Special Issue
While Google Trends indicates that worldwide interest in the term ‘disaster management’ has generally increased over the past ten years, attention to the term ‘disaster’ spiked at three specific times during that period—September and December, 2017, as a result of incredible natural disasters during that year, and again in April, 2020, as a result of an initial reckoning with the Coronavirus-2019 (COVID-19) disease pandemic. [1] According to the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a disaster is “an occurrence of a natural catastrophe, technological accident, or human-caused event that has resulted in severe property damage, deaths, and/or multiple injuries.” [2] In this respect, disasters are fairly common; however, societal understanding of vulnerability and resilience has not always been strong, even if scholarship in this area continues to advance. Management of disaster events has sometimes been weak, if not dangerously lacking in certain cases, putting the public at risk. There have also been positive cases, from which we may learn and apply understanding elsewhere.
This call for submissions seeks to encourage manuscripts addressing considerations of disaster management, viewed broadly as with the FEMA definition above. Rigorous papers involving quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-method approaches are invited. Efforts to bridge gaps between academic pursuits and official policy and practice, to effect positive change, are particularly welcome.
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph/special_issues/Emergency_Manage
Christopher Atkinson