In the northwoods of Wisconsin, Kennecott Copper Corporation is pressuring Native Americans for the right to construct an environmentally destructive open-pit copper mine on treaty lands of the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians. Opposing the mine's construction is a coalition of Chippewa traditionalists and Wisconsin environmentalists. This native and environmentalist struggle against corporate greed and environmental racism is mirrored in hundreds of similar struggles all over the world, from James Bay, Quebec and Malaysia to the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. Gedicks documents these struggles and explores the underlying motivations and social forces that propel them.

Extreme weather and climate events, interacting with exposed and vulnerable human and natural systems, can lead to disasters. This Special Report explores the social as well as physical dimensions of weather- and climate-related disasters, considering opportunities for managing risks at local to international scales. SREX was approved and accepted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on 18 November 2011 in Kampala, Uganda.