4th International Conference on Disaster Management and Human Health: Reducing Risk, Improving Outcomes

The fourth International Conference on Disaster Management is being reconvened following the success of the previous three meetings, held at Wessex Institute in the New Forest in 2009, the University of Central Florida in Orlando, USA in 2011 and A Coruña, Spain in 2013.

This series of conferences originated with the need for academia and practitioners to exchange knowledge and experience on the way to handle the increasing risk of natural and human-made disasters. Recent major earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods and other natural phenomena have resulted in huge losses in terms of human life and property destruction. A new range of human-made disasters have afflicted humanity in modern times; terrorist activities have been added to more classical disasters such as those due to the failure of industrial installations for instance.

It is important to understand the nature of these global risks to be able to develop strategies to prepare for these events and plan effective responses in terms of disaster management and the associated human health impacts.

The conference provides a forum for the exchange of information between academics and practitioners, and a venue for presentation of the latest developments. The corresponding volume of WIT Transactions on the Built Environment containing the papers presented at the meeting has been published in paper and digital format and widely distributed around the world. The papers are also archived in the WIT elibrary (http://library.witpress.com) where they are available to the international community.