Introduction and Overview of the All-Hazard Approach

The COVID-19 pandemic posed substantial concerns and questions on our current disaster risk management framework and strategies that mainly focus on natural hazards. We must reconsider our current crisis/emergency/disaster management strategy to tackle more complicated situations, such as—compound, cascading disasters—and different types of hazards including chemical, biological, and technological. This has led to the development of an all-hazard approach (AHA); however, it is not clear how to implement such an approach or what the difference is between a multi-hazard and an all-hazard approach. This chapter aims to clarify these two approaches and discuss how the AHA can be implemented. Finally, the book structure is included to explain the key points of each chapter.