ABSTRACT
A warming climate and expanding urban infrastructure make today’s world an increasingly hazardous place to live in. It is an opportune moment, therefore, to review the terms and concepts we have employed over the last 50 years to assess risk and measure people’s exposure to such events in a wider geopolitical context. This chapter examines the principal theoretical concepts of ‘vulnerability’, ‘resilience’, and ‘adaptation’, that, from a historical perspective, have dominated disaster studies since the end of the Second World War. It is particularly valuable to assess the extent to which such discourses were ideological products of their time, which sought to explain societies and their environments from the stance of competing conceptual frameworks.
