Book Review: Natural Hazards in the Asia-Pacific Region: Recent Advances and Emerging Concepts

This book is a collection of papers that discuss natural hazards in one of the most vulnerable regions of the earth: the Asia–Pacific Region. “Many might say that it could not be a worse time to live in the Asia–Pacific Region”, the authors Goff and Terry started the first short introduction article with this sentence. If we consider that a significant number of people are living or decide to live in the coastal area, and the natural hazards that occurred in the last decade (e.g., the 2004 Indian Ocean, and the most recent 2011 Tohku tsunamis), the readers can easily image how effective the sentence from Goff and Terry is. In the second paper, still an introduction to the entire book, the same authors highlighted the special vulnerability of Asia–Pacific islands to natural hazards. The islands are more vulnerable to natural hazards than continental locations for different reasons: because they are located in remote and inaccessible areas, because of issues related to communications, or because of their economic marginalization. All of these reasons are relevant and may be of critical importance when planning disaster preparedness, risk management and adaptation. After these two introductory papers, the discussion focuses on more site-specific case studies. These are mainly related to tsunamis, but also to tropical cyclones, volcanic eruptions, and submarine natural hazards. In order to give a quick overview, the case studies have been summarized in the following sections, where a brief explanation of the contents is provided.