What does it mean to protect against disaster in the context of climate change and other cascading environmental crises? Although the question of protection against disasters has long been discussed in the case of humanitarian assistance (Redfield, 2012), current debates on climate change and other intensifying crises call for re-thinking what kind of protection is desirable in times of disasters and how to produce it. Protection can be defined in legal, economic, social, or technical terms, with various implications. How do these definitions interact with one another during disasters? What keeps people, properties, and the environment safe, and how: laws, policies, infrastructures, human interventions, technical systems, insurances? What are the implications of different modalities for states, international organisations, or private actors? And what does 'safe' even mean? Keeping safe involves a variety of expectations, interventions, and expertise, which all have different definitions, standards, concepts, and views regarding protection. Can different understandings of protection clash with one another? How do communities define protection and interact with the infrastructures of protection?

• crisis
• disasters
• environment
• population
• protection

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