Dear Colleagues,

Within minutes of the March 2011 earthquake in Japan, news media provided unprecedented coverage of an unfolding natural catastrophe. Events such as this place natural disasters firmly in the public eye but only for a short time. It falls to the research community to learn the lessons offered by these events and turn them into opportunities for developing more effective risk management and mitigation strategies and identifying the factors that contribute to the vulnerability and resilience of communities and response and recovery agencies. Disasters such as the Japanese tsunami also highlight the ever-present need for systematic, rigorous research into the risk posed by natural hazards and how these risks can be managed. Of course it is vital to ensure that the findings from such research endeavours are disseminated to those who can use the findings.

This means that journals that disseminate these lessons are important resilience and adaptive resources for all those involved in risk and disaster management. Journals such as Challenges provide outlets for scholarly and professional debate on the causes and consequences of disasters and how their effects may be mitigated and managed. This special edition of Challenges will give voice to research into the causes of human and societal losses and ensure that the lessons learned from such disasters can be readily disseminated to the humanitarian, academic and political arenas where that knowledge can provide the evidence base necessary to inform effective risk management intervention.

Prof. Dr. Douglas Paton
Guest Editor

• disaster risk reduction
• land use planning
• structural mitigation
• warning systems
• evacuation
• resilience
• vulnerability
• risk management
• community
• disaster preparedness
• recovery planning