Ilan Kelman

University College London | UCL · Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction

Community groups are taking initiatives to adapt to a changing climate. These organizations differ from businesses and governments by being non-profit, often informal, resource limited, and reliant on volunteer labor. How these organizations facilitate collective action is not well known, especially since they do not necessarily solve common pool r...

This study investigates the potential recognition and engagement of the natural environment as an important factor in strategic investment decisions by accommodation suppliers in a small island context. The investigation, based on empirical data from two Thai islands, Koh Tao and Koh Phi Phi, contributes to the debate if the environment, by focusin...

Environmental sustainability and inclusive engagement have had numerous interpretations over the past decades, with small island states being at the forefront of seeking and applying multiple approaches. This short review selects key peer-reviewed papers from 2020 to mid-2022 on the topic of inclusive engagement for environmental sustainability in...

Land Body Ecologies (LBE) is a global, transdisciplinary research group seeking to understand the mental health dimensions of minority, Indigenous and other land-dependent communities’ relationship to ecologies in a changing environment. We argue that our project is a successful case of global transdisciplinary collaboration that can serve as an ex...

Islands are at the center of discourses on climate change. Yet despite extensive work on diverse island systems in a changing climate, we still lack an understanding of climate change-related responses amongst islands and what shifting from what might be called “tinkering” (perhaps heat warnings) to “transformational” adaptation (perhaps relocation...

Operational ethics for disaster research is suggested as an important area for further investigation. The main questions are suggested as: 1. Could carrying out disaster research interfere with disaster and risk management activities? 2. Could publishing disaster research interfere with disaster and risk management activities? 3. Should researchers...

This paper develops a baseline and definition for informal disaster diplomacy in order to fill in an identified gap in the existing research. The process adopted is a review of the concept of informality, the application of informality to diplomacy, and the application of informality to disasters and disaster science. The two applications of inform...

Nigeria currently reports the second highest number of cholera cases in Africa, with numerous socioeconomic and environmental risk factors. Less investigated are the role of extreme events, despite recent work showing their potential importance. To address this gap, we used a machine learning approach to understand the risks and thresholds for chol...

Background Understanding and continually assessing the achievability of global health targets is key to reducing disease burden and mortality. The Global Task Force on Cholera Control (GTFCC) Roadmap aims to reduce cholera deaths by 90% and eliminate the disease in twenty countries by 2030. The Roadmap has three axes focusing on reporting, response...

As climate change increasingly affects the world, much is said about the rising amounts of aid required to support emergency response, long-term development to adapt, and peacebuilding to ensure that conflict does not undermine these efforts. Bringing these ideas together, some advocate for the addition of a separate climate change stream into the...

Cholera outbreaks contribute substantially to illness and death in low- and middle-income countries. Cholera outbreaks are associated with several social and environmental risk factors, and extreme conditions can act as catalysts. A social extreme known to be associated with infectious disease outbreaks is conflict, causing disruption to services,...

Introduction: The relationship between humans and our planet is conditioned by an economic system that undermines rather than supports health. There has been an emerging focus on the relationship between economic structures and planetary health, but alternative economic approaches to support health for people and the planet require further developm...

Purpose This short paper compiles some potential disasters that might not have happened in 2021 even though a major hazard occurred. No definitive statements are made of what did or did not transpire in each instance. Instead, the material offers a pedagogical and communications approach, especially to encourage deeper investigation and critique in...

The 2022 report of the Lancet Countdown is published as the world confronts profound and concurrent systemic shocks. Countries and health systems continue to contend with the health, social, and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, while Russia's invasion of Ukraine and a persistent fossil fuel overdependence has pushed the world into global...

This article proposes an urban governance framework for including environmental migrants in sustainable cities. It outlines the links among environmental migration, vulnerability, and sustainability, showing how vulnerability and sustainability are not about the environment or the human condition as snapshots in space and time, but rather are long-...

Any future outer space exploration and exploitation should more fully consider disaster and health risks as part of aiming for sustainability. The advent of the so‐called “New Space” race, age, or era characterised by democratisation, commercialization, militarisation, and overlapping outer space activities such as tourism presents challenges for d...

The role that culture plays in the way different groups experience, respond to, and recover from disasters has been widely discussed. Yet, while there is a considerable (and growing) literature of case study evidence for the need to account for culture in disasters, comparatively few studies take a long-term perspective on cultural interactions wit...

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognized the interconnectedness of sustainable development, with peace and health emerging as highly influential. Challenges to peace and health have been linked from a systems approach by existing research; however, the potential for positive peace and positive health to be connected in a self-sustain...

Background In the past decades, climate change has been impacting human lives and health via extreme weather and climate events and alterations in labour capacity, food security, and the prevalence and geographical distribution of infectious diseases across the globe. Climate change and health indicators (CCHIs) are workable tools designed to captu...

The evidence base connecting planetary and human health is growing, but thus far the research community has primarily focused on the physical health implications. This Voices asks: how does environmental degradation affect mental health, and what are the emerging needs and research priorities?

Background Vibrio cholerae is a water-borne pathogen with a global burden estimate at 1.4 to 4.0 million annual cases. Over 94% of these cases are reported in Africa and more research is needed to understand cholera dynamics in the region. Cholera data are lacking, mainly due to reporting issues, creating barriers for widespread research on cholera...

Cholera is reported as endemic in more than 50 countries, many of which are in sub-Saharan Africa. Nigeria currently reports the second highest number of cases, with several risk factors potentially contributing to this including poverty, water, sanitation and climate. Enteric pathogens have a significant global burden, especially on children and t...

Svalbard’s geographical positioning, environmental characteristics and multinational population make it conducive for considering informality and multinational cooperation in disaster risk reduction and response. Most research examining disaster risks and disasters for Svalbard has focused on Norwegian efforts in and for the main settlement of Long...

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is often blamed for disasters in the Pacific island region. From a disaster risk reduction (DRR) perspective, which includes climate change adaptation (CCA), the challenges with the El Niño part of the ENSO cycle are more related to inadequate vulnerability reduction within development than to ENSO-induced ha...

Antarcticness joins disciplines, communication approaches and ideas to explore meanings and depictions of Antarctica. Personal and professional words in poetry and prose, plus images, present and represent Antarctica, as presumed and as imagined, alongside what is experienced around the continent and by those watching from afar. These understanding...

Since the declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic in March 2020, significant research and attention has focused on countries' abilities and interests in enacting response measures to the spread of the coronavirus including lockdowns, travel restrictions, and vaccination programmes to contain infections, hospitalisations, and deaths. As the pandemic h...

Communities are powerful and necessary agents for defining and pursuing their health, but outside organizations often adopt community health promotion approaches that are patronizing and top-down. Conversely, bottom-up approaches that build on and mobilize community health assets are often critiqued for tasking the most vulnerable and marginalized...

Background Temperature and precipitation are known to affect Vibrio cholerae outbreaks. Despite this, the impact of drought on outbreaks has been largely understudied. Africa is both drought and cholera prone and more research is needed in Africa to understand cholera dynamics in relation to drought. Methods Here, we analyse a range of environment...

Empirical evidence suggests that the effects of anthropogenic climate change, and heat in particular, could have a significant impact on mental health. This article investigates the correlation between heatwaves and/or relative humidity and suicide (fatal intentional self-harm) on a global scale. The covariance between heat/humidity and suicide was...

In Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC), one of the causes of maternal and child mortality is a lack of medical knowledge and consequently the inability to seek timely healthcare. Mobile health (mHealth) technology is gradually becoming a universal intervention platform across the globe due to ubiquity of mobile phones and network coverage. MANTR...

Background Cholera outbreaks contribute significantly to diarrhoeal disease mortality, especially in low-income countries. Cholera outbreaks have several social and environmental risk factors and extreme conditions can act as catalysts for outbreaks. A social extreme with known links to infectious disease outbreaks is conflict, causing disruption t...

Scattered around the tropics and sub-tropics are several dozen states and sub-national jurisdictions considered to be Small Island Developing States (SIDS). This book sets out to explore vulnerable and resilient communities in SIDS, how these are and are not impacted by climate change, and how to evaluate mitigation and adaptation activities. It al...

Communities play a central role in strengthening their health, but conventional community health promotion often adopts paternalistic and top-down approaches. Conversely, agentic approaches are critiqued for tasking marginalized communities to create change without opportunities. Taking into consideration these shortcomings, we ask how communities...

Africa has historically seen several periods of prolonged and extreme droughts across the continent, causing food insecurity, exacerbating social inequity and frequent mortality. A known consequence of droughts and their associated risk factors are infectious disease outbreaks, which are worsened by malnutrition, poor access to water, sanitation an...

Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in 2020, included local and international travel restrictions alongside limits on face-to-face gatherings. These measures impinged on participatory research examining local impacts of environmental change. In response, many researchers adopted techniques that could be implemented without travel. This...

Climate change is not just about modelling and understanding hazards or weather. Societal resilience has to consider wider systemic dynamics and to explore how risks interact for going beyond the existing approaches to adaptation. It is a matter of understanding the root causes of problems, promoting strategic efforts that could be efficient and fe...

Background Temperature and precipitation are known to affect Vibrio cholerae outbreaks. Despite this, the impact of drought on outbreaks has been largely understudied. Africa is both drought and cholera prone and more research is needed in Africa to understand cholera dynamics in relation to drought. Methods Here, we analyse a range of environment...

This paper analyses science diplomacy efforts to reduce disaster risks and proposes establishing national knowledge exchange centers (KECs) to help individual states adhere to their Sendai Framework goals. KECs are considered to be interconnected globally and work together to promote resilience efforts by facilitating sharing of information and str...

A disaster is typically defined as a situation requiring external assistance, under the (contestable) assumption that the situation must affect people and society to be a disaster. Animals and their habitats are part of society and humans connect with them, so animals and their habitats are part of all disaster-related activities. This straightforw...

This research note focuses on the impact of tourism development from disaster capitalism as expressed by post-disaster land grabs and forced population displacement. Case studies highlighted are India, Thailand and Sri Lanka following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami; Honduras after Hurricane Mitch in 1998; and Barbuda following Hurricane Irma in 2017...

The field of community health promotion encompasses a wide range of approaches, including bottom-up approaches that recognise and build on the agency and strengths of communities to define and pursue their health goals. Momentum towards agent-based approaches to community health promotion has grown in recent years, and several related but distinct...

The health impacts of climate change are distributed inequitably, with marginalized communities typically facing the direst consequences. However, the concerns of the marginalized remain comparatively invisible in research, policy and practice. Participatory action research (PAR) has the potential to centre these concerns, but due to unequal power...

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world in 2020, many (although certainly not all) of the places with limited numbers of reported cases were island countries or territories. This suggests the importance o discussing island resilience and Prince Edward Island enforced its ow restrictions for people travelling internally within Canada. It the became...

Part of Venice’s character and appeal is sometimes constructed and construed as being not just about water, but also about the role which flood management plays, especially avoiding floods. A ‘disaster risk personality’ is created regarding water-land interaction, based mainly on avoiding inundation. This paper explores the construction of this app...

Koh Phi Phi Don is among the most visited island tourism destinations in Thailand. Due to the island's topography and development patterns, most accommodation suppliers on the island are likely to be exposed to a range of climate change impacts, particularly sea-level rise, which can pose a severe risk to the local tourism operations. This study ai...

Infectious disease outbreaks are increasingly recognised as events that exacerbate impacts or prolong recovery following disasters. Yet, our understanding of the frequency, geography, characteristics and risk factors of post-disaster disease outbreaks globally is lacking. This limits the extent to which disease outbreak risks can be prepared for, m...

Small island developing states (SIDS) are often at the forefront of climate change impacts, including those related to health, but information on mental health and wellbeing is typically underreported. To help address this research lacuna, this paper reviews research about mental health and wellbeing under climate change in SIDS. Due to major diffe...

This presentation will share the results of a survey that aimed at understanding the impact of COVID-19 on the Antarctic research community. Primarily designed to identify the most adversely affected Antarctic researchers and gauge what kind of assistance they might need, the survey, which forms part of an interdisciplinary international research p...

In the United States and the United Kingdom COVID-19 has disportionately affected Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people respectively. Multiple studies identify environmental factors such as overcrowded housing and poor workplace conditions as contributing factors for the disproportionate C...

This book explores how vulnerable and resilient communities from SIDS are affected by climate change; proposes and, where possible, evaluates adaptation activities; identifies factors capable of enhancing or inhibiting SIDS people’s long-term ability to deal with climate change; and critiques the discourses, vocabularies, and constructions around S...

Disaster risk reduction and healthcare support each other, including the mitigation of further harm after illness or injury. These connections are particularly relevant in locations which have permanent or temporary limited accessibility. In these circumstances, people are required to be self-sufficient in providing emergency and long-term healthca...

Scholars and practitioners are increasingly questioning formal disaster governance (FDG) approaches as being too rigid, slow, and command-and-control driven. Too often, local realities and non-formal influences are sidelined or ignored to the extent that disaster governance can be harmed through the efforts to impose formal and/or political structu...

The Lancet Countdown is an international collaboration established to provide an independent, global monitoring system dedicated to tracking the emerging health profile of the changing climate. The 2020 report presents 43 indicators across five sections: climate change impacts, exposures, and vulnerabilities; adaptation, planning, and resilience...

This review analyses global or near-global estimates of population exposure to sea-level rise (SLR) and related hazards, followed by critically examining subsequent estimates of population migration due to this exposure. Our review identified 33 publications that provide global or near-global estimates of population exposure to SLR and associated h...

Earthquakes around the world are unnecessarily lethal and destructive, adversely affecting the health and well-being of affected populations. Most immediate deaths and injuries are caused by building collapse, making search and rescue (SAR) an early priority. In this review, we assess the SAR response to earthquake disasters. First, we review the e...

It is frequently noted that small islands, including Small Island Developing States (SIDS), receive hugely disproportionate levels of aid or official development assistance (ODA) relative to other states and territories. However, the precise relationship between 'islandness' and aid remains underexamined. This paper uses the concept of 'conspicuous...

This research note focuses on the impact of tourism development from disaster capitalism as expressed by post-disaster land grabs and forced population displacement. Case studies highlighted are India, Thailand and Sri Lanka following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami; Honduras after Hurricane Mitch in 1998; and will demonstrate how disaster capitalism...

The Arctic is frequently framed as a region of disaster and conflict, as well as of opportunity and cooperation. Disaster diplomacy is one approach for examining how dealing with disasters might or might not affect conflict and cooperation, yet little work on Arctic disaster diplomacy has been completed, especially regarding specific bilateral rela...

Tropical cyclones have had a considerable impact on Mauritius. Large cyclones are relatively rare, and in popular imagination are thought to hit Mauritius every 15 years. Yet it has been over 25 years since the last cyclone widely considered as ‘significant’. Critically, there is little known about the role of memory in responses to cyclones and de...

Introduction: Disasters have many forms, including those related to natural hazards and armed conflict. Human-induced global change, such as climate change, may alter hazard parameters of these disasters. These alterations can have serious consequences for vulnerable populations, which often experience post-disaster infectious disease outbreaks, l...

Disaster research, conflict research, and peace research have rich and deep histories, yet they do not always fully intersect or learn from each other, even when they investigate if and how disasters lead to conflict or peace. Scholarship has tended to focus on investigating causal linkages between disaster (including those associated with climate...

Contents: Disaster vulnerability by demographics? ILAN KELMAN Endangered species condoms: a social marketing tool for starting conversations about population SARAH BAILLIE, KELLEY DENNINGS & STEPHANIE FELDSTEIN Anticipating urbanization-led land cover change and its impact on local climate using time series model: a study on Dhaka city RIPAN DEB...

Particular support needs of perinatal women in a disaster have been difficult to grasp through preexisting quantitative epidemiological studies. This study aimed to extract concerns that must be considered for perinatal women's mental healthcare in postdisaster settings based on lessons from the Great East Japan Earthquake. Narrative messages regar...

Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) is an Arctic highly autonomous subnational island jurisdiction (SNIJ) of Denmark, its former coloniser. The coronavirus (COVID‐19) pandemic of 2020 has influenced both Kalaallit Nunaat’s relations with the outside world and relations between people and places within the territory. The Kalaallit Nunaat government’s respo...

This research seeks to address the extent to which indices of large-scale modes of climate variability (El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD)) can be linked to physical differences in the local mean and extreme rainfall conditions experienced in the Maldives in order to suggest implications for disaster risk reduction (D...

This paper explores islanders’ hopes and fears for migration and non-migration, highlighting the role of the ocean. Migration, non-migration, hope, and fear are human conditions. To examine these conditions for islanders and oceans, this paper uses a qualitative evidence synthesis for collating and interpreting themes on the topic. Some types of ho...

This article provides a brief overview of the relationship between disaster vulnerability and demographic variables. Population numbers and densities are examined along with using a gender focus as illustrative of individual characteristics. For the most part, people’s and society’s choices create vulnerabilities based on demographics rather than s...

We argue that discussion prioritizing the physical hazard in the case of climate change overshadows and distracts from exposing and confronting the real causes of harm. These root causes remain the many socioeconomic and political processes that push people into vulnerable situations.