The authors argue that the academic literature, both qualitative and quantitative, has mislabeled most episodes of large-scale violence in Africa as civil war; these episodes better fit their concept of regional war complexes. The paper seeks to highlight the fundamental flaws in the conception...

The successes of Japan’s disaster risk management (DRM) system as well as the ways in which that system could be improved are reflected in the lessons drawn from the Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) and presented in the initial reports from the Learning from Megadisasters project. The GEJE...

The World Bank's president has been an American by tradition. Yet little work has explored the consequences for this connection in influencing visions of development in the organization across time. This paper uses evidence from archives, congressional hearing records, and memoirs and histories...

The paper estimates the effects on presidential election returns in Mexico of a government climatic contingency transfer that is allocated through rainfall-indexed insurance. The analysis uses the discontinuity in payments that slightly deviate from a pre-established threshold, based on rainfall...

In Europe, it can be estimated that hydro-meteorological information and early warning systems save several hundreds of lives per year, avoid between 460 million and 2.7 billion Euros of disaster asset losses per year, and produce between 3.4 and 34 billion of additional benefits per year...

Which cities have the highest risk of human and economic losses due to natural hazards? And how will urban exposure to major hazards change over the coming decades? This paper develops a global urban disaster risk index that evaluates the mortality and economic risks from disasters in 1,943...

The debate on whether natural disasters cause significant macroeconomic impacts and indeed hinder development is ongoing. Most analyses along these lines have focused on impacts on gross domestic product. This paper looks beyond this standard national accounting aggregate, and examines whether...

There is a low but uncertain probability that climate change could trigger"mega-catastrophes,"severe and at least partly irreversible adverse effects across broad regions. This paper first discusses the state of current knowledge and the defining characteristics of potential climate change...