Synopsis The major challenges of the 21 century faced by human beings are how to achieve water security, food security, energy security and environmental security. Owing to enhanced natural/anthropogenic disasters worldwide, these challenges become much more complicated and daunting especially for developing countries. Therefore, it is important to highlight the risk of different disasters as well as the modern tools and techniques for minimizing disaster incidence and losses.

Disaster management being highly multidisciplinary in nature, a comprehensive book dealing with different aspects of disaster management, and encompassing important disasters faced by humankind is presently not available. This book is an attempt to fulfill this gap. It provides clear, comprehensive and up-to-date information about different facets of disaster management along with salient case studies. The book highlights the current status of disaster management focusing on developing nations, discusses vital issues such as climate change and sustainable development, modern approaches, and tools/techniques, and the challenges of and future R&D needs for sustainable disaster management.

This book will not only serve as a general guideline for effective disaster management but will also help educate engineers and scientists about the salient natural and anthropogenic disasters as well as the modern approaches and tools/techniques for their efficient management. It will be very useful to teachers, students and researchers of environmental, civil, agricultural, ocean, and land, and water resources engineering fields as well as to the practitioners, planners and decision makers, particularly of developing nations.