Special Issue: Looming Disasters

Too Big to Handle - Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Question of Why Societies Ignore Looming Disasters

Systemic risks such as climate change and pandemics, and natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and asteroids, are often too big to handle physically, but they are no longer ‘Acts of God’ and beyond human understanding and the possibility of prevention and disaster relief preparation. Indeed, in many of these areas there is much talk, less action and only paltry gains. This free to access special issue of Global Policy explores the question of when and why societies are unable to handle these looming disasters. It stems from a conference held on 9th and 10th October 2014, at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, also popularly and internationally known as the WIKO), well known for its encouragement of cross-disciplinary interactions.

Introduction

Anne van Aaken and Janis Antonovics - Too Big To Handle? Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Question of Why Societies Ignore Looming Disasters

Special Issue Articles

Philip Kitcher - Masking The Meaningful

Andreas Glöckner - Psychology and Disaster: Why We Do Not See Looming Disasters and How Our Way of Thinking Causes Them

Françoise Lavocat - Catastrophes To Come: What Can Literature Tell Us?

Todd Sandler - Strategic Aspects of Difficult Global Challenges

Scott Barrett - Collective Action to Avoid Catastrophe: When Countries Succeed, When They Fail, and Why

Susan Rose-Ackerman - The Limits of Cost/Benefit Analysis When Disasters Loom

Jonathan B. Wiener - The Tragedy of the Uncommons: On the Politics of Apocalypse

Anne van Aaken - Is International Law Conducive To Preventing Looming Disasters?

Janis Antonovics - The Value of Concept: Lessons from the Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance

Peter Kareiva and Emma Fuller - Beyond Resilience: How to Better Prepare for the Profound Disruption of the Anthropocene