Business plays important roles in community functioning. However, disaster research has been disproportionately focused on units of analysis such as families, households and government agencies. This paper synthesises the major findings within the business development research field and the disaster research field. It constructs a framework for evaluating business vulnerability to natural disas...

During an extended period of economic recession for most of the 1990s, broad and striking changes have been made to the Japanese employment system. How fundamental or reversible they are is harder to evaluate. This paper discusses the Japanese employment system and its changes. It is concluded that if the economic recovery prevails, a considerable stabilization of Japanese human resource practi...

Veterinarians in the United States of America and Canada are involved in a variety of activities which contribute to improving human health and well-being. Some of these activities can be considered as a part of veterinary public health (VPH), including: zoonoses control, food safety, environmental protection, comparative medicine, disaster medicine and animal welfare. Both countries have feder...

The working paper describes a study which aims to examine and evaluate local community responses to environmental degradation, and factors assisting or hampering local involvement in neighbourhood environmental renewal in two Durham coalfield communities in the UK, an area characterised by high levels of unemployment, poverty, poor health and environmental degradation. A postal survey and focus...

There is considerable effort to cover the broad variety of types of risk including natural disaster risk, technical disaster risk, biological disaster risk, transport and energy, research and innovation, critical infrastructure protection, cross-border health threats, implications for the health service systems, environmental impact assessment, green infrastructure, integrated coastal managemen...

Introduction Disasters due to floods, drought, fires, tsunamis, landslides and biological hazards could intensify their magnitude due to historical, social, economic, political and environmental factors. A significant feature of today’s disaster risk reduction process is that it does not take environmental imbalances into account and neither the co-existing hazards nor their likeliness to gener...