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How can island communities deal with environmental hazards and hazard drivers, including climate change?

Part of: Humans and Island Environments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2017

ILAN KELMAN Open the ORCID record for ILAN KELMAN [Opens in a new window]
ILAN KELMAN*
Affiliation:
University College London, Institute for Global Health and Institute for Risk & Disaster Reduction, London, UK and Universitetet i Agder, Kristiansand, Norway
*
Correspondence: Dr Ilan Kelman email: ilan_kelman@hotmail.com
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Summary

This paper provides a critiquing overview of how island communities deal with environmental hazards and hazard drivers, including climate change. The key activity is disaster risk reduction including climate change adaptation, for which many concepts and techniques have emerged from island studies. Although these concepts and techniques are not exclusive to island contexts, this paper focuses on island communities in order to illustrate the importance of human actions in causing and dealing with disasters involving environmental hazards. This point is demonstrated by examining key human and physical geography characteristics representing ‘islandness’: population, area, geomorphology and connectedness. The characteristics are not mutually exclusive, but island stereotypes emerge as small and static populations, small resource areas, highly volatile and changing geomorphology and limited connectedness. In exploring exceptions and diversities amongst islands, stereotypes are sometimes seen and sometimes not seen in reality. Advantages and disadvantages are demonstrated for different island settings dealing with environmental hazards and hazard drivers.

Keywords

CCAclimate change adaptationdisastersdisaster risk reductionDRRenvironmental hazardsislandsresilienceriskvulnerability
Type
Papers
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 244 - 253
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation for Environmental Conservation 2017 

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