There is growing evidence that the cumulative impacts of industrial societies on several vital Earth systems are reaching or have passed critical thresholds, significantly compromising current and future socioecological flourishing. Contemporary societies have barely begun to confront the potentially catastrophic impacts of escalating extinctions, toxic pollutants, and growing climate disruption in the medium to long-term. Moreover, environmental/climatic changes are already contributing to a range of local/regional disasters, including food and water shortages, the spread of disease vectors, and the increasing frequency and intensity of weather-borne extremes (e.g. storms, flooding, heat waves and wildfires). At the same time, demographic shifts, in conjunction with changes to land use and the built environment, are putting more people at risk from other kinds of geophysical hazard (e.g. earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides). While such disasters are generally cast as singular events, they arise from longer-standing patterns of interrelationship among culture, society, technology and environment. They also have long-term consequences. How people prepare for, respond to, and recover from such calamities depends on their assumptions about their environment, the stories they tell about it, and their historically-conditioned modes of perceiving and interacting with it.

Disaster preparedness, including risk reduction, harm mitigation, building resilience, facilitating recovery, and enabling transformation, therefore has a sociocultural dimension, no less than a techno-scientific dimension, entailing fundamental questions of value, meaning and identity, as well as issues of social cohesion, cooperation and wellbeing. This research theme will catalyse collaborations among humanities scholars, social and cultural anthropologists, and earth system scientists, including the development of transdisciplinary projects aimed at disaster risk reduction and enhancing resilience with vulnerable communities in specific locations.