The number of psychologists whose work crosses cultural boundaries is increasing. Without a critical awareness of their own cultural grounding, they risk imposing the assumptions, concepts, practices, and values of U.S.-centered psychology on societies where they do not fit, as a brief example from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami shows. Hermeneutic thinkers offer theoretical resources for gaining...

We cannot stop natural calamities, but we can and must better equip individuals and communities to withstand them. Those most vulnerable to nature’s wrath are usually the poorest, which means that when we reduce poverty, we also reduce vulnerability. Kofi Annan, Former UN Secretary-General, October 12, 2005 Kofi Annan’s 2005 International Day for Disaster Reduction message followed a year of na...

The global-health landscape has changed radically in recent years. Key factors are the substantial increase in the number of donors and in funding. Agencies, such as the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Bank, now contribute more to global-health programmes than WHO. Although this growth of resources and interest is a positive dev...

To be effective, early warning systems for natural hazards need to have not only a sound scientific and technical basis, but also a strong focus on the people exposed to risk, and with a systems approach that incorporates all of the relevant factors in that risk, whether arising from the natural hazards or social vulnerabilities, and from short-term or long-term processes. Disasters are increas...

This paper presents a new remotely sensed solution for monitoring the recovery of a large disaster-affected area. It exploits the powerful data grid and computing grid technologies developed on GEO (Global Earth Observation) Grid system. Accessing the ASTER portal site of GEO Grid, all the necessary ASTER multi-spectral images and on-demand ASTER digital elevation model (DEM) are easily and qui...

The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami significantly impacted the coastal shoreline of Andaman Nicobar Islands, causing widespread destruction infrastructure ecological damage. This study aims to analyze short- long-term changes in South Andaman, focusing on 2004–2005 (pre- post-tsunami) 1990–2023 (to assess periodic changes). Using remote sensing techniques geospatial tools such as Digit...

[1] Sea surface temperature (SST) for the central equatorial Indian Ocean, has been reconstructed over the last 137 kyr, from Mg/Ca of the planktonic foraminiferal species Globigerinoides ruber. According to our record the equatorial Indian Ocean SST was 2.1 C colder during the last glacial maximum as compared to present times. The data further shows that the surface equatorial Indian Ocean was...

A shore-based High-Frequency (HF) WERA radar was recently installed by Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) near Tofino, British Columbia (Canada), to mitigate the elevated tsunami hazard along the shores of Vancouver Island, from both farand near-field seismic sources and, in particular, from the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ). With this HF radar, ocean currents can be measured up to a 70-85 km range, ...