Crises, Disasters and the Crux of Emergency Management

Crises and disasters are a constituent part of our lives and have increased in number and impact since the 1950s (Robert and Lajtha 2002; Handmer and Dovers 2007). The Emergency Event Database (EM-DAT) has shown that the 387 natural hazards and disasters that occurred worldwide from 2002 to 2022 affected 185 million individuals each year (CRED 2023). These unanticipated and disruptive phenomena have become so frequent and intertwined that some scholars even talk about turbulence as a normal state of affairs (Ansell and Trondal 2018; Ansell et al. 2023).