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This chapter presents a research study that examined post-disaster authentic university academic care resilience (PAUACR) at a Historically Black College and University (HBCU). PAUACR is a university’s and its students’ capacity to bounce back from post-disaster educational challenges. PAUACR requires a strong caring response and authentic academic care environments. For the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI), PAUACR following Hurricanes Irma and Maria was crucial to ensure students successfully completed the academic year. To assess UVI’s PAUACR, this study utilized a caring about academic caregiving inventory (CAACI). This 49-item instrument was used to gain students’ discernment of post-disaster authentic university academic care (PAUAC). The research employed a cross-sectional exploratory survey research design. The empirical analysis found associations between the structural workings of UVI’s academic caregiving in the aftermath of hurricanes Irma and Maria. These findings offer distinctive indicators of UVI’s PAUACR. Along with the findings, this chapter offers practical lessons of academic resilience drawn from the experience of conducting post-disaster research.

Disasters significantly reduce the accessibility of justice particularly in rural locations. The bushfires, which ravaged three states in the south-east of Australia in late 2019 and early 2020, have had catastrophic social and economic impacts on people, animals and places in rural areas. In the aftermath of disasters, people by necessity must inevitably avail themselves of legal advice and services: to negotiate new business contracts; re-mortgage property; access wills and testaments; attend court; and for a host of other matters. In rural communities, where access to legal services is already limited by distance and circumstance, disasters create increased demand, and access issues are accentuated. This chapter explores access to justice issues in post-disaster context and as they relate to rural, regional and remote communities. It draws upon post-disaster experiences nationally and internationally, outlining responses to improve access to legal services past and present, identifying effective responses. It argues that rurality creates additional barriers and reduces access to justice, and that disasters exacerbate existing access issues as well as creating new challenges.

Tourism sites around the world which are often hit by calamities caused by climate change normally affect extremely the regions and economies. Disasters affect directly or indirectly the number of tourist arrival, the hotel industry, tourism receipts, employment, and the overall economy of a region (Naeem, Bhatti, & Khan, 2021). To thrive or adapt in this novel and rapidly changing environment, tourism communities need to be resilient in order to maintain the economic benefits (Wu, Chiu, & Chen, 2019). This requires strategic approach in local tourism development with strong public private partnership and collaboration. Economy, environment, emergency management and response, disaster risk management, community-based participation, post-disaster tourism recovery management, psychological behavior of people, nature-based tourism, dark tourism, responsive consumer behavior, and transportation are the key areas to focus on. Developing resilient and sustainable local tourism communities must be guided by the carefully defined goals and objectives depending on the dynamics and resources of the communities, and anchored of guidelines, pertinent laws and policies implemented by the local, national, and international governing and regulatory bodies.

Purpose – This chapter provides an overview to the challenges of policing both natural and man-made disasters. Questions surrounding police preparedness to respond to large-scale disasters as well as the causes of failure are likely one of the single biggest system threats faced by police today.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter starts out with a short discussion about the important impact the 9/11 attacks as well as both Hurricanes Katrina and Rita had on policing in the United States. The materials presented also provide a conceptual framework for understanding the meaning of “disasters,” as well as making sense of the effectiveness of the police response. Finally, this chapter provides an overview of the role of police in disasters, and more importantly, their role in “creating order out of chaos” (Punch & Markham, 2000).

Findings – After more than 10 years of substantial attention to problems associated with responses to natural and man-made disasters, significant barriers remain in the level of communication and coordination among first responders. These barriers are best understood as cultural and not technical in nature.

Originality/value of paper – The conceptual role of police in both pre-disaster planning and post-disaster responses has been largely ignored in the literature. This chapter provides a strong framework for conceptualizing these roles. We argue that police, as core members of the first responder system, must continue to break down cultural barriers that diminish their capacities to effectively serve communities in the wake of disasters.

Natural disasters and other crises present methodological challenges to organizational researchers. While these challenges are well canvassed in the literature, less attention has been paid to understanding how distinct crisis events may present, not only unique challenges, but also important opportunities for research. In this chapter, we draw on our collective experience of conducting post-earthquake research and compare this with the COVID-19 pandemic context in order to identify and discuss the inherent vulnerabilities associated with disaster studies and the subsequent methodological challenges and opportunities that researchers might encounter. Adopting a critical perspective, the chapter grapples with some of the more contentious issues associated with research in a disaster and crisis context including aspects of stakeholder engagement, ethics, reciprocity, inequality, and vulnerability.

Disaster responders play a crucial role in providing aid to individuals and communities following catastrophic events. Being tasked to protect and preserve life and property, these groups of professionals are constantly exposed to various hazards, which puts them at risk of negative mental health consequences. This chapter describes and discusses these mental health effects and interventions for disaster responders in Southeast Asia. The chapter defines who the disaster responders are in Southeast Asian countries. Drawing from the literature, this chapter enumerates the various positive and negative psychological consequences of disaster response, and the risk and protective factors associated with disaster response work. This chapter also describes the different interventions, such as psychological first aid and psychotherapy, following the Inter-agency Standing Committee (IASC) (2007) guidelines on conducting mental health and psychosocial support services (MHPSS), and focusing on the Southeast Asian context. This chapter ends with a discussion of the different challenges of providing MHPSS in Southeast Asia and with some recommendations on how to improve the delivery of these services and the mental health of disaster responders in general.

Extreme events undermine progress toward social sustainability and require an immediate response from the private sector. The authors propose a two-dimensional framework (response time and the scope of activities to the various stakeholders) to benchmark firms’ effectiveness in mitigating the threats to social sustainability post-disaster. This framework allows establishing a taxonomy of corporate emergency responses. Within such a framework, the authors group 218 corporate actions from 111 companies operating in Spain during the COVID-19 pandemic into four corporate relief strategies: symbolic, selective, reactive, and supportive. The authors show how companies can use this framework as a guide to foster social sustainability in times of shock in an efficient way. Also, stakeholders can use this framework as a reference to distinguish corporate initiatives aiming to propel community resilience from corporate “covidwashing.”

This chapter introduces the tourism–disaster–conflict nexus through a comprehensive review of the contemporary social science literature. After reviewing conceptual definitions of tourism, disaster and conflict, the chapter explores various axes that link through this nexus. The linkages between tourism and disaster include tourism as a trigger or amplifier of disasters, the impacts of disasters on the tourism industry, tourism as a driver of disaster recovery and disaster risk reduction strategies in the tourism sector. Linkages between tourism and conflict include the idea that tourism can be a force for peace and stability, the niche status of danger zone or dark heritage tourism, the concept of phoenix tourism in post-conflict destination rebranding, tourism and cultural conflicts, and tourism’s conflicts over land and resources. Linkages between disaster and conflict include disasters as triggers or intensifiers of civil conflict, disaster diplomacy and conflict resolution, disaster capitalism, and gender-based violence and intra-household conflict in the wake of disasters. These are some of the conversations that organise this volume, and this introductory chapter ends with a summary of the chapters that follow.

Floods are among the most significant and frequent hazards to affect communities in the downstream part of the Ba River in Western Viti Levu, Fiji Islands. They often leave in their wake displacements and death putting thousands at risk of sliding into poverty. Using the recent 2009 and 2012 floods, we examine how social capital aids in post-disaster response and recovery among residents in five selected villages in the downstream communities of the Ba River. Data were collected from a questionnaire survey administered to 97 households and semi-structured interviews with a further 20 respondents. It is conventionally believed that moving supplies, aid and expertise into flood-affected areas offers the best path to effective response and recovery. By contrast, our results indicate that residents of downstream communities in Ba District are using four approaches to create and deploy social capital among them to facilitate disaster response. The patterns of social capital used for effective response include practices of search and rescue, information, mutual assistance and commercial cooperation. Such strategies help to build resilience at household and community levels and reduce risks of loss of life and costly damage to property. The findings can be used to generate policies concerning the integration of social capital as a component of flood disaster response and recovery mechanisms.