1. Introduction
We are witnessing an increasing number of large-scale disasters around the World, where the number of disasters per year is projected to increase by 40% between 2015 and 2030 (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction 2022). These increasing disaster impacts, which are compounded by climate change, are leading to more complex recovery challenges and consequently the need for advancing planning, funding, and research to address and overcome them. Over the past decade, the breadth of research and policy analyses on recovery has grown, marking progress in long-term and multidimensional studies that aim for understanding some of the complexities and inequalities of recovery.
Just over a decade ago, IJMED published a special issue on disaster recovery that served as an account of the progress in long-term recovery research in 2012 (Reiss 2012). The 2012 special issue highlighted a need for comparative and longitudinal data collection for long-term disaster recovery research to observe how recovery differs in various environments and how recovery unfolds over multiple years. While systematic comparative studies are still rare, the field has progressed with systematic long-term as well as longitudinal recovery studies across the world, for example after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the BP Oil Spill in 2010, the 2011 Triple Disaster (Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Crises) in Japan, and many other events. Recovery studies in these locations around the world have contributed to our understanding of pace and progress, long-term patterns and disparities, success factors in recovery, best practices for the ethical conduct of research, data collection, and analytical methods, and measurement of recovery, among other topics. Innovations in the methods and data used for recovery research and a larger history of longitudinal studies offer additional insights that future recovery studies can build upon.
To evaluate current progress in disaster recovery research, the theme of the 2021 Researchers Meeting after the Natural Hazards Workshop focused on Advances in Longitudinal Recovery Research. Held virtually in July 2021, this Researcher’s Meeting brought together 479 participants representing multiple disciplines and countries. Plenary sessions featured prominent examples of longitudinal cohort studies across cultural contexts and throughout the world, including studies from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (e.g. Merdjanoff et al. 2022; Nguyen, Kim, and Abramson 2023; Raker et al. 2020, 2023; VanLandingham and VanLandingham 2017) (see Goff and Merdjanoff in this Special Issue), the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquakes (e.g. Fujimoto et al. 2022) (see Tatsuki in this in this Special Issue), the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami (e.g. Frankenberg et al. 2017, 2023; Gray et al. 2014), the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake (Wu 2021), the 2015 Nepal Earthquake (Loos et al. 2023; The Asia Foundation 2021), and the 2020 Hurricanes and Earthquake in Puerto Rico (Garcia et al. 2022). The many more papers presented at this Researchers Meeting featured engaging presentations covering additional topics including approaches to conduct longitudinal recovery studies, methods to model recovery, and evaluations of unequal recovery outcomes, among others.
The 2021 Researchers Meeting garnered excitement and discussion surrounding the collective progress in long-term and longitudinal recovery research. Throughout the meeting, several key findings and questions for further research emerged during presentations and discussions. We confirmed that recovery is a long, slow, evolving, unequal, and complex process. Therefore, studying recovery requires a longitudinal lens through a mix of quantitative and qualitative data and methods to understand and explain the complexities, inequalities, and compounding effects of disasters alongside driving and contextual factors that shape recovery outcomes. Several researchers acknowledged the need to consider and preserve historical research on disaster recovery in concert with more recent longitudinal studies. When considering various dimensions of recovery, several presentations noted that it does not only consist of physical reconstruction of the built environment, and that ignoring the human dimensions of recovery—such as social, economic, and cultural—in research and practice can lead to negative consequences including exacerbating inequalities. Finally, the research community called for studying recovery with communities as partners to prevent the extractive and marginalizing effects of this field of research.
We developed this special issue to highlight and further expand upon the key findings from the 2021 Researchers Meeting by inviting paper submissions from the disaster recovery research community. Through this special issue, we received several articles from presenters in the Researchers Meeting, falling into four main areas: (1) new understandings of recovery based on the use of longitudinal datasets (2) methodological advances in recovery measurement, data collection, and modeling, and (3) applications of recovery research to practice and policy. In the following sections of this introduction article, we summarize the contributions to this Special Issue. We discuss how these articles contribute to the four main areas we identified for the Special Issue while connecting them to other literature in the field.
