Libro

Descripción

Every October and November, the east coast of India holds its breath. Satellite images of spiralling cloud over the Bay of Bengal are followed by bulletins, district alerts, sirens, buses, shelters and, in the best cases, a quiet morning in which families return to homes that are still standing. The cyclone that struck the Andhra Pradesh and Odisha coasts in the last days of October 2026, and the further system that forecasters were tracking as this book was completed, are only the latest chapters in a story that began in earnest with the Odisha super cyclone of 1999. This book asks a simple question with a complicated answer: how does a populous, climate-exposed, lower-middle-income country reduce cyclone mortality by orders of magnitude, and what can the rest of the world learn from that experience? The answer, I argue, lies less in any single technology than in an architecture: a statutory framework, a credible forecasting service, a professional response force, and above all a community that is trusted, trained and organised. The book therefore places the community at the centre of strategy. The contribution is threefold. First, it offers a comparative, evidence-based account of what drives cyclone risk and what does not, separating the established effects of ocean warming, aerosols and coastal degradation from popular but unsupported claims. Second, it documents and compares the institutional models of the Union Government and of States such as Odisha and Andhra Pradesh with those of Bangladesh, Cuba, the Philippines, Japan, the United States and others. Third, it proposes the 6A-COBID model (Anticipate, Alert, Assemble, Act, Adapt, Account), together with planning tools and a maturity scale, and extends it to the pandemic and other compound disasters under the label COBID. The book is written for policymakers, administrators, researchers, students of public policy and management, and practitioners in government, civil society and industry. It uses the register of academic scholarship while aiming to remain usable in a District Collector's office or a Panchayat meeting. Figures, models and tables are provided so that ideas can be taught, tested and adapted.