In the past decade, the Asia-Pacific region has had to cope with more than its share of natural disasters: The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the 2009 “Black Saturday” bushfires in the Australian state of Victoria, the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the earthquake and tsunami in Japan’s Sendai prefecture a month later are among the most tragic examples. Social and political structures in the region have been just as volatile as the natural environment, thanks in part to the impact of globalization, and in particular to a spreading awareness that the twenty-first century