In Cities, disaster risk and adaptation, Christine Wamsler's significant contribution to the area of environmental risk and adaptation coalesces, drawing the strands of planning, architecture and socio-economic conditions together to form an intricate web. It begins with the idea that disaster and its inherent risk to our ways of life is increasing exponentially, outlines the reasons why, and the impacts where it has already occurred. Importantly, it predicts what will occur if we fail to adapt to certain risks. In this book, Wamsler debunks the idea that urban centres, even those in first world countries, are places of refuge, immune to risk and the effects of climate change. She asserts that all cities generate hazards directly through the creation of urban heat islands and indirectly because of their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, though it is the poor who tend to bear the brunt of disaster risk.