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Landslide Hazards, Risks, and Disasters
General hazards, risks, and disasters: Hazards are processes that produce
danger to human life and infrastructure. Risks are the potential or possibilities
that something bad will happen because of the hazards. Disasters are that quite
unpleasant result of the hazard occurrence that caused destruction of lives and
infrastructure. Hazards, risks, and disasters have been coming under increasing
strong scientific scrutiny in recent decades as a result of a combination of
numerous unfortunate factors, many of which are quite out of control as a result
of human actions. At the top of the list of exacerbating factors to any hazard, of
course, is the tragic exponential population growth that is clearly not possible to
maintain indefinitely on a finite Earth. As our planet is covered ever more with
humans, any natural or human-caused (unnatural?) hazardous process is
increasingly likely to adversely impact life and construction systems. The
volumes on hazards, risks, and disasters that we present here are thus an attempt
to increase the understanding about how to best deal with these problems, even
while we all recognize the inherent difficulties of even slowing down the rates
of such processes as other compounding situations spiral on out of control, such
as exploding population growth and rampant environmental degradation.
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