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The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of gender mainstreaming into disaster reduction decision making as a way of reducing disaster vulnerabilities of women, a highly vulnerable group to disasters.

The paper builds a discussion around disaster reduction, the importance of gender mainstreaming in disaster reduction and the ways of mainstreaming gender based on a literature review. It reviews academic literature as well as papers and reports produced by the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UN/ISDR) and various other institutions.

The paper highlights the importance of the role of gender mainstreaming in disaster reduction as a means of reducing disaster risk through considering women's needs and concerns in particular. Further, on the basis of the literature reviewed, the paper emphasises the need for enhancing gender balance in disaster reduction decision making in order to understand the possible effects of policies and measures developed for disaster reduction on gender roles.

The paper paves the way forward to identify how gender mainstreaming could be achieved in the context of construction as construction has a significant relationship with development that could create or reduce disaster risk.

The paper attempts to contribute to disaster reduction through emphasising the need for mainstreaming gender into the disaster reduction decision‐making process and also towards reducing disaster vulnerabilities of women. In this context, the paper brings an insight into the necessity for mainstreaming gender in disaster reduction in construction.

To develop a decision model supporting employee involvement in industrial vulnerability reduction.

A synthesis review of some of the relevant extant literature on technological/industrial vulnerability, and their application within a normative decision‐making model (i.e. the “Vroom‐Yetton model”).

The insights on vulnerability drawn from the literature are highly amenable to a systematic decision‐making model for employee involvement. Various aspects of vulnerability, specifically with regard to substantial, social and temporal dimensions may be included in such a model.

New insights about the context‐dependent aspects of vulnerability are offered by considering these within a contingency decision model. This suggests that vulnerability categories are not absolute, but have to be assessed in relation to a specific decision‐making framework.

The developed model provides a way of weighting various dimensions of vulnerability and making more appropriate decisions regarding leadership style in a range of circumstances.

While decision models exist for assessing risk in organizations, no contingency model for employee involvement in vulnerability assessment has been presented to date.

Discusses the nature of disaster and the future of emergency management. After exploring differing historical perspectives of disaster, puts forth a model of vulnerability and highlights the plethora of factors that contribute to calamitous events. Introduces the concept of invulnerable development as a method of vulnerability management and compares it to other terms that have been proposed as guides for future disaster policy. The central argument to be made is that vulnerability is, or should be, the key concept for disaster scholarship and reduction.

Literature on natural risks typically examines either biophysical process characteristics or human pre‐ or post‐disaster activities. This paper takes a somewhat different track; first, it argues that also natural disasters are socially constructed and, therefore, second, it resets the framework in which disaster management has to be placed. While most researchers usually focus on risk assessment it is suggested that the concept of vulnerability can provide a vehicle to explore a contextual approach to the reduction of losses due to natural hazards. In a brief overview the conceptualization of vulnerability is presented. Since precise measurement of uncertainties and exact prediction of damages is hardly feasible, a conceptual approach in vulnerability assessment is proposed. Qualities that determine potential damage are identified and characteristics described. It is suggested that, even without assessing risk exactly, vulnerability reduction decreases damages and losses.

Following the disasters of 9/11/01 the U.S. government has embarked on what is intended to be a comprehensive response to the hazard of further terrorist attacks on Americans at home and abroad. This paper addresses the homeland component of the response and asserts that both the general approach and the measures being deployed are neither comprehensive nor well-balanced. The broad goal of security is losing ground to the narrower objective of defense; mitigation strategies are being overshadowed by preparedness and response alternatives; expert systems are preferred over grass-roots bottom-up ones; and possibilities for reducing human vulnerability are being ignored in favor of programs that aim to reduce risks or lessen the vulnerability of built structures and infrastructures. Preferences for the use of sophisticated technologies that are intended to quarantine terrorism and minimize its consequences far outnumber efforts to engage with the messier realm of ideas and behaviors related to terrorism. Yet it is the latter that shape the public interpretation of terrorism risks, structure patterns of exposure and affect the coping capabilities of threatened communities. Without substantial changes to policy that take account of these deficiencies, Americans are likely to find themselves little better prepared to confront the challenges of future terrorist attacks on targets in U.S. territory and the nation’s ability to address other kinds of hazards may be seriously compromised.

Risk assessments are the very basis on which planning and implementation are carried out. In the context of urban risk management, the assessment processes are complex to understand as they involve multi-sectoral parameters. Many of the issues involved are of technical nature, but this also requires focus on the principles behind the assessment process including participatory assessment tools.

Action planning is a participatory, short-term, visible, output-oriented process that enables urban community groups to plan the development of risk reduction actions in their locality and to lead the implementation of the action plans.

There are three kinds of actions that emerge from an action planning process: (i) those that can be implemented by the community groups themselves, (ii) those that need some external help for implementation, and (iii) those that can only be implemented by specialized agencies from outside the community. Implementation management processes thus need to look at how internal systems can be established to operationalize self-action, and to coordinate external interventions.

Disasters are increasingly depicted as unique opportunities to ‘build back better’, to make communities more ‘resilient’ and to address pre-existing ‘vulnerabilities’. This has seen international disaster risk reduction (DRR) and recovery frameworks attempt to link short-term relief efforts with long-term development objectives while at the same time ensuring active community participation, local knowledge inclusion and ownership. This chapter looks at how ‘build back better’ – which became institutionalised through the 2015 Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction – attempts to reconcile normative concepts of ‘better’ with diverse place-based needs, interests and knowledge. Through an analysis of three United Nations DRR frameworks from 1994 to 2015, the chapter tracks how disasters have been constructed as opportunities for development, and asks whether the post-disaster context is the right time for implementing development agendas given the potential for recovery to be co-opted by dominant development ideologies.

The present paper attempts to prove that social resilience to environmental risks should be considered as a potential mechanism of transfer of vulnerability from one social actor to another and/or transformation of vulnerability to one risk to vulnerability to another. This means that social resilience should not be treated always as a desirable attitude; it is desirable under certain conditions only.

Widespread views are challenged by alleging both theoretical knowledge and empirical outcomes. By carrying out insights to the epistemological roots of the concept resilience, its use in the domains of ecology, social and behavioural sciences, and actual experiences of resilience processes to risks in Greece, the author re‐integrates resilience analysis in the context of systemic understanding of society, the environment and interrelations between the two.

The paper introduces a clear dissociation of individualized from collective resilience and evidences that these two forms may come in conflict. Besides it indicates that assessment of resilience impacts on vulnerability is possible only by taking into account the systemic interconnections between community actors, on the one hand, and between environmental, natural and socio‐economic risks, on the other. The paper provides a methodological approach to the identity of a resilience process, an approach based on the determinant factors of resilience: the agency performing the process, the utilized resources, the stimulus and modus operandi, spatial and temporal range of the process and impacts on several aspects of vulnerability.

Acknowledgement of social resilience to risks as a mechanism of transfer and/or transformation of vulnerability entails radical changes in planning philosophy. Planning should focus more on keeping the effects of individualized resilience within the constraints of the wider community interest and environmental sustainability objectives, i.e. vulnerability reduction for all and vis‐à‐vis all risk aspects.

The paper reverses widespread optimism about social resilience to environmental risks as a universally positive process and a panacea for dealing with social vulnerability. It introduces a new methodology for evaluating virtual impacts on vulnerability and revises the guiding principles and given assumptions of risk mitigation planning.

Disasters provide physical, social, economic, political and environmental development windows of opportunity particularly through housing and infrastructure reconstruction. The reconstruction process should not be neglected due to the opportunistic nature of facilitating innovation in development. In this respect, post‐disaster “infrastructure” reconstruction plays a critical role in development discourse and is often essential to sustain recovery after major disasters. However, reconstruction following a natural disaster is a complicated problem involving social, economic, cultural, environmental, psychological, and technological aspects. There are significant development benefits of well‐developed “Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) Strategies” and, for many reasons, the concept of DRR can be more easily promoted following a disaster. In this respect, a research study was conducted to investigate the effects of integrating DRR strategies into infrastructure reconstruction on enhancing the socio‐economic development process from a qualitative stance. The purpose of this paper is to document part of this research study; it proposes an approach that can be used to assess the influence of the application of the DRR concept into infrastructure reconstruction on socio‐economic development.

The research methodology included a critical literature review.

This paper suggests that the best way to assess the influence of integrating DRR strategies practices into infrastructure reconstruction on socio‐economic development is to assess the level of impact that DRR strategies has on overcoming various factors that form vulnerabilities. Having assessed this, the next step is to assess the influence of overcoming the factors that form vulnerabilities on achieving performance targets of socio‐economic development.

This paper primarily presents a framework for the concept of socio‐economic development and a modelled classification of DRR practices.

Climate-related disasters are the most representative in terms of recurrence and impacts. To reduce them, risk transfer is a key strategy for climate risk management. However, this approach does not consider the socioeconomic vulnerability of each population group, limiting its effectiveness. The objective of this paper is to improve and increase the usefulness of risk transfer through the Differential Risk Transfer (DRT) approach.

A comprehensive and systematic review of the state of the art on Differential Approach (DA) is presented, and its connection with existing models of vulnerability to disasters is analysed. Through epistemic deliberations, an operational definition of Differential Risk Transfer (DRT), as well as its advantages are discussed. Finally, general guidelines are presented for the implementation of the DRT in a specific context.

The results confirm that DA presents a clear relation with the models for the study of disaster vulnerability. The small group discussions agree with the usefulness of DRT for improving climate-related risk management.

This paper argues for the inclusion of the DRT approach in the climate risk management strategies aiming to fill the disaggregated data gaps that limit the potentiality and accuracy of risk transfer schemes worldwide.

This innovative approach improves the accuracy of the risk transfer mechanisms through the recognition of the differences of ethnicity, gender and life cycle that increase socioeconomic vulnerability to climate-related disasters.