Natural Disaster Risk Management

Introduction.- Responsibility of Geoscience in Natural Disaster Risk Management.- General Aspects.- Natural Disaster vs. Extreme Events.- Society of Risk.- Definitions of Hazard, Vulnerability and Risk.- General Aspects.- Definitions.- Hazard Assessment.- Disaster Statistics.- One Hazard Distribution.- Hazard Cascade.- Multiple Hazard Distribution.- Multiple Hazard Assessment Application.- Vulnerability Assessments.- General Aspects.- Definition Vulnerability.- Social and Cultural Vulnerability.- Economic Vulnerability.- Ecological Vulnerability.- Risk Assessments General Aspects.- Definition.- Loss Damage Curve, Frequency vs. Probability.- Social Amplification of Risk.- Societal Resilience.- Risk Assessment.- Risk Communications.- General Aspects Risk Perception.- Role of Media.- Communication by Officials.- Communication within Emergency Management Organizations.- Risk Management.- Mitigation.- Increasing Resilience.

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Ranke, born in 1947, studied Geology at the University of Goettingen, Germany, where he later wrote his doctoral thesis on the marine sediments of the Northern Adriatic Sea in 1974. He joined the German Geological Survey (BGR) the same year, and worked for an extended period as a petroleum advisor to Bangladesh and Pakistan. For three years he was assigned to the Federal German Ministry for Technical Cooperation and Development as seconded expert for integrating geoscience in social and economic development projects. Later he became Head of the Department for Principles of Technical Cooperation, making him responsible for the BGR's project planning and evaluation in the context of international cooperation. During this time, he travelled to more than 30 countries, mostly in Asia, but also in southern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. In 2002, he was assigned as project leader for German-Indonesian technical cooperation in the field of natural disaster risk management.In the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami disaster he served for many years in an advisory capacity to the Indonesian government concerning disaster risk management and the institutionalization of the German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System. After returning from Indonesia to Germany in 2007, he was invited to hold lectures on natural disaster risk management at the Universities of Bonn and Clausthal. The following year, he was elected an honorary professor by the Geological Faculty at the University of Goettingen, where, since his retirement in 2012, he has continued to hold lectures on project management, planning and project evaluation.

"Ranke ... has written a very timely, well-organized, comprehensive textbook that will be remarkably valuable to earth scientists in many disciplines throughout the world. Climatologists, hydrologists, geophysicists, volcanologists, and sedimentologists are just some specialists who will find this book an important resource. ... This guide and accompanying free software will be very useful to students studying natural disaster risks. ... Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above." (M. S. Field, Choice, Vol. 53 (9), May, 2016)