This chapter addresses insuring natural catastrophes in America. It provides an overview of the existing lines of insurance for natural catastrophe losses, such as homeowners insurance, commercial property insurance (including business interruption insurance), the National Flood Insurance Program, and earthquake insurance (including the California Earthquake Authority). Currently, most natural catastrophe losses are uninsured in America as a result of consumer ignorance regarding risk and private insurers’ general treatment of natural catastrophes as uninsurable correlated risks. Consequently, this chapter also includes a discussion of ways more natural catastrophe losses could be insured in America by considering the ways other developed countries throughout the world insure natural catastrophe losses.

Article 7.1 of the Paris Agreement establishes that parties should aim at enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience, and reducing vulnerability to climate change. While many climate hazards and vulnerabilities are beyond territorial control, a readiness to withstand and recover from them must be delivered locally. This chapter discusses climate-related vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience of the Greater Bay Area of China (GBA), an area that has been identified by the Chinese government as an engine of economic development but which has historically been vulnerable to flooding. After providing a contextual introduction to the GBA project, the chapter reviews key studies on past, current, and future climate trends focusing on meteorological, climatological, hydrological, and geophysical hazards. It then surveys adaptation policies and plans already implemented in GBA cities to assess what works and what does not and where the gaps are. Finally, the discussion focuses on the drivers and barriers for the uptake of technology for flood prevention and for the deployment of emergency responses. The aim of this discussion is to identify the opportunities and risks of technology in building future-ready local skills and citizen engagement for climate resilience. Given the ambitious plans for the GBA to contribute to the economic development of China, existing and projected vulnerabilities to climate hazards and their potential impact on the developed environment and physical infrastructure, business and industry, energy supply, financial services, human health, water resources, and biodiversity may not only hamper GBA plans but also put its businesses and citizens at risk. Technological innovation diminishes this vulnerability, but drivers and barriers to its uptake must be either identified and enhanced or removed accordingly.

At the beginning of the new millennium, Australia's cities and their peri-urban and rural hinterlands were in the midst of a worsening drought. Having developed in the mid-1990s, the Millennium Drought finally broke in 2010, at least in south-eastern Australia. It was the most severe drought experienced in southern Australia since instrumental records began in the early twentieth century, thanks to a combination of natural variability and anthropogenic climate change. The urgency of water restrictions and supply augmentation that had characterised the drought years gave way to more pressing matters of the electoral cycle. As Australian cities continue to grow, it remains be seen as to whether plans to shape the urban form as a water catchment of its own materialise beyond model suburbs and local initiatives and what their implementation might mean for the water infrastructure and cultures of the past.

Description: Beside pandemics and famines, humans have also suffered from the impact of other kinds of disasters, which at times were very destructive of lives and property. Among these natural disasters there were earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, major floods, hurricanes and tornadoes, and tsunamis. While some of these were clearly Acts of God, increasingly some had some human contribution, because of the growing impact that humans had started to have on nature. This human impact was growing with the passing of time. The increase in the standard of living of humans was increasingly coming at a high natural cost. The chapter provides information on some of the major disasters.

In the wake of the ‘golden age’ of economic growth in the early 1970s, public provision of urban infrastructure came under the close scrutiny of governments seeking to reduce the size of their bureaucracies in the face of expanding budgets, rising prices, and increasing unemployment. Australian governments and water utilities followed the UK and USA by introducing price mechanisms to attain more efficient water use. This coincided with severe droughts that affected urban water supplies and led state governments to impose residential water restrictions, save for Brisbane, where catastrophic floods in 1974 reminded residents of their vulnerability to the elements. Growing concern for the environment, as well as the implications of environmental degradation for human health, meant that the sights, smells, and sounds of the Australian suburbs were on the eve of change. The use of suburban waterways as drains for industrial and domestic waste would no longer be tolerated, as local residents campaigned to protect built and natural environments from pollution and development projects. Such health and ecological concerns collided with the neoliberal reform agenda of the 1990s, when newly restructured water utilities faced a series of crises in their provision of water and disposal of wastes.

This chapter shows that theories of natural catastrophes in Greek and Roman literature in general presuppose the repetition of devastating events rather than their singularity, but that the ancient evaluations of natural catastrophes differ widely. Long shows that Plato and Aristotle tend to be detached and dispassionate in their accounts of such natural catastrophes by treating them simply as inevitable phases in the natural world’s cyclical history. By contrast, the Epicurean Lucretius and the Stoic Seneca clearly acknowledge human fragility in the face of catastrophes. Both philosophers register the dangers of presuming mastery over the natural environment and are sensitive to the human toll that nature can extort from exceeding such limits.

Beginning in northwestern Kenya with the story of Eregae and Aita Nakali, this chapter introduces the new science of climate extremes and extreme event attribution. Between 2015 and 2019, the “fingerprints” of climate change slapped hundreds of millions of people. Extreme heat waves, floods, droughts, and wildfires exacted a terrible toll on developed and developing nations alike. These catastrophes affected hundreds of millions of people and resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in losses. Fire-afflicted movie stars in California and ranchers in Australia; drought-stricken South Africans; poor flooded fisher-folk in Bangladesh; Houston's middle-class families riven by flood: these are just some of the people who felt the crushing blow of more extreme climate. While humans have always faced the perils of natural disasters, the data suggest that the human and economic cost of climate and weather extremes is increasing rapidly as our population and economies expand and our planet warms rapidly. Since the early 1980s, the number of large catastrophes has quadrupled, inflicting billions of dollars in losses and impacting vulnerable populations on every continent. Understanding the link between extremes and warming is both a moral and an existential imperative.