On August 4, 2020, a huge blast at the Port of Beirut, Lebanon, devastated the city and severely impacted people’s lives. Accordingly, the urban recovery team at the Beirut Urban Lab in the American University of Beirut immediately mobilized its resources and expertise to respond to the blast. Based on the early observations of the team, some of the typical practices and challenges associated with post-disaster responses were identified. The Lebanese government was largely absent and did not provide a recovery plan for the devastated neighborhoods next to the Beirut port. As such, public institutions played a limited role and failed to position themselves as the custodians of the common good. The efforts of many actors on the ground—for example, nongovernmental organizations that provided emergency relief and short-term humanitarian aid—were also not coordinated and lacked a shared vision and a common framework.
The de facto postwar reconstruction approach that was previously adopted in Lebanon was primarily physical, in which buildings were the focus. Accordingly, the Beirut Urban Lab provided an alternative, based on its approach to urban recovery that is people-centered, holistic, and multilayered; it stressed the need for long-term sociocultural and economic recovery. The Lab worked on different initiatives, from collecting and sharing data to coordinating with multiple partners, establishing an Observatory of Reconstruction, carrying out spatial interventions, and proposing a neighborhood-scale urban recovery strategy. The urban recovery strategy focused on one of the neighborhoods next to the Beirut port, Karantina, to serve as a pilot. This urban recovery strategy adopted the participatory City Development Strategy (CDS) model and combined it with the citizen science method to maximize community engagement. The Lab’s work in Karantina demonstrates the importance of CDSs as strategic planning models that should be part of urban recovery at a neighborhood scale. As opposed to the dominant approaches to postwar reconstruction in Lebanon, they aim to enhance participation and engagement with local community groups. The paper also details the steps of the proposed urban recovery strategy in Karantina and explores ways to sustain it on the long-term in situations of compounded crises like in Lebanon.
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A People-Centered Urban Recovery Strategy for Karantina (Beirut, Lebanon) in the Aftermath of the Beirut Port Blast
Howayda Al-Harithy and Batoul Yassine
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Comparative Public Finance Approaches to Natural Hazards Management
Mohammed Alkhurayyif, Julie Winkler, Simon Andrew, and Skip Krueger
An important challenge of natural hazards is that they inflict the greatest total economic damage in large, developed countries, where wealth is aggregated, but they create the greatest economic impact in smaller and developing countries, where a disaster caused by a natural hazard can easily overwhelm a national government’s ability to respond and its economy to recover. Thus, a common understanding in the literature is that the fiscal effect of a natural hazard is a function of the size of the disaster relative to the size of a nation’s economy at the time of the disaster.
At the international level, the economic impact of disasters, for example, has been estimated to be US$2.9 trillion between 1998 and 2017, and approximately $945 billion of that occurred in the United States. With a 2019 gross domestic product (GDP) of $21 trillion, the total economic effect for those 20 years is close to 5% of the value of economic output for a single year. Developing country losses, on the other hand, can be overwhelming, especially as measured against the size of the economy. For example, Hurricane Maria’s impact on Dominica is estimated to have been approximately US$1.37 billion, which was equivalent to 225% of Dominica’s GDP.
While an appreciation for the connection between the size of a national economy and natural hazards is clearly critical, the literature points to a number of additional factors that are important to understand about how government financial conditions are affected by natural hazards and vice versa. Debates continue about the role of foreign direct investment, government and private debt levels, investments in education, and internationally sponsored protective actions and insurance pools in improving the resilience of smaller and developing countries to disasters. For example, structural approaches to understanding the linkage between disasters and economic development suggest that countries with a limited number of sources of income have economies that are more vulnerable to disasters than more diversified economies, which might suggest that fiscal policies designed to increase economic diversity are important. Neoclassical approaches, on the other hand, argue that economic recovery is slowed by government intervention in the economy, and suggest that the best way for developing economies to recovery quickly is to reduce the amount of regulation in the economy.
Whatever the theoretical approach, what remains most clear is the ongoing challenge of decoupling the emotional need to participate in responses to the human tragedy associated with disasters caused by natural hazards from the strategic imperative to invest in hazard mitigation at much higher rates globally and plan toward disaster risk reduction.
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Cost-Effective Business Resilience Decision Making
Noah Dormady, Alfredo Roa-Henriquez, Chris Snider, and Adam Rose
Practitioners, scholars, and students engaged in the analysis or evaluation of natural hazard impacts, particularly those involved in quantifying economic disruptions, should understand basic analytical principles and best practices. Economic analysis of disasters is particularly challenging, and there are best practices that can be employed to address many of these measurement and quantification challenges, including survey-based empirical data collection and analysis techniques.
Once these challenges are considered, and an evaluation has been performed, another more difficult challenge occurs—how that information can be used to effectively and cost-effectively improve hazard resilience. This involves how businesses, organizations, and communities can then use those analyses and data to improve operations, improve resilience, and restore functionality at the lowest cost.
The choices a business makes in the aftermath of a disaster can play a key role in its ability to continue operating, as well as in its pace of recovery. Those operational decisions are critically important and must be informed by a complex set of factors beyond property damage alone. It is important that decision makers develop a set of evaluation criteria for quantifying business resilience, with an explicit focus on cost-effectiveness. This is important because, due to the wide-ranging nature of disaster impacts, many disrupted businesses pursue resilience actions for which costs exceed avoided losses. In other words, they spend more money to avoid losses than the value of those losses. Recent natural disaster data collection and analysis efforts from Hurricane Harvey and other major disasters reveal that many businesses respond to disasters in cost-effective ways, while others spend inefficiently on resilience actions or tactics.
It is important that society learns from the experiences of businesses affected by prior disasters, so that businesses, organizations, and communities can more effectively and cost-effectively respond to future disasters, prepare for hazards, and accelerate recovery when disasters strike. It is also important that these objective, data-driven decisions, which aim to avoid economic losses and hasten recovery, consider the role of insurance. Insurance policies, practices, and incentives can vary, and they can fundamentally alter the behavior of firms in responding to natural disasters.
As such, cost-effective business resilience decision making is multifaceted. It involves operational decisions in the presence of post-disaster constraints that impact the firm’s ability to produce its goods and services. It involves cost and investment considerations, dynamic decision making, and external opportunities and limitations associated with contractual, legal and regulatory, and insurance-related considerations.
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Disaster and Emergency Planning for Preparedness, Response, and Recovery
David Alexander
Emergency and disaster planning involves a coordinated, co-operative process of preparing to match urgent needs with available resources. The phases are research, writing, dissemination, testing, and updating. Hence, an emergency plan needs to be a living document that is periodically adapted to changing circumstances and that provides a guide to the protocols, procedures, and division of responsibilities in emergency response. Emergency planning is an exploratory process that provides generic procedures for managing unforeseen impacts and should use carefully constructed scenarios to anticipate the needs that will be generated by foreseeable hazards when they strike. Plans need to be developed for specific sectors, such as education, health, industry, and commerce. They also need to exist in a nested hierarchy that extends from the local emergency response (the most fundamental level), through the regional tiers of government, to the national and international levels. Failure to plan can be construed as negligence because it would involve failing to anticipate needs that cannot be responded to adequately by improvisation during an emergency.
Plans are needed, not only for responding to the impacts of disaster, but also to maintain business continuity while managing the crisis, and to guide recovery and reconstruction effectively. Dealing with disaster is a social process that requires public support for planning initiatives and participation by a wide variety of responders, technical experts and citizens. It needs to be sustainable in the light of challenges posed by non-renewable resource utilization, climate change, population growth, and imbalances of wealth. Although, at its most basic level, emergency planning is little more than codified common sense, the increasing complexity of modern disasters has required substantial professionalization of the field. This is especially true in light of the increasing role in emergency response of information and communications technology. Disaster planners and coordinators are resource managers, and in the future, they will need to cope with complex and sophisticated transfers of human and material resources. In a globalizing world that is subject to accelerating physical, social, and economic change, the challenge of managing emergencies well depends on effective planning and foresight, and the ability to connect disparate elements of the emergency response into coherent strategies.
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Disaster and Response in an Experiment Called New Orleans, 1700s–2000s
Richard Campanella
As an urbanized river-dominated delta, New Orleans, Louisiana, ranks among the most experimental of cities, a test of whether the needs of a stable human settlement can coexist with the fluidity of a deltaic environment—and what happens when they do not.
That natural environment bestowed upon New Orleans numerous advantages, among them abundant fresh water, fertile soils, productive wetlands and, above all, expedient passage between maritime and continental realms. But with those advantages came exposure to potential hazards—an overflowing Mississippi River, a tempestuous Gulf of Mexico, sinking soils, eroding coasts, rising seas, biotic invasion, pestilence, political and racial discord, conflagration—made all the worse by the high levels of social vulnerability borne by all too many members of New Orleans’ population. More so than any other major metropolis on the North American continent, this history of disaster and response is about the future of New Orleans as much as it is about the past.
This article examines two dozen disasters of various types and scales, with origins oftentimes traceable to anthropogenic manipulation of the natural environment, and assesses the nature of New Orleans’ responses. It frames these assessments in the “risk triangle” framework offered by David Crichton and other researchers, which views urban risk as a function of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. “Hazard” implies the disastrous event or trauma itself; “exposure” means human proximity to the hazard, usually in the form of settlement patterns, and “vulnerability” indicates individuals’ and communities’ ability to respond resiliently and adaptively—which itself is a function of education, income, age, race, language, social capital, and other factors—after having been exposed to a hazard.
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Disaster Risk Reduction and Furthering Women’s Rights
Supriya Akerkar
Traditional conceptions of disaster mitigation focus mainly on risk reduction practices using technology; however, disaster mitigation needs to be reconceptualized as a discursive and social intervention process in the disaster-development continuum to further women’s rights and equality and their emancipatory interests before, during, and after disasters. Such reconception would be more aligned with current formulations within the Sendai Framework of Action (2015–2030), which to an extent highlights the need to engage with gender inequalities through women’s leadership in disaster and development planning and the fifth UN Sustainable Development Goal on furthering gender equality. As discursive practices, disaster mitigation should question discrimination against and marginalization of women in disaster recoveries and development processes in different contexts. Discourse about women and gender is ingrained in the society and further perpetuated through regressive and patriarchal state policies and practices in the disaster-development continuum. A critical and progressive politics for women’s rights that furthers their equality would counter regressive discourses and their effects. Women experience discrimination through complex and multiple axes of power, such as race, class, ethnicity, and other social markers. Instead of treating women as a passive site for relief and recovery, nongovernmental organizations, both national and international, should work with women as persons with agency, voice, aspirations, and capacity to bring about policy and social change in the terrain of the disaster-development continuum. Critical humanitarianism and mobilizing women’s leadership would be a hallmark of such work. The relation between disaster mitigation and women’s rights is that of a virtuous cycle that calls for a synergy between disaster response and development goals to further women’s equality and rights. A vision for socially just and equal society must inform the relation between disaster mitigation and furthering women’s rights.
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Economic and Business Recovery
Joanne R. Stevenson, Ilan Noy, Garry McDonald, Erica Seville, and John Vargo
The economics of disasters is a relatively new and emerging branch of economics. Advances made in analysis, including modeling the spatial economic impacts of disasters, is increasing our ability to project disaster outcomes and explore how to reduce their negative impacts. This work is supported by a growing body of case studies on the organizational and economic impacts of disasters, such as Chang’s in-depth analysis of the Port of Kobe’s decline following the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake, and the evolving studies of the workforce trends during the ongoing recovery of Christchurch, New Zealand, following a series of earthquakes in 2010 and 2011.
The typical view of post-disaster economies depicts a pattern of destruction, renewal, and improvement. Evidence shows, however, that this pattern does not occur in all cases. The degree of economic disruption and the time it takes for different economies to recover varies significantly depending on characteristics such as literacy rates, institutional competency, per capita income, and government spending.
If the impacts are large relative to the national economy, a disaster can negatively affect the country or sub-national region’s fiscal position. Similarly, disasters may have significant implications for the national trade balance. If, for example, productive capacity is reduced by disaster damage, exports decrease, the trade balance may weaken, and localized inflation may increase.
Studies of individual, household, industry, and business responses to disasters (i.e., microeconomic analyses) cover a broad range of topics relevant to the choices actors make and their interactions with markets. Both household consumption and labor markets face expansion and contraction in areas affected by disasters, with increased consumption and employment often happening in reconstruction related industries.
Additionally, the ability of businesses to absorb, respond, and recover in the face of disasters varies widely. Characteristics such as size, number of locations, and pre-disaster financial health are positively correlated with successful business recovery. Businesses can minimize productivity disruptions and recapture lost productivity by conserving scarce inputs, utilizing inventories, and rescheduling production.
Assessing the progress of economic recovery and predicting future outcomes are important and complex challenges. Researchers use various methodologies to evaluate the effects of natural disasters at different scales of the economy. Surveys, microeconomic models, econometric models, input-output models, and computable general equilibrium models each offer different insights into the effect of disasters on economies.
The study of disaster economics still faces issues with consistency, comprehensiveness, and comparability. Yet, as the science continues to advance there is a growing cross-disciplinary accumulation of knowledge with real implications for policy and the private sector.
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Flood Resilient Construction and Adaptation of Buildings
David Proverbs and Jessica Lamond
Flood resilient construction has become an essential component of the integrated approach to flood risk management, now widely accepted through the concepts of making space for water and living with floods. Resilient construction has been in place for centuries, but only fairly recently has it been recognized as part of this wider strategy to manage flood risk. Buildings and the wider built environment are known to play a key role in flood risk management, and when buildings are constructed on or near to flood plains there is an obvious need to protect these. Engineered flood defense systems date back centuries, with early examples seen in China and Egypt. Levees were first built in the United States some 150 years ago, and were followed by the development of flood control acts and regulations. In 1945, Gilbert Fowler White, the so-called “father of floodplain management,” published his influential thesis which criticized the reliance on engineered flood defenses and began to change these approaches. In Europe, a shortage of farmable land led to the use of land reclamation schemes and the ensuing Land Drainage acts before massive flood events in the mid-20th century led to a shift in thinking towards the engineered defense schemes such as the Thames Barrier and Dutch dyke systems. The early 21st century witnessed the emergence of the “living with water” philosophy, which has resulted in the renewed understanding of flood resilience at a property level.
The scientific study of construction methods and building technologies that are robust to flooding is a fairly recent phenomenon. There are a number of underlying reasons for this, but the change in flood risk philosophy coupled with the experience of flood events and the long process of recovery is helping to drive research and investment in this area. This has led to a more sophisticated understanding of the approaches to avoiding damage at an individual property level, categorized under three strategies, namely avoidance technology, water exclusion technology, and water entry technology. As interest and policy has shifted to water entry approaches, alongside this has been the development of research into flood resilient materials and repair and reinstatement processes, the latter gaining much attention in the recognition that experience will prompt resilient responses and that the point of reinstatement provides a good opportunity to install resilient measures.
State-of-the-art practices now center on avoidance strategies incorporating planning legislation in many regions to prohibit or restrict new development in flood plains. Where development pressures mean that new buildings are permitted, there is now a body of knowledge around the impact of flooding on buildings and flood resilient construction and techniques. However, due to the variety and complexity of architecture and construction styles and varying flood risk exposure, there remain many gaps in our understanding, leading to the use of trial and error and other pragmatic approaches. Some examples of avoidance strategies include the use of earthworks, floating houses, and raised construction.
The concept of property level flood resilience is an emerging concept in the United Kingdom and recognizes that in some cases a hybrid approach might be favored in which the amount of water entering a property is limited, together with the likely damage that is caused. The technology and understanding is moving forward with a greater appreciation of the benefits from combining strategies and property level measures, incorporating water resistant and resilient materials. The process of resilient repair and considerate reinstatement is another emerging feature, recognizing that there will be a need to dry, clean, and repair flood-affected buildings. The importance of effective and timely drying of properties, including the need to use materials that dry rapidly and are easy to decontaminate, has become more apparent and is gaining attention.
Future developments are likely to concentrate on promoting the uptake of flood resilient materials and technologies both in the construction of new and in the retrofit and adaptation of existing properties. Further development of flood resilience technology that enhances the aesthetic appeal of adapted property would support the uptake of measures. Developments that reduce cost or that offer other aesthetic or functional advantages may also reduce the barriers to uptake. A greater understanding of performance standards for resilient materials will help provide confidence in such measures and support uptake, while further research around the breathability of materials and concerns around mold and the need to avoid creating moisture issues inside properties represent some of the key areas.
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Masculinities and Disaster
Scott McKinnon
Gender plays a role in all phases of the disaster cycle, from the lived experience of disaster survivors to the development of disaster risk reduction (DRR) policy and practice. Early research into the entanglement of gender and disaster revealed how women are made more vulnerable to disaster impacts by sexist and misogynist social structures. Researchers have since identified women’s central roles in building disaster resilience and aiding community recovery. Feminist scholarship has been highly influential in disasters research, prompting consideration of how intersecting social characteristics, including gender, sexuality, race, class, and bodily ability each contributes to the social construction of disaster.
Drawing on work in the field of critical men’s studies, a small but growing body of research has engaged with the role of gender in men’s disaster experiences, as well as how hegemonic masculinity shapes emergency management practice, constructs widely understood disaster narratives, and influences the development of DRR policy, including policies related to the crisis of climate change. Rather than a fixed identity, hegemonic masculinity operates as a culturally dominant ideal to which men and boys are expected to strive. It is spatially constituted and relational, often defined by attributes including physical strength, bravery, and confidence.
To date, the most substantial focus of research into masculinity and disasters relates to the lived and bodily experience of men impacted by wildfire. Australian researchers in particular have identified ways in which hegemonic ideals increase the disaster vulnerability of men, who feel pressure to act with bravery and to exhibit emotional and physical strength in conditions of extreme danger. Expectations of stoicism and courage equally impact men’s recovery from disaster, potentially limiting opportunities to access necessary support systems, particularly in relation to mental health and emotional well-being.
Hegemonic masculine ideals similarly impact the experiences of frontline emergency workers. Emergency management workplaces are often constructed as masculine spaces, encouraging high-risk behaviors by male workers, and limiting opportunities for participation by people of other genders. Male dominance in the leadership of emergency management organizations also impacts policy and practice, including in the distribution of resources and in attentiveness to the role of gender in the disaster experiences of many survivors.
Dominant disaster narratives, as seen in movies and the news media, contribute to the idea that disaster landscapes are ideal places for the performance of hegemonic masculine identities. Male voices dominate in media reporting of disasters, often leaving invisible the experiences of other people, with consequences for how disasters are understood by the wider public. Common tropes in Hollywood cinema similarly depict disasters as masculine events, in which brave cisgender men protect vulnerable cisgender women, with people of other genders entirely invisible.
Identifying and addressing the role of masculinities in disaster is increasingly important within the crisis of global heating. As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of disasters, new ways of engaging with the environment and constructing DRR policy has become more urgent. Research in this field offers a critical baseline by which to move beyond binary gender definitions and to address damaging masculine ideals that ultimately harm the environment and people of all genders.
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Post-Disaster Housing Recovery
Anuradha Mukherji
Rapid urbanization and growing populations have put tremendous pressures on limited global housing stocks. As the frequency of disasters has increased with devastating impacts on this limited stock of housing, the discourse on postdisaster housing recovery has evolved in several ways. Prior to the 1970s, the field was largely understudied, and there was a narrow understanding of how households and communities rebuilt their homes after a catastrophic event and on the effectiveness of housing recovery policy and programs designed to assist them. Early debates on postdisaster housing recovery centered on cultural and technological appropriateness of housing recovery programs. The focus on materials, technology, and climate missed larger socioeconomic and political complexities of housing recovery. Since then, the field has come a long way: current theoretical and policy debates focus on the effect of governance structures, funding practices, the consequences of public and private interventions, and socioeconomic and institutional arrangements that effect housing recovery outcomes.
There are a number of critical issues that shape long-term postdisaster housing recovery processes and outcomes, especially in urban contexts. Some of them include the role of the government in postdisaster housing recovery, governance practices that drive recovery processes and outcomes, the challenges of paying for postdisaster housing repair and reconstruction, the disconnect between planning for rebuilding and planning for housing recovery, and the mismatch between existing policy programs and housing needs after a catastrophic event—particularly for affordable housing recovery. Moreover, as housing losses after disasters continue to increase, and as the funding available to rebuild housing stocks shrinks, it has become increasingly important to craft postdisaster housing recovery policy and programs that apply the limited resources in the most efficient and impactful ways. Creating housing recovery programs by employing a needs-based approach instead of one based solely on loss could more effectively focus limited resources on those that might need it the most. Such an approach would be broad based and proportional, as it would address the housing recovery of a wide range of groups based upon their needs, including low-income renters, long-term leaseholders, residents of informal settlements and manufactured homes, as well as those with preexisting resources such as owner-occupant housing.