Introduction: Resilience, Adaptation, and Migration – Exploring the Range of Human Response to Climatic Change

In many parts of the world, natural hazards have become commoner, more prevalent, more severe, and graver. This is especially true of developing regions, where the triple factors of disaster risk, vulnerability of the society to hazards in general, and poverty have caused millions of people to become internally displaced persons (IDPs). The problem has got exacerbated with the recent multiple earthquake events in Himalayan region, extreme cyclones in the tropics, and the continuing riverbank erosion of Brahmaputra in India and Bangladesh. Coupled to this is the growing awareness that climate change is going to cause unprecedented displacement of people from fragile ecosystems and low-lying areas of the world in the coming decades of this century. Considering all these factors in a holistic manner, it becomes clear that responding and adapting to ecological change is going to be a major challenge of the current century and beyond. The present chapter discusses these issues in details and provides a brief introduction to all the chapters of the book.