Christian Science Monitor

The next time a big storm rolls over the Philippines, at least one city hopes to be prepared, reports Christian Science Monitor. The southern urban center of Dapitan — about 200 miles from Tacloban, where Typhoon Haiyan did its worst in 2013 — may soon be home to 200 new dome-shaped, disaster-resilient houses...

'The costs of disasters are mounting,' Darren Hammell, co-founder and chief strategic officer with Princeton Power Systems, a New Jersey-based advanced technology company said 'but it is much better to pay the costs up front in preparedness than after the fact in losses'...

Apart from weather and climate applications, information gathered from the tool will improve flood and landslide forecasts, and help track changes in the distribution of waterborne diseases, stated Ramesh Kakar, program scientist for this project and its predecessor, the US-Japanese Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite...

'What the public wants are prompt and efficient responses,” instead of prevention, says Federico Estévez, political science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. 'We’re fatalistic in the country and like to believe that in the heavens the dice are loaded against us'...

The best response to natural events like hurricane Sandy lies in a community preparing its political, civic, and even cultural attitudes. Each disaster, such as Katrina, teaches new lessons. What can America's mid-Atlantic region learn from Sandy?

National Council of Architects warns that there are 6 million buildings facing grave seismic risks in Italy and criticizes the lack of security standards of buildings in the country, 'anti-seismic standards were introduced only in 1973, which means about half of the current houses lack them'...

The 7.3-magnitude earthquake that struck off the coast of western Indonesia early Wednesday morning revealed that the people are more prepared than they were when the Dec. 26, 2004 monster wave killed roughly 170,000 people in Aceh alone...

'Nobody expected that a tsunami would affect Japan's nuclear plants. And climate change will raise the possibility of such awful, unlikely happenings around the world', says UCLA economics professor, Matthew Kahn in an opinion piece for The Christian Science Monitor...