Ethical Issues in Natural Hazards Management

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9312161 Beatley Management of natural hazards raises many ethical questions. They arise at all stages from prior mitigation to reconstruction, and with respect to all kinds of hazards, whether earthquakes or floods. Rarely do those making management policies and decisions see them explicitly as involving ethical choices; typically, they view them in technical, political and economic terms. This project seeks to expand the understanding of the nature of ethical issues which arise in the area of natural hazards management, and of the variety of concepts, standards and other ethical tools that could be useful to public officials in resolving these issues. The research tasks are conceptual and empirical, involving further review of the relevant literatures and development of a conceptual framework, fieldwork on a set of hazard case studies which raise significant ethical questions, and the preparation of casebook and ethical guidelines. The literature review will cull the hazards and disaster literature and the applied ethics literature in order to identify central ethical questions of use in developing a framework of ethical concepts and cases of particular relevance for the fieldwork portion of the study. Case studies will collect and compile background materials and conduct telephone and on-site interviews. The casebook will contain summaries of the case studies, each focusing on ethical issues and ending with a set of questions highlighting the ethical problems, and a set of guidelines attempting to facilitate ethical judgment for hazards management. The book will be widely distributed. ***