The term natural disaster is often used to refer to natural events such as earthquakes, hurricanes or floods. However, the phrase natural disaster suggests an uncritical acceptance of a deeply engrained ideological and cultural myth. At Risk questions this myth and argues that extreme natural events are not disasters until a vulnerable group of people is exposed. The book focuses on what makes people vulnerable. Often this means analysing the links between poverty and vulnerability. However it is also important to take account of different social groups that suffer more in extreme events,...

Forests and forest lands around the world are a source of livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people. Contests over control and use of these forest resources are increasingly acute, and nowhere are they more intense than in South Asia. Although state forest administration is recorded in the earliest historical texts of the region, since the colonial period forest departments have extended and intensified scientific forest management in order to generate greater flows of timber and revenue, constructing policy in terms of colonial and later national development rather than as serving the...