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This paper aims to argue that to address the consequences of climate change and variability a greater focus on pre‐emergency planning that engages a wider stakeholder group must be adopted.

The paper discusses UK emergency management and approaches to climate change and climate variability risk.

The internal focus of UK emergency management inhibits the contribution that it can make to societal resilience and public preparedness. Effective risk reduction requires that all actors, including the public, are engaged in the social learning process. From a UK emergency management perspective this requires a culture shift to an outward proactive focus.

This paper offers insights into emergency preparedness in the UK.

Coping with and adjusting to disruptive challenges has always been a characteristic of human development. Formalisation of this has led to the emergence of a number approaches addressing disruptive challenges. Often formalised practice has a narrow focus. Increasingly complex challenges require a refocus of formalised approaches. Drawing from these approaches, the purpose of this paper is to posit that a greater focus on preparedness through pre‐disaster planning is needed for a more holistic approach to disaster management.

The paper reviews the evolution of disaster management thinking and practice and proposes that changes are needed to the dominant disaster management model. These changes are drawn from a number of alternative perspectives. Based on the uncertainties surrounding complex or “wicked” problems, for example, climate change and variability, this paper develops a more holistic approach.

Responding to “wicked problems” requires a greater focus on preparedness. In terms of disaster risk reduction a greater emphasis on pre‐disaster planning is needed driven by social learning processes.

Faced with an increasingly uncertain and complex future, current approaches to conceptualising disaster management are inadequate. This paper develops an approach that is likely to be more effective.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model for developing climate adaptation strategies to reduce climate risk for cultural heritage. Cultural heritage has an important role in human well-being. This paper posits that cultural heritage requires an approach that recognises the uniqueness of cultural heritage. The paper draws from the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) Making My City Resilient campaign and the Heart of the City Partnership in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and proposes a Cultural Heritage Adaptation Forum. The role of the forum is to develop adaptation strategies in a sustainable development context. This is an original attempt to link cultural heritage to climate risk.

The paper draws from two initiatives and uses good practice established from the disaster management and climate communities and proposes a Cultural Heritage Adaptation Forum that can be used to formulate adaptation interventions for cultural heritage. The approach builds on active participation in a global overview of cultural heritage and climate risk led by UNISDR together with personal experience of implementing such strategies in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

The paper finds that a model can be developed that incorporates good practice from the climate and disaster management communities.

The paper presents a model that can be used by those stakeholders that have an interest in protecting cultural heritage form climate driven hazards.

Cultural heritage has a value for all and protecting it from climate driven hazards can impact human well-being

The paper brings together concepts from different academic and practitioner communities. The concept outlined in the paper will be of interest to all those interested in protecting cultural heritage for climate driven hazards.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that there is still much scope for improvement in planning and training, for both actors and disaster victims, in the front line of disaster management in Malaysia. Although the established ethos of Malaysia's public service sector has tended to be one of control from above, there is promise and virtue in seeking to promote a professional culture. Ideas and recommendations in finding new solutions to old problems can move upwards as well as downwards due to the technical design in rules and regulations which is now to be accompanied by organisational design.

Research was undertaken to determine attitudes of actors in disaster management mechanism in Malaysia.

The actors in public service sectors in Malaysia had a negative attitude towards disaster planning implementation because they are usually not familiar with the Standard Operational Procedure in handling land disaster management in Malaysia called the MNSC Directive 20. Social learning is about initiative of organisations and policy makers in learning through actor's interactions with others and through the knowledge and expertise of others.

The paper shows that the MNSC Directive 20 document is not available for public scrutiny and restricted for reasons of national security, which limits the policy's effectiveness. Even then, documents were circulated for office use only. Learning from status of current policy implementation and suggestion will promote awareness raising and capacity building from the inside of organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to review the changes made to civil protection in the UK, both legislative and capacity building, that aim to make the UK more resilient.

Reviews the background to changes in UK civil protection and compares these with the work being done by the broader disaster management community on the meaning and development of resilience to a range of threats.

Finds that the UK approach has been deflected by the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 and is clearly focused on organisational resilience. This top‐down approach does not augur well in terms of promoting a more resilient society. The paper also questions if it is time to take a broader view of what constitutes an emergency.

The recent changes in UK civil protection are in many ways welcome. But the promotion of more resilient communities requires a bottom‐up as opposed to a top‐down approach. Government funding is aimed mainly at institutional resilience. This raises the question of how to promote a broader agenda of more resilient societies able to respond to a broad range of threats.

The chapter aims at representing the results of a case study with concern to the economic and environmental crisis triggered by Ilva in Taranto.

The case study design follows an ethnographic approach. The analysis is based on the collection of some qualitative interviews and documentation related to the environmental conflict engendered by the Ilva of Taranto, which has been the largest steel mill in Europe since the 1990s.

The analysis of the empirical data shows some interesting insights about (a) the growing contradictions in time of crisis in the relationship between the ‘the four pillars’ of sustainability (economy, social justice and society, environment, culture); (b) the importance of the social pillar in playing a key role in the management of local conflicts and in stimulating change within social and economic organizations; (c) the difficulty to promote sustainable policies through a multilevel governance approach able to synthesize the complexity of the scenarios emerging at the local, regional, national and European levels, in order to create an alternative way of development.

The ethnographic approach is useful to analyse in depth the core of the environmental conflict and the divergent developmental scenarios expressed by the different categories of actors.

Within both Western and Eastern traditions of virtue ethics, there is a Doctrine of the Mean, suggesting that errors may lie either in excess or in deficiency. The need to avoid both excess and deficiency in the allocation of finite resources is a concern in many sorts of business decisions, some with ethical implications. One finite resource is the resource of attention, and ethical problems can arise from failures to attend to important things. Both Aristotle and classical Confucianism accept the importance of paying attention to circumstances rather than following fixed rules or blindly maximising value. For organisations to give appropriate attention to different things requires suitable intra-organisational reporting and communication. Then there is still need for awareness that resources are finite, and for activity that is sustainable, highlighting the related idea of harmony, especially salient in the Confucian tradition.