Climate change and disasters are fast emerging as the most defining challenges of the 21st century as global risks with impacts far beyond just the environment and implications on national security and development. The paper examines the climate change-disaster-security nexus in context of India, the future projections of the IPCC and other regional assessments, along with the disaster profile ...

As everyone knows, some paroxysmal disasters, such as flood, can do a great damage in short time. Timely, accurate, and fast acquisition of sufficient disaster information is the prerequisite facing with disaster emergency. Due to UAV’s superiority in acquiring disaster data, UAV, a rising remote sensed data has gradually become the first choice for departments of disaster prevention and mitiga...

In this work we propose a market-based task allocation system for disaster response domains. We model the disaster response domain as a team of robots cooperating to extinguish a series of fires that arise due to a disaster. Each fire is associated with a time-decreasing reward for successful mitigation, with the value of the initial reward corresponding to task importance, and the speed of dec...

Robocup Rescue is a research initiative on disaster mitigation, search and rescue problems. Rescue Simulation is a sub-domain that domain aims at increasing the understanding of disasters at a macroscopic(i.e.city-wide) level and exploring new ways for disaster management. In this graduation project, we extended the simulation with a model of human crowd behavior. Also explored is, how crowds c...

Early Warning Systems (EWS) provide an effective measure for better disaster preparedness, response, and mitigation. The effectiveness of EWS depends highly on the ability to distribute alert message to the persons that will be affected. In this context mobile devices play already a vital role in the ability to reach people in time and at the endangered location. Most existing approaches focus ...

Editorials 558 Several high-impact disasters in the last decade have shown diverse environmental and social settings to be vulnerable to natural hazards. According to the United Nations (UN), in 2011 302 disasters resulting from natural hazards killed 29 782 people and injured, displaced or otherwise affected another 206 million. Economic damages reached 366 billion United States dollars (US$),...