At War with the Weather: Managing Large-scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes

Citation

(2010), "At War with the Weather: Managing Large-scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes", International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management, Vol. 2 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijccsm.2010.41402dae.001

At War with the Weather: Managing Large-scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes

Article Type: Books and resources From: International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management, Volume 2, Issue 4

Howard C. Kunreuther and Erwann O. Michel-Kerjan,MIT Press,Cambridge, MA,July 2009,448 pp.,ISBN 9780262012829,US$ 55.00,

The USA and other nations are facing large-scale risks at an accelerating pace. In 2005, three major hurricanes – Katrina, Rita, and Wilma – made landfall along the US Gulf Coast within an eight-week period. The damage caused by these storms led to insurance reimbursements and federal disaster relief of more than $180 billion – a record sum. Today we are more vulnerable to catastrophic losses because of the increasing concentration of population and activities in high-risk coastal regions of the country. The question is not whether but when future catastrophes will strike. Who should pay the costs associated with catastrophic losses suffered by homeowners in hazard-prone areas?

In At War with the Weather, Howard Kunreuther and Erwann Michel-Kerjan and their colleagues deliver a groundbreaking analysis of how we currently mitigate, insure against, and finance recovery from natural disasters in the USA. They offer innovative, long-term solutions for reducing losses and providing financial support for disaster victims that define a coherent strategy to assure sustainable recovery from future large-scale disasters. The amount of data collected and analyzed and innovations proposed make this one of the most comprehensive books written on these critical issues in the past 30 years.