Challenges of Post-Disaster Recovery in Rural Areas

Routledge eBooks, 2016

How we understand and measure success in disaster recovery establishes the policy platform for how governments prepare for future events. In the past two decades, observers have recognized that the return to pre-event conditions is often unworkable-not only because the pre-event conditions were hazardous, but also because the disaster has created a new normal, requiring new ways of thinking and planning. Disaster recovery means more than restoring physical infrastructure and reconstructing housing and commercial buildings. Recovery is now linked to the concepts of resilience and community renewal, with social, economic, institutional, infrastructural, ecological, and community dimensions. Recent research has helped to identify the linkages among several factors: the welfare of individuals; the welfare of households; business and civic recovery; and the importance of health, education, housing, employment, and environmental conditions in recovery. The capacity for renewal, reorganization, and development is critical for ultimately going beyond recovery to community resilience. The range of approaches to the recovery process after recent earthquakes in Chile, China, Haiti, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, and other countries offers insights into successful policies and challenges to integrating housing and recovery at the human and civic levels.

Southern Rural Sociology, 2007

This special issue of Southern Rural Sociology brings together a diverse array of theoretical and empirical explorations on the rural community context of disaster in the Southern United States. As the Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2004 and 2005 made abundantly clear, natural and other disasters present a host of unique problems for rural areas. In many cases, rural communities are often left on their own to meet the emergency needs of local residents. While both urban and rural communities found themselves grappling with inexplicable turmoil in the midst and wake of recent hurricane disasters, rural communities were often at the periphery of the focus of media attention and large-scale emergency response. Similarly, recent disasters brought to focus the stark reality that local community residents are often the front lines of disaster response. In this setting, rural communities find themselves shouldering responsibility for meeting the immediate emergency needs of local residents. Under such conditions, threats to rural social solidarity, community, local cohesion, and well-being are significant. The articles in this special issue attempt to capture the dynamic nature of community and regional interaction and highlight the unique experiences and needs of rural communities in the context of disasters.

Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy, 2013

It is critical to assess how the needs and vulnerabilities in rural communities impact the creation of resilience, especially in states that have a large expanse of rural regions. Rural areas present different opportunities and challenges from their urban counterparts for disaster managers. The position rural communities find themselves in after a disaster is different than that of urban communities. Using the Central Florida region as an example, this study examines the characteristics of disaster management in rural communities and ways to strengthen emergency management systems to develop and improve disaster resilience in these communities. Surveys and focus groups were conducted to examine the common traits and problems in existing emergency management systems across the rural regions. Results suggest that collaboration is needed in tackling evolving social, economic, and technological environments, which tend to create new vulnerabilities in rural communities. The adaptive capacity of rural communities is expected to sustain recovery at the individual, organizational, and the community levels. Sustainability is an important element for emergency management in rural communities because the policies and programs that influence the location and character of development can ultimately reduce losses and create resilience to future disasters.

2006

Die Schäden der weltweit ansteigenden Naturkatastrophen sind erschütternd. Marginale Armensiedlungen in Entwicklungsländern sind gegenüber diesen Naturkatastrophen am anfälligsten und somit am stärksten betroffen. Der vorliegende Artikel untersucht im Detail die dem Katastrophenrisiko und -vorkommen in Slums zugrundeliegenden Hauptvariablen und deren kausale Beziehungen, zu deren Analyse sogenannte "causal loop diagrams" herangezogen werden. Die Sicht und das Wissen von Slumsiedlern in El Salvador stehen im Fokus dieser Untersuchung. Ein besseres Verstehen dessen, wie betroffene Familien Katastrophenrisiko und -vorkommen wahrnehmen und erfahren, gibt wichtige Einblicke, welche für die Verbesserung von Entwicklungshilfe -einschließlich sozialen Wohnungsbaus und Stadtplanung -von entscheidender Bedeutung sind.

Nature Sustainability, 2018

B eyond the immediate destruction and loss of life, disasters can influence long-term social and economic development 1-5 , with the well-being of the poor affected most severely 6. The international disaster-risk-reduction community has long argued that reducing societal vulnerability to hazards is a key component of sustainable development 7 , a view repeatedly endorsed by United Nations member states in the Hyogo and Sendai Frameworks 8. In post-disaster contexts, the widely adopted 'build-back-better' approach promotes sustainable development through integrating a wide range of vulnerability reduction measures into reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts 8. However, measures intended to reduce people's vulnerability to natural hazards may entail difficult trade-offs against other factors that influence people's vulnerabilities to a wider set of shocks. Such trade-offs are particularly salient in the decision of where to rebuild after a disaster. Although rebuilding in areas less exposed to hazards reduces vulnerability to those hazards, mass relocation projects often have negative social impacts on people's livelihoods, land rights and community cohesion 9-13. Given this difficult tradeoff, the humanitarian sector has come to favour rebuilding in-place in order to avoid the social disruptions of mass relocation 14,15 , while trying to reduce vulnerability to natural hazards through other means. In addition, political, economic and logistical practicalities tend to make rebuilding in-place the more expedient option. Yet while mass relocation can be problematic, it is not clear that a general policy to rebuild in-place is always consistent with the preferences of people affected by disasters. Studies have shown both that affected people tend to return after disasters 16-19 and that some people prefer relocation 20-23. Differing preferences may be expected, as people have differing experiences, priorities, livelihoods and attachments to place and community 16,17,24. Especially after a disaster or provision of new information about hazards, housing markets show price discounts for properties closer to earthquake faults 25-28 and on floodplains 29,30 , indicating some preference to live in areas less exposed to hazards. This in turn can lead to socioeconomic segregation. Following Hurricane Andrew in the United States, middle-income households tended to move to less exposed areas

2000

increases every year worldwide, reconstruction programs in the Third World continuously fail to recover poor communities from destruction. Research demonstrates that despite that enormous resources are devoted to post-disaster reconstruction, very few housing programs targeted to low-income families have drawn to sustainable development. Furthermore, increasing uncontrolled urbanisation, growing poverty in largely populated developing nations, and insufficient mitigation programs suggest that disasters as harmful as those occurred this year, are far to be coming to an end.

1985

of the case studies and analysis completed to date are of United States communities, we think this new oryaniziny framework provides a good fi rst step for researchers interested in the recovery process in other societal settinys. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Four staff persons who assisted with the project for less than the full four-year period deserve credit.

Earthquake Spectra, 1999

In the last one hundred years, population shifts have drawn people to teeming urban centers that lie in regions prone to devastating natural forces. Consequently, Mary C. Comerio states in her straightforward volume, property damage and lives lost to disaster have skyrocketed. While she cites and uses for comparison international examples, she quickly turns to her main focus, the United States and US disaster assistance policy. Even more specifically, she concentrates on California and Florida, with their earthquakes and hurricanes. Whereas the 1925 Santa Barbara earthquake affected a sleepy beach town, the Northridge earthquake of 1994 struck a megalopolis.

Rural Realities, 2006

Rural recover from such calamities. Although few realize it, nonmetro residents represented the majority (55%) of the population affected by Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi. They also constituted 17% of the people living in Alabama's disaster-stricken area, and about 12% of the affected population in Louisiana. These are not inconsequential numbers; they represent thousands of inhabitants living in small communities dotting the tri-state region. Map 1 shows the path of Katrina through the rural South. This Rural Realities brief draws much needed attention to nonmetro areas affected by Hurricane Katrina and outlines the key features of the rural people and places that have been impacted by this major disaster. Most important, it offers a series of policy recommendations that can assist in rebuilding the region's nonmetro counties and parishes. The hope is that these policy ideas can offer a meaningful set of strategies for lessening the future vulnerability of rural areas within and outside this region of the country.

Disasters, 1991

In this paper we examine the issues associated with the tempora y sheltering and housing of victims after natural disasters in the United States. Specific topics addressed include differential access to shelter and housing aid according to social cluss, ethnicity and related demographic factors; the relationship betzueen post-disaster shelter and housing and long-term recovey; the role of social support networks in the sheltering of victims; and the implications of the research for the provision of shelter and housing aid after disasters.