Foreword: Current Trends in Disaster Law and Policy

Abstract

The increasing effects of climate change are intensifying many of our most pressing disaster risks. As disaster events are compressed in time and space by the growing potential for both disaster clusters and disaster cascades, current governance challenges will also intensify, heightening both the need for — and the difficulty of — coordinating across fragmented authority, integrating and mainstreaming climate policy, addressing disaster inequality, and managing short-term versus long-term risks. Resilience planning can be an important framework for addressing some of these challenges, but only if resilience initiatives focus more clearly on what we are making more resilient and why, who will benefit from specific resilience measures, the timeframes in which those benefits will be realized, and whether resilience measures that preserve the status quo today merely impede more transformative change that is desirable or necessary in the longer term. While we should not underestimate the tremendous difficulty of making the institutional changes needed to address these governance challenges, climate change may help energize efforts at institutional reform by increasing the urgency of changing current institutions. We hope this chapter, along with the others in this volume, helps clarify both the issues at stake and some potential solutions.

Keywords: disasters, disaster law, climate change, climate change adaptation, resilience