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The year 2015 is the 25th annum of the international disaster and risk reduction proposed by the United Nations. Disaster risk reduction (DRR) has achieved significant progress worldwide. The goals of disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, and sustainable development have become the joint responsibility of all countries in their economic, societal, cultural, political, and ecological construction activities. In the past 25 years, UNISDR together with national governments, scientific community, NGOs, entrepreneur groups, media and various relevant regional organizations is gaining effective results in alleviating human being's casualties, property losses, and damages to resources and environment caused by natural hazards on the world and is earning a great reputation at every stratum of society as well. Nevertheless, data released by related UN organizations indicate that natural disaster and disaster risk are still on the rise globally. Some nations and regions are still extremely vulnerable to large-scale disasters, although significant progress has been made in DRR actions. Natural disaster risk reduction is still a long haul ahead. FoundationsThe global hot spots project jointly finished by the World Bank and Columbia University (the USA) is the first ever cartography of major natural disaster risks at the global scale (Dilley et al. 2005). The UNISDR Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR) inspired this Atlas (UN-ISDR 2009, 2011 All faculties and students of BNU on the disaster risk science and the international experts who participated in the IHDP/Future Earth-Integrated Risk Governance and "111 Project", as well as all the personnel involved in these two projects, throughout ten years of preparation, planning, and action, were organized to compile this atlas, aiming to reflect the spatial patterns of the main natural disaster risk all around the world. This atlas provides scientific evidence for taking effective measures of world natural disaster risk reduction by demonstrating the spatial variation from the following three spatial scales for the main natural disaster risk on the world: the grid unit (1°× 1°, 0.75°× 0.75°, 0.5°× 0.5°, 0.25°× 0.25°, 0.1°× 0.1°or 1 km × 1 km), the comparable geographic unit (about 448,334 km 2 per unit), and the national or regional unit (245 nations and regions). International Scientific and Technological CooperationClose cooperation with worldwide scientific institutions lays the scientific foundation of this Atlas. Scientific BasisThe World Atlas of Natural Disaster Risk attempts to reveal the spatial pattern of the risks of natural disaster which are mainly caused by physical hazards in the world with multiple perspectives of natural environment, exposure, disaster loss, and disaster risk with the framework of Regional Disaster System Theory (Shi 1991(Shi , 1996(Shi , 2002(Shi , 2005(Shi , 2009. It emphasizes the spatial-temporal pattern of worldwide natural disasters from the perspective of individual disasters and integrated disasters, in...

International audienceDisaster loss estimates are helpful for managing post-disaster reconstruction and for designing disaster-risk mitigation strategies. However, most of these estimates in China merely consider direct losses, and only a few include indirect economic losses. As the most destructive earthquake since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Wenchuan Earthquake that occurred in 2008 resulted in direct economic damages reached Chinese Yuan (CNY) 845 billion (US $124 billion). The aim of the study was to estimate indirect economic losses caused by the Wenchuan Earthquake in Sichuan Province through the Adaptive Regional Input-Output (ARIO) model, which can reflect disaster-related changes in production capacity, ripple effects within the economic system, and adaptive behaviors of economic actors. The results showed that indirect economic losses in the production and housing sectors were estimated at 40% of the direct economic losses, i.e., approximately CNY 300 billion; moreover, the model predicted an 8-year reconstruction period. Several factors contributed to these losses, including significant damages to key sectors, financial constraints on reconstruction, post-earthquake investment instability, and limits in reconstruction capacity. Active government support policies post-earthquake are a useful strategy to mitigate the adverse economic impact of an earthquake in developing countries

This article analyzes the role of dynamic economic resilience in relation to recovery from disasters in general and illustrates its potential to reduce disaster losses in a case study of the Wenchuan earthquake of 2008. We first offer operational definitions of the concept linked to policies to promote increased levels and speed of investment in repair and reconstruction to implement this resilience. We then develop a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model that incorporates major features of investment and traces the time-path of the economy as it recovers with and without dynamic economic resilience. The results indicate that resilience strategies could have significantly reduced GDP losses from the Wenchuan earthquake by 47.4% during 2008-2011 by accelerating the pace of recovery and could have further reduced losses slightly by shortening the recovery by one year. The results can be generalized to conclude that shortening the recovery period is not nearly as effective as increasing reconstruction investment levels and steepening the time-path of recovery. This is an important distinction that should be made in the typically vague and singular reference to increasing the speed of recovery in many definitions of dynamic resilience.