ABSTRACT This introduction sets out some of the key themes addressed by the papers in the special issue on ‘Confronting the Naturalness of Disaster in the Pacific’. Disasters are now widely understood not as ‘natural’ phenomena but as events or processes that unfold at the intersection between natural or artificial hazards and human populations. We review some of the effects of the naturalisation of disaster before turning to the ways in which Pacific disasters are defined through government, media and public discourses. These discourses feature their own distinctive accounts of possible forms of agency in the context of disaster, and draw on markedly different frames of reference in attributing cause and blame. Similarly, contrasting temporalities and spatialities are invoked in addressing disasters as bounded phenomena. We conclude with reflections on the nature of responses to disaster in the Pacific in the context of increasingly unstable cultural, economic and environmental grounds for action induced by global climate change

中文翻译：

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面对太平洋自然灾害

摘要 本介绍列出了“面对太平洋自然灾害”特刊中的论文所讨论的一些关键主题。灾害现在被广泛理解为不是“自然”现象，而是在自然或人为灾害与人口之间发生的事件或过程。在转向通过政府、媒体和公共话语定义太平洋灾害的方式之前，我们回顾了灾难归化的一些影响。这些话语以自己独特的方式描述了灾难背景下可能的代理形式，并在归因于原因和责备时利用了明显不同的参考框架。类似地，在将灾害作为有界现象处理时，会调用对比的时间和空间。