Environmental history in southern Africa has only recently come into its own as a distinct field of historical inquiry. While natural resources lie at the heart of all environmental history, the field opens the door to a wide range of inquiries, several of which are pioneered in this collection.
"South Africa's Environmental History" offers a series of local and particular studies followed by more general commentary and comparative studies.
The contributors include Sean Archer, William Beinart, Jane Carruthers, Beverley Ellis, Bill Guest, Nancy Jacobs, Elna Kotze, John Lambert,...

Disasters both natural and human-induced are leading to spiralling costs in terms of human lives, lost livelihoods and damaged assets and businesses. Yet these consequences and the financial and human crises that follow catastrophes can often be traced to policies unsuited to the emerging scales of the problems they confront, and the lack of institutional capacity to implement planning and prevention or to manage disasters. This book seeks to overcome this mismatch and to guide development of a policy and institutional framework. For the first time it brings together into a coherent framework...

With the global population expected to reach nine billion by 2050, our capacity to provide enough food, water and energy relies on our understanding and management of the complex inter-dependencies in the climate-energy-water nexus. This book presents a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the inter-dependencies between these sectors and the knock-on consequences of those interactions for other sectors, such as food production and biodiversity conservation. The interdisciplinary nature of the book across the three sectors of climate, energy and water means that it will be valuable for...