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The Palgrave handbook of human-animal Interactions in the global context of climate change, disasters, and other crises

Haorui Wu … [et al.], 2025

We don’t often think about what happens to animals during a disaster, but they are definitely there. In the chaos of a wildfire evacuation, flood, or pandemic, they are present: as companions left behind, as livestock stranded in rising water, as wildlife displaced by habitat collapse. This ambitious handbook invites us to become aware of this reality.

Drawing together researchers from social work, disaster studies, veterinary science, environmental humanities, and beyond, this volume examines the full range of human-animal connections in times of distress and what these connections reveal about how we prepare for, respond to, and recover from crises. The editors bring a genuinely global perspective to the work, crossing cultures and contexts to show that our relationships with animals are never peripheral to disaster, they are an integral part of it.

What sets this handbook apart is its insistence on treating animals as full stakeholders, not simply as property or emotional attachments, but as beings whose fate is intimately linked to our own. For practitioners, researchers, and anyone who has ever wondered why someone refused to evacuate without their dog, this book offers both answers and a framework for thinking about resilience differently.