It has been estimated that, as a result of natural disasters, during the 1970s and 1980s three million lives were lost worldwide, the number of disasters increased threefold, the economic losses per decade almost doubled and the insurance losses quadrupled. In the light of these figures, the United Nations proclaimed the 1990s as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction and this book focuses on the British contribution to the Decade and is supplemented by papers from America, Asia, Europe and Africa.