary data collection was by telephone interviews with experts in the South and South‐East Asian region, supplemented by a comprehensive literature review of scholarly journals, reports from relief agencies and United Nations situation reports and bulletins amongst others. The scope of the paper is limited to the issue of a warning not been passed onto appropriate authorities in the region, the unique challenges of the relief response and the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the affected communities.

From the study, there is a need for further investigation into the catastrophic warning failure; as reasons proffered by the early warning officials for their inability to pass on a warning to authorities in the affected area appear weak at this stage. The study also found unique geographical, political, economic and social challenges facing the international relief and reconstruction effort. Specifically some of the challenges include the management of the media and information, logistics and coordination, needs and damage assessment, donations and safety and security issues amongst others. In summary, the author found that there is also a need for foreign assistance agencies to be seen to be fair, to build trust and ownership of relief and reconstruction efforts amongst the local populace, as well as use local people as much as possible.

The study was conducted only 21 days (three weeks) after the tsunami catastrophe of 26 December 2004, hence it is a snapshot of events in the days immediately after the catastrophe. The relief action is an on‐going event and there may be changes as new information emerges from the field.

A world wide network of integrated submarine earthquake and tsunami monitoring and early warning system should be set up. Critical warning information in any potential disaster should be shared as inclusively as possible. Relief workers must be seen to be politically and religiously neutral, especially in the civil conflicts of Banda Aceh Indonesia. Finally relief and aid should be given on the basis of sound humanitarian principles such as need, not just on wider economic criteria.

The study highlights specific potential challenges which relief organisations must deal with in responding effectively to the disaster, and in assisting to reconstruct the region. The paper proffers specific strategies for effective management of the international assistance effort. Finally, the study adds to the literature on developing countries and is valuable for governments, emergency and relief workers, policy makers in both developed and developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal difficulties associated with identifying child victims of the 2004 South-East Asia Tsunami at the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification (TTVI) operation in Phuket and explores two strategies that increased child identifications.

Data allowing comparison of identification proportions between adult and child (defined as ⩽16 years old) victims of six nationalities and the forensic methods used to establish identification were used in this study.

The first 100 days of the operation revealed that the proportion of adult identifications far outweighed the proportion of child identifications. Moreover, the younger the child, the longer the identification process took (p<0.0001). Children under the age of 1 year took an average of 195 days to identify compared to 130 days for children aged 16. Identification was extended, on average, 4.3 days for each year that victims younger were than 16. Identifying large numbers of child victims requires targeted protocols. Two efforts increased child identifications for the TTVI operation: using body length to distinguish post-mortem (PM) DNA samples potentially belonging to children for targeted testing, and singling out deceased parents of missing children who were previously identified by a modality other than DNA, in order to retrieve and test their PM samples as references for kinship matching. Disaster victim identification operations with similar characteristics may benefit from implementing a strategy targeting child identifications.

The implementation of these two strategies at the TTVI helped to overcome initial complexities, namely, the lack of ante-mortem and PM material, and increased child identifications.

This chapter summarizes the literature on mindfulness and its impact of postdisaster response. Although the use of mindfulness is still in its infancy in Southeast Asia (SEA), initial studies suggest it has potential as a means to address survivors’ posttrauma symptoms. Given cultural nuances such as a discomfort in emotional expression and shame, mindfulness is non-intrusive and encourages non-judgmental acceptance. Mindfulness has been used in group settings which is congruent with the region’s collectivist orientation. In addition, given the importance of spirituality, we suggest that mindfulness may be an inclusive approach that is familiar and acceptable to SEA survivors.

The aim of this article is twofold: validation of a theoretical model of a civil contingencies agency management system, and methodological development by employing qualitative means for analysis.

The theoretical model to be validated serves as a starting point for a qualitative reanalysis of logic‐deductive character, aimed at verification of the pre‐existing theory that is already discovered and developed. Data from three previously published case studies were used as a frame of reference.

The theoretical model of a civil contingencies management system for disaster aid is validated in most respects. The qualitative testing for high trustworthiness proves reasonable with regard to selected reference studies.

The theoretical model of a civil contingencies agency management system for disaster aid was mostly confirmed and partly modified when being compared to empirical data and models from three previous case studies. Also, the qualitative approach to validating the theoretical model is, to the best knowledge of the authors, new.

Natural disasters may inflict significant damage upon international financial markets. The purpose of this study is to investigate if any contagion effect occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear crisis.

Using 33 international stock indices and exchange rates, this paper uses heteroscedasticity biases based on correlation coefficients to examine if any contagion occurred across financial markets after the March 11, 2011 Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis. The sample period is partitioned into two sections: the 12‐month pre‐earthquake period (March 11, 2010 to March 10, 2011) and the 2‐month post‐earthquake period (March 11, 2011 to May 10, 2011). While the stability period is defined as the pre‐earthquake period, the turbulent (turmoil) period is defined as the post‐earthquake period. In a bid to ensure robustness of the findings, the turmoil period is further partitioned into two equal sections: the 1‐month (short‐term) post‐earthquake period (March 11, 2011 to April 10, 2011), and the 2‐month (medium‐term) post‐earthquake (March 11, 2011 to May 10, 2011).

Findings reveal that, while no sampled foreign exchange markets suffered from contagion, stock markets of Taiwan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and South Africa witnessed a contagion effect.

The results have two paramount implications. First, the paper has confirmed existing consensus that in the face of natural crises that could take an international scale, emerging markets are contagiously affected for the most part. Second, the empirical evidence also suggests that international financial market transmissions not only occur during financial crisis; natural disaster effects should not be undermined.

This paper has shown that the correlation structure of international financial markets are also affected by high profile natural disasters.

This paper aims to examine the impact of health and other exogenous shocks on stock markets in Africa. Particularly, the authors examined the resilience of the major stock markets in 12 African economies during the recent global pandemic.

This paper uses the recent panel vector autoregressive model, which enables us to capture the response of stock markets to shocks in COVID-19, commodity markets and exchange rate. For robustness, the authors also analysed the panel Granger causality test. Data was obtained for the period ranging from 2 January 2020 to 31 December 2020.

The results show that the growth in COVID-19 cases and deaths do not have any substantial impact on the stock market returns of these economies. In terms of commodity markets, the authors find that gold price has a negative contemporaneous effect on stock returns, but the effect fizzles out around the fifth day while crude oil price, on the other hand, has a significant positive simult aneous impact on stock returns and also converges around the fifth day. The authors further find that the exchange rate has a contemporaneous and nonlinear effect on stock returns and seems to be more dramatic when compared with the other variables. Overall, the results show that stock markets in Africa appear to be flexible and resilient against the COVID-19 outbreak but are affected by other exogenous shocks such as volatile commodity prices and the foreign exchange market. The effect is, however, short-lived – between one to five days.

Following the study’s findings, policies should be put in place to support financial markets by way of hedging against commodity instability and securing domestic currency financing. Policymakers are also recommended to concentrate on managing the uncertainties around their exchange rate markets and develop robust and efficient domestic financial markets to encourage local and foreign investors.

Several studies have been carried out on the effects of disasters (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) on stock markets, but only a few studies have examined the resilience of stock markets to health and other exogenous shocks. This study’s attempt is not only to examine the impact of COVID-19 health shocks on stock markets but also to analyse the resilience of the sampled stock markets. The authors also analyse the resilience of stock markets to commodity markets and exchange rates shocks.

Recent advances in aviation technology have seen the development of helium-filled “hybrid cargo airships” (HCAs) which have the potential to convey large payloads over significant distances at relatively low cost and with a small carbon footprint. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how such HCAs could be used to improve the logistic response to a rapid onset disaster.

Through consideration of three recent natural disasters (Typhoon Haiyan – The Philippines – 2013; The Nepal Earthquake – 2015; Cyclone Winston – Fiji – 2016), and drawing on both academic and practitioner literature, this paper provides an overview of how HCAs could potentially provide logistic support to those affected by similar disasters. The paper considers two scenarios: one in which the HCA replaces local truck or sea-based transport from an international airport to the disaster area, and the other in which it operates directly from a United Nations Humanitarian Response Depot to the disaster area.

The paper demonstrates that, when compared with the actual response to these three exemplar disasters, in the first scenario the use of HCAs provides a significantly faster but more expensive response; whereas in the second scenario, the timeline to supply is longer, but the costs are considerably less.

This paper is conceptual in nature, but has been developed through an analysis of the literature related to both HCAs and humanitarian logistics. Given that the emerging generation of HCAs has yet to become fully operational, it will be important to continue to monitor their development and analyse the emerging speed/time/cost parameters in order to ascertain how HCAs might be optimally integrated into the logistic response to a disaster.

The significant cargo carrying capacity of an HCA together with its ability to operate from and into ad hoc locations (including those on water) would enable direct delivery from an international airhead or humanitarian response depot to an affected area. This has clear potential to enhance the efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility of post-disaster logistic operations.

Whilst there is some emerging discussion of the humanitarian-related use of HCAs in the literature, this generally reflects the technical aspects such as flight control systems and the actual operation of the airships. This paper is the first to offer a practical analysis of how HCAs might be used to support the work of the humanitarian logistician.

The purpose of this paper is to examine contagion among the major world markets during the last 25 years and propose a new way to analyze contagion with wavelet methods.

The analysis uses a novel way to study contagion using wavelet methods. The comparison is made between co‐movements at different time scales. Co‐movement methods of the discrete wavelet transform and the continuous wavelet transform are applied.

Clear signs of contagion among the major markets are found. Short time scale co‐movements increase during the major crisis while long time scale co‐movements remain approximately at the same level. In addition, gradually increasing interdependence between markets is found.

Because of the chosen method, the approach is limited to large data sets.

The research has practical implications to portfolio managers etc. who wish to have better view of the dynamics of the international equity markets.

The research uses novel wavelet methods to analyze world equity markets. These methods allow the markets to be analyzed in the whole state space.

To provide a review of the general aspects of tsunamis and the specific aspects of the 2004 tsunami impacts on the coastal areas of India and surrounding islands.

The approach is a general discussion of the 2004 tsunami and its effects in areas in South East Asia, followed by the specific impacts in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, including the damage to water supply and power systems, and a situation analysis of the communities, land and housing.

The impact of the 2004 tsunami highlights the vulnerability of the coastal areas and islands of India. The multi‐hazard situation existing on the sea coast of the mainland as well as in the islands of Andaman and Nicobar require a holistic multi‐hazard mitigation approach as a long term measure. The recovery programs presently in hand are being planned taking the multi‐hazard situation in view, so as to provide protection from such hazards in future.

Provides a review of the effects of the 2004 tsunami in the coastal areas and islands near India.