Risk, hazards and crisis: Covid‐19 and beyond

At the time when this issue of Risk, Hazards and Crisis in Public Policy gets published (March 2022), we can look back at over 2 years of COVID‐19 pandemic. The crisis had both many phases and faces, in ever so many countries around the globe. In RHCPP, we have seen discussions on its creeping nature (Boin et al., 2020), its disproportionate impact on vulnerable minorities (Gadson, 2020), the widely different governance responses to similar threats (Pollock & Steen, 2021; Simonsen, 2022; Thomas & Terry, 2022; Zahariadis et al., 2021) the viability of all‐hazards, and total defense approaches (Penta et al., 2021; Pollock & Steen, 2021), the obstacles of learning from pandemic response inquiries (Eriksson et al., 2022), the influence of risk perception and trust on support for government interventions and restrictions (Ahluwalia et al., 2021; Sledge & Thomas, 2021; Yeom et al., 2021) and its particular but not so unique nature in historical perspective (De Graaf et al., 2021). In line with our recent review on methods and approaches in crisis and disaster research, they represent a mix of single and comparative case studies based on secondary data, conceptual discussions and survey research on primary data. Also, they clearly indicate a shift of attention from preparedness to response (Wolbers et al., 2021). If anything good, the Covid‐19 pandemic brings us ample opportunities to study crisis governance comparatively. Many axioms in our multidisciplinary literature on how and why and what aspects of crisis management matter can be tried and tested empirically under a wide variety of conditions. There is rich harvest there. In Risk, Hazards and Crisis in Public Policy, we would therefore like to push the envelope and prioritize comparative studies over single case or country studies and invite contributors to search for external validity of their findings for an international audience struggling with similar crisis management challenges. The current issue brings variety beyond Covid, mostly. One article digs into the Covid response, in the United Arab Emirates, coining the term NASECH disaster: a Natural disaster with Social, Economic and Health implications. It studies the impact of lockdown interventions onmental wellbeing of the population and finds that young, urban, female and vulnerable people ran higher risks on elevated levels of depression and anxiety (Thomas & Terry, 2022). The other articles presented here focus on flood risks, cascading hazards, and power failure. First, Lea and Pralle (2021) argue that in response to flood risks, citizens and residents can wield their influence on flood insurance rates maps to their advantage. It turns out that areas indicated as flood risk zones are more often amended in places where the houses are more valuable and newer and the residents have greater socioeconomic means, raising questions of equity. Next, Chen and Greenberg (2022) discuss how cascading effects of hazardous events for their (urban) environments have historically not been in focus in local disaster mitigation plans, but gain more attention recently. The authors plea for a more aggressive continuation of this trend to increase and innovate environmental health and protection programs. Sapat et al. (2022) examine the adoption and