Pour réduire les risques naturels et environnementaux, il est nécessaire de développer des connaissances qui tiennent compte des enjeux matériels, environnementaux et humains exposés aux aléas, mais aussi des vulnérabilités cachées, les dispositifs de protection, les politiques d'aménagement du territoire, les comportements ou encore les représentations sociales. Voici un état des lieux des recherches françaises sur la vulnérabilité, qu'elles portent sur le territoire métropolitain ou sur d'autres pays.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the term "vulnerable" was applied to "individuals" and to "populations", "groups" and "countries" in discussions, laws and regulations; now it applies to all objects in relation to all kinds of threats. However, rather than a label for governing people and places, the notion of "vulnerability" was expected to become an instrument to tackle the root causes of disasters, poverty and maldevelopment, as well as the inequalities and injustices they bring, whether social, political, economic or environmental. Despite this radical dimension, vulnerability has gradually been incorporated into public policies and international recommendations for global risk and disaster management. This book is intended for researchers, students, managers and decision makers concerned with the management of not only risks and crises but also climate and environmental change. The first part examines the multiple theoretical and conceptual approaches; the second explores vulnerability assessments, using examples from the Global North and Global South; and the third discusses tools, public policies and actions taken to reduce vulnerability.

Resilience and Urban Risk Management presents the latest progress made in designing resilient towns, and identifies leads to be explored for attaining the objective of systematically integrating risks into urban environments The aim of the book is to provide guidance in designing and planning future cities, and to create a new form of risk manageme

In the past thirty years, knowledge on flooding has greatly increased by moving away from purely hydrological and hydraulic science and opening up to other disciplines such as economics or human and geographical sciences.It is as part of this multidisciplinary approach that this book proposes a review of current knowledge on flood risk. It starts with the ever-increasing impact of flooding in order to conceptualize and understand the constituents of risk. Although risk knowledge in modeling methods or naturalist approaches remains essential, it is further developed by the fields of economics, human sciences, geography, environmental psychology and history. This integrated approach to flood risk contextualizes current conclusions on the eventual effects of climate change by showing that human factors are of paramount importance in understanding the process of "risk production. - The book sets a state of art around the "flood issue" from the description of the phenomena to the management of risk (dikes, dams, reducing vulnerability, management of crisis...). - The chapters are written by specialists but are accessible to the "mainstream scientist". - Each chapter exposes knowledge, methodologies, scientific locks and the prospects of each discipline on the theme of floods.

The Anthropocene refers to all societies’ current era of environmental challenges. For the social sciences, the Anthropocene represents a historical “moment” with huge potential: it offers people new ways of considering the human condition, as well as how they interact with the rest of the living world and with the planet on all levels. At the turn of the 21st century, the idea of the Anthropocene burst onto the older, diverse and varied scene of risk studies. This “new geological era”, which is entirely created by humanity, went on to revive our understanding of environmental issues, as well as the analysis of the social and political problems that constitute risk situations. Drawing together contributions from specialists in social sciences concerning risks and the environment, Risks and the Anthropocene explores the advantages that the idea of the Anthropocene can offer in understanding risks and their management, as well as the limitations it presents.

In Vulnerability and Critical Theory, Estelle Ferrarese identifies contemporary developments on the theme of vulnerability within critical theory while also seeking to reconstruct an idea of vulnerability that enables an articulation of the political and demonstrates how it is socially produced. Philosophies that take vulnerability as a moral object contribute to rendering the political, as the site of a specific power and action, foreign to vulnerability and the notion of recognition offered by critical theory does not correct this deficit. Instead, Ferrarese argues that vulnerability, as susceptibility to a harmful event, is above all a breach of normative expectations. She demonstrates that these expectations are not mental phenomena but are situated between subjects and must even be conceived as institutions. On this basis she argues that the link between the political and vulnerability cannot be reduced to the institutional implementation of moral principles. Rather she seeks to rethink the political by taking vulnerability as the starting point and thereby understands the political as simultaneously referring to the advent of a world, the emergence of a relation, and the appearance of a political subject.

This Handbook presents a broad overview of the current research carried out in environmental psychology which puts into perspective quality of life and relationships with living spaces, and shows how this original analytical framework can be used to understand different environmental and societal issues. Adopting an original approach, this Handbook focuses on the links with other specialties in psychology, especially social and health psychology, together with other disciplines such as geography, architecture, sociology, anthropology, urbanism and engineering. Faced with the problems of society which involve the quality of life of individuals and communities, it is fundamental to consider the relationships an individual has with his different living spaces. This issue of the links between quality of life and environment is becoming increasingly significant with, at a local level, problems resulting from different types of annoyances, such as pollution and noise, while, at a global level, there is the central question of climate change with its harmful consequences for humans and the planet. How can the impact on well-being of environmental nuisances and threats (for example, natural risks, pollution, and noise) be reduced? How can the quality of life within daily living spaces (home, cities, work environments) be improved? Why is it important to understand the psychological issues of our relationship with the global environment (climatic warming, ecological behaviours)? This Handbook is intended not only for students of various disciplines (geography, architecture, psychology, town planning, etc.) but also for social decision-makers and players who will find in it both theoretical and methodological perspectives, so that psychological and environmental dimensions can be better taken into account in their working practices.