What you will learn in Natural Hazards and Disaster Resilience

1. 1. Hazard is not disaster

   Risk is hazard times exposure times vulnerability. Hold the shaking fixed, change who is in it and what they stand in, and the toll moves by orders of magnitude. Two real pairs of earthquakes of the same size show it.

2. 2. Probability, return periods and what maps mean

   A hundred-year flood is a 1% chance every year, not an appointment. Run the centuries and watch them cluster; read what a hazard map's 10% in 50 years means.

3. 3. Warning time decides everything

   Seconds for an earthquake, minutes to hours for a tsunami, days for a cyclone, a season for a drought. Match each measure to the warning a hazard gives, and see why warnings fail after they are issued.

4. 4. Geophysical hazards

   Earthquakes kill through buildings. A building sways at its own period and the ground shakes at its own; when they match, the building resonates. Design a building for the ground it stands on, and find where base isolation helps and where it cannot.

5. 5. Hydrometeorological hazards

   Flood a real floodplain and a flat coast, build a levee, put towns behind it and let a bigger flood come. Drought as the slow hazard with no start date, and heat as the quiet one.

6. 6. Cascades, and what actually works

   One hazard sets off the next: an earthquake, a tsunami, a nuclear accident; a drought, a failed harvest, a famine. Break the chain at different links, put heat on the same chart as everything else, and weigh the evidence on what reduces deaths.