ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of environmental hazards, exploring what hazards are, how they are formed and how they are interconnected. Contemporary socio-environmental challenges, alongside a rethinking of the nature of academia and the role of disaster-focused organisations, have meant revising and expanding on many concepts such as hazard, disaster, risk, vulnerability and resilience. Charting the chronology of key perspectives and approaches adopted over hundreds of years – from observational to engineering, behavioural, developmental, feminist, decolonial and complexity frameworks – provides valuable insight into how we understand, research, respond to and manage environmental hazards. The chapter concludes by noting how in recent decades international organisations (private sector and non-profit as well as governmental and intergovernmental) have increased their scope. A key example is the United Nations (UN) and its associated programmes such as the Sustainable Development Goals, the Sendai Framework and the Paris Agreement, which are increasingly shaping top-down approaches and policies to understand, manage, and reduce hazards and disasters.
