Title: The role of mortality awareness in risk management

Authors: M. Derya Honca

Addresses: Center for International Development, Harvard University, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

Abstract: Efforts to imagine a sustainable world replete with global risk and crisis management capabilities are often hampered by conflation of previously little discussed individual, local, regional and universal understandings of human mortality. Pointing to these variable expectations and experiences of death and dying, the article demonstrates the insufficiency of economic and biomedical perspectives on mortality for building workable policies of risk or crisis management that fully address human senses of hazard, contingency and loss on a global scale. From the initial observation that most perceived hazards represent the observers| mortal vulnerability to the unforeseen, the discussion proceeds to advocate a broader ||contingency approach|| to risk management, in which principled responses to the prospect, as well as the reality of deaths of all causes are recognised as integral to policies of sustainable existence.

Keywords: risk; risk management; mortality; morbidity; awareness; hazard; contingency; globalisation; sustainability.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRAM.2002.002557

International Journal of Risk Assessment and Management, 2002 Vol.3 No.2/3/4, pp.255-268

Published online: 23 Jul 2003 *

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