Long-term Recovery from Recent Disasters in Japan and the United States

This paper clarifies recovery status and life recovery processes based on victims’ feelings following the March 2011 Great East Japan earthquake. Specifically, a questionnaires were given to about 3,000 quake victims to determine their status and any issues they may have had. The overall recovery picture was obtained using measurement called a “recovery calendar.” The structure of the recovery process was compared to disasters such as the Great Hanshin-Awaji (Kobe) earthquake in 1995. The recovery calendar indicated that 80% of respondents felt that local activities have not been restored to their original state and saw themselves as victims three years after the earthquake, indicating that recovery had progressed slower than it had following the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake. In a comparison of the three prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima, Iwate and Miyagi displayed the same recovery trends. Fukushima recovered later than the other two prefectures. For the item “The local economy was no longer influenced by the earthquake,” it was indicated that the economic situation in Iwate was worse than that in Miyagi or Fukushima. General characteristics of the life recovery process were also investigated through a comparison to other earthquake and water disasters. Life recovery proceeded in five phases: 1) Victims prepared to have an uncomfortable life for a while and understood the extent of the damage. 2) Victims felt safe and office and school activities had resumed. 3) Everyday life settled down, housing problems were finally settled, and personal financial situations were no longer influenced by the earthquake. 4) Respondents no longer defined themselves as victims. 5) The local economy was no longer influenced by the earthquake. In cluster analysis for classifying life recovery processes, 12 items were classified into five clusters corresponding to the above five phases, statistically showing that victims’ lives recovered through these phases. As a result of decision tree analysis for predicting causes of “they no longer defined themselves as victims” in an attempt to organize life recovery processes, the same structure of life recovery processes was found as for the three-layer recovery model of the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake. In short, physical and economic recovery such as of houses and regions was achieved based on the reconstruction of infrastructures, followed by the achievement of life recovery. It is predicted and proposed that life recovery in areas affected by the Great East Japan earthquake took the course of infrastructure reconstruction at first, then achieved physical recovery in local areas by supporting house recovery on a parallel with economic support. To achieve them, a long-term plan from a perspective of at least 10 years is required, as was the case of the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake.

The earthquake that struck the Japanese port city of Kobe on January 17, 1995, was the most severe quake ever to strike a modern urban area. It has become the most studied, analyzed, and discussed natural disaster in history. What I propose to add to this dialogue is an economist's overview of what he saw in Kobe 19 months after the event and what he learned during the ensuing 6 months.

Background: In the early morning of January 17, 1995, the Kobe city (1.5 million inhabitants) and surrounding urban areas were devastated by the Great Hanshin Awaji Earthquake. This Earthquate killed more than 5,500 people immediately and made more than 350,000 people homeless. But the Japanese have learned many lessons through experiencing this tragic event. Methods: I personally experienced the Earthquake on spot at that time. I have also been witnessing the recovery process in the Kobe area over 15 years. As a psychiatrist, I have also been observing the changes of psychiatric problems of the Earthquate victims over the time. Results: Inhabitants in the Kobe area started to experience various physical and psychological problems after the disaster. These problems have been changing over the time. The first victims' symptoms were panic attacks, which were gradually replaced with depressive symptoms, alcohol abuse and alcohol-related problems as well as so-called ”solitary death.” But posttraumatic stress disorder was not common among those victims. In one year, those psychopathologic problems had quickly become social problems in Japan. The recovery process was accompanied with the efforts of the Kobe people to transfer their experiences to the victims of similar disasters in Asia and in the world. Conclusion: The Hanshin Awaji Earthquake was tragic. But, the lessons learned in Kobe is being shared by psychiatrists and mental health experts in Asia and in other developing countries. This transfer of experiences has constituted a continuous process in Japanese recovery from the Great Hanshin Awaji Earthquake. One could say, ”sharing is the main source of our recovery from the disaster.”

The Hanshin-Awaji Great Earthquake (17 January 1995) caused a lot of damage to Kobe's housing stock (mainly wooden rental houses, for example, wooden apartments and row houses), especially in the inner city area. Against the background of providing a safety net for many people who lost their homes, Kobe City and Hyogo Prefecture provided about 26, 000 recovery public housing units. In this paper, the author aims to clarify the locational process and the background of the Hanshin-Awaji Great Earthquake Recovery Public Housing (HAERPH) project provided in Kobe City. In particular, the author focuses on how Kobe City and Hyogo Prefecture were able to supply HAERPH in the built-up area according to the needs of the victims.There are three methods of supplying HAERPH. The first is direct supply by local government, in this case Kobe City and Hyogo Prefecture. The second is based on local government supplying public housing which is leased from the Urban Development Corporation (UDC). The last method is that local government supplies public housing which is leased from the private sector and which is made possible by the Public Housing Act revision of 1996. This paper shows that each method succeeded in supplying HAERPH in the built-up areas in different ways.Direct supply by the local government, particularly in Kobe City, was applied by using existing techniques of site acquisition of new construction areas, of rebuilding public housing, and of coordinating housing supply together with the urban redevelopment project.The UDC launched its own project team for site acquisition for housing, and coordinated it with Kobe City and the Kobe City housing supply corporations. They were able to provide some housing in the inner city. Kobe City and Hyogo Prefecture leased some of these houses from the UDC.All private houses leased by Kobe City are located in the built-up area. This is because Kobe City had set particular leasing standards towards private owners. These particular standards state that those private houses should be located near a train station in the built-up areas, especially in the west central area.

This study examines early disaster recovery and prevention planning projects in fishing port cities in the northern part of Japan after the 1933 Sanriku tsunami, the later modernization of those cities, and their current recovery from the 2011 Great Northern Japan earthquake. This work reframes the goal of disaster recovery and of disaster prevention planning in our society as social resilience—the ability of a community to cope with and adapt to stresses such as social, political, environmental, or economic change. Drawing on the author’s field research in Kesennuma, this study also describes postwar economic and industrial development in fishing ports that changed social and spatial structures. It shows that postwar administration and planners ignored the prewar disaster recovery and prevention planning based on local social systems, which caused fundamental problems in redevelopment and disaster prevention planning after 2011.

Cities face significant challenges in developing urban infrastructure systems in an inclusive, resilient, and sustainable manner, with rapid urbanization and increasing frequency of shocks (e.g., climate hazards, epidemics). The complex and dynamic interdependencies among urban social, technical, institutional, and natural components could cause disruptions to cascade across systems, and lead to heterogeneous recovery outcomes across communities and regions. Large scale data collected from mobile devices, including mobile phone GPS data, web search data, and social media data, allow us to observe urban dynamics before, during, and after disaster events in an unprecedented spatial-temporal granularity and scale. Despite these opportunities, we lack data-driven methods to understand the underlying mechanisms that govern the recovery and resilience of cities to shocks.Such dynamical models, in contrast to static index based metrics of resilience, will allow us to test the effects of policies on the heterogeneous post-disaster recovery trajectories across space and time. In this dissertation, I studied the recovery dynamics and resilience of urban systems to disasters using a large-scale human-centered data-driven modeling approach, with particular emphasis on the complex interdependencies among social, economic, and infrastructure systems. First, statistical analysis of large-scale human mobility data collected from over 1 million mobile phone devices in five major disaster events across the globe, revealed universal population recovery processes across regions and disasters, including disproportionate disaster effects based on income inequalities and urban-rural divide. Second, human mobility data are used to infer the recovery of various socio-economic systems after disasters. Using Bayesian causal inference models, regional and business sectoral inequalities in disaster recovery are quantified. Finally, the analysis on social, economic, and physical recovery were integrated into a dynamical model of coupled urban systems, which captures the bi-directional interdependencies among socio-economic and physical infrastructure systems during disaster recovery. Using the model and data collected from Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria, a trade-off relationship in urban development is revealed, where developed cities with robust centralized infrastructure systems have higher recovery efficiency of critical services, however, have socio-economic networks with lower self-reliance during crises, which lead to loss of community resilience. Managing and balancing the socio-economic self-reliance alongside physical infrastructure robustness is key to resilience. The proposed models and results presented in this dissertation lay the scientific foundations of urban complexity and resilience, encouraging us to move towards dynamical and complex systems modeling approaches, from conventional static index-based resilience metrics. Big data-driven, dynamical complex systems modeling approaches enable quantitative understanding of the underlying disaster recovery process (e.g., interdependencies, feedbacks, cascading effects) across large spatial and temporal time scales. The approach is capable of proposing community-based policies for urban resilience via cross-regional comparisons and counterfactual scenario testing of various policy levers.

To address recent criticisms of the recovery process of the U.S. Endangered Species Act and to search for ways to improve recovery efforts, we evaluated all recovery plans approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service as of August 1991. As expected with rare species, we found an overall lack of detailed biological information presented in recovery plans. Information on species’ distributions was most common, being mentioned in 88% of the original recovery plans, while information on species’ abundance, population demographics, and dynamics (in descending order) was much less available. Biological information tended to be sparsely distributed among taxonomic groups. We found that threatened and endangered species were at risk of extinction, yet differentiation between threatened and endangered species’ status in the wild and their recovery goals was not evident. Based on criteria developed by Mace and Lande (1991) (and depending on choice of minimum criteria), population‐based recovery goals set in recovery plans, if achieved, would not improve the level of endangerment for 60–73% of vertebrate species. With few exceptions, a taxonomic bias was detected in the recovery process that favored animals over plants, vertebrates over invertebrates, and birds and mammals over fish and herpetofauna. The average time in years between listing and original recovery plan approval, however, was significantly shorter for plants (4.1) than animals (11.3), and for invertebrates (6.3) than vertebrates (9.4). It took an average of at least five years between each step in the recovery plan process (from listing to recovery plan approval and subsequent revision). Only 3.5% of the species in recovery plans were identified as keystones, and little recent emphasis has been placed on recovery plans covering multiple species. Finally, though public education was recommended frequently (92%) in recovery plans, public attitude assessment was virtually ignored (<2%). We suggest possible explanations for some of these findings, discuss the implications in light of the Endangered Species Act reauthorization, and present recommendations for future recovery plans and conservation strategies.

The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Disaster which occurred in the dawn of January 17, 1995 resulted in the severest damages in terms of moralities and physical losses ever since Kanto earthquake in 1923. It affected more than three million people who have lived in the impacted area. This disaster management in addition to physical issues. Unfortunately disaster researches with social scientific orientation have been underrepresented in the disaster studies. This paper reviews some of the major possible research issues for the disaster researchers who are interested in human and societal reactions to disasters. In this paper, three independent operations with different goals has been identified: emergency responses, rehabilitation, and rebuilding. Emergency responses are the opration with the goal to save the endangered life as much as possible. Based on the search and rescue data in Kobe city, it was noted that emergency responses should be prioritizes for the first 72 hours after the disaster onset. Rehabilitation is the processes to restore everyday life for the disaster survivors. Based on the shelter operations data in Kobe city, it was found that lifetime functional failure has a great impact on shelter operations which have been the prime focus in this phase. In fact, this phase has lasted for the first hundred days after the earthquake, it is ended when the Self Defense Force has withdrawn completely from the impacted area. Rebuilding has two aspects; recovery of the victims, and reconstruction of the impacted area. The restoration plans made by both Hyogo prefecture and Kobe city were mainly the plans for rebuilding the impacted area. The rebuilding of the future of each victim was left for themselves without clear guidelines. In all processes of emergency responses, rehabilitation, and rebuilding, there are some many research questions to be studied not only by natural scientists but also by social scientists in collaboration with them.

Twenty years ago, a catastrophic earthquake hit the second largest economy in Japan, causing damages to a considerable number of houses, buildings, lifelines, and infrastructure. The total damage was estimated to be around 2% of the Japanese GDP at that time. Reconstruction plans were set and had progressed since then. The progress of recovery and reconstruction has been studied from various angles. With regard to economic recovery, a series of studies pointed out that after a short period of reconstruction-boom, the Hyogo Prefecture and the City of Kobe have been showing a declining trend. Under the 10-year reconstruction plans, the damaged region went through a recovery and rebuilding process; nevertheless, these plans could not bring back the damaged economy to the pre-event growth trend. The reconstruction plans were intended not to restore the pre-event conditions but to maintain the long-range development plans initiated before the event. Further, this decision might have contributed to the downturns in economic recovery in the middle-run; however, it is expected that it would lead the economy toward sustained growth in the long-run.

Stopping declines in biodiversity is critically important, but it is only a first step toward achieving more ambitious conservation goals. The absence of an objective and practical definition of species recovery that is applicable across taxonomic groups leads to inconsistent targets in recovery plans and frustrates reporting and maximization of conservation impact. We devised a framework for comprehensively assessing species recovery and conservation success. We propose a definition of a fully recovered species that emphasizes viability, ecological functionality, and representation; and use counterfactual approaches to quantify degree of recovery. This allowed us to calculate a set of 4 conservation metrics that demonstrate impacts of conservation efforts to date (conservation legacy); identify dependence of a species on conservation actions (conservation dependence); quantify expected gains resulting from conservation action in the medium term (conservation gain); and specify requirements to achieve maximum plausible recovery over the long term (recovery potential). These metrics can incentivize the establishment and achievement of ambitious conservation targets. We illustrate their use by applying the framework to a vertebrate, an invertebrate, and a woody and an herbaceous plant. Our approach is a preliminary framework for an International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Green List of Species, which was mandated by a resolution of IUCN members in 2012. Although there are several challenges in applying our proposed framework to a wide range of species, we believe its further development, implementation, and integration with the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species will help catalyze a positive and ambitious vision for conservation that will drive sustained conservation action.

The border areas of the Tibetan Plateau and the neighboring mountainous areas have a high incidence of earthquakes with a magnitude greater than Ms 5.0, as well as having a dense distribution of geological disasters such as collapses, landslides, and debris flows. Revealing the post-disaster economic development and recovery process is very important for enhancing disaster prevention and response capacity in order to formulate control policies and recovery methods for post-disaster economic reconstruction based on economic resilience. Using long-term socioeconomic data and the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model, this paper calculated the economic resilience index of the areas most severely affected by the Wenchuan Earthquake of 2008 and adopted the improved variable returns to scale (VRS) date envelopment analysis (DEA) model and the Malmquist productivity index to analyze the efficiency and effect of annual post-disaster recovery. The results show that: (1) the economic resilience index of the areas most severely affected by the Wenchuan Earthquake was 0.877. The earthquake resulted in a short-term economic recession in the affected areas, but the economy returned to pre-quake levels within two years. In addition, the industrial economy was less resilient than agriculture and the service industry. (2) The comprehensive economic recovery efficiency of the disaster-stricken area in the year following the disaster was 0.603. The comprehensive efficiency, the pure technical efficiency, and the scale efficiency of the plain and hilly areas were significantly greater than those of the plateau and mountain areas. (3) The annual fluctuation in total factor productivity (TFP) following the disaster was considerable, and the economic recovery efficiency decreased significantly, resulting in a short-term economic recession. The TFP index returned to steady state following decreases of 33.7% and 15.2%, respectively, in the two years following the disaster. (4) The significant decrease in the post-disaster recovery efficiency was caused mainly by technological changes, and the renewal of the production system was the leading factor in determining the economic resilience following the disaster. With the decline in the scale of economic recovery following the earthquake, long-term economic recovery in the disaster-stricken areas depended mainly on pure technical efficiency, and the improvement in the latter was the driving force for maintaining the long-term growth of the post-disaster economy. Therefore, according to the local characteristics of natural environment and economic system, the disaster-stricken areas need to actively change and readjust their economic structures. At the same time, attention should be paid to updating the production system to enhance the level of technological progress and give full play to the scale effects of large-scale capital, new facilities, human resources, and other investment factors following the disaster so as to enhance the impact of economic resilience and recovery efficiency in response to the disaster.

Individual disaster recovery: A framework in the long-term recovery process after the Great East Japan Earthquake

The Wenchuan earthquake, which happened in May 2008 in China, was one of the most destructive natural disasters of the past decade. The Chinese government implemented several aid programs, including the Paired Assistance to Disaster-Affected Areas (PADAA) program, to assist with disaster recovery. Although the Wenchuan earthquake has gained much scholarly attention, previous studies often adopted different recovery measures and provided fragmented empirical evidence on how an aid program may have influenced the recovery process in both the short and long term. To bridge the gap, this paper collects eight social, economic, and institutional indicators to measure four types of recovery processes, namely, economic recovery, social recovery, institutional recovery, and built environment recovery. The data, collected between 2002 and 2015, covers 269 earthquake-stricken counties. Based on this data, we constructed a set of disaster recovery indexes. We then evaluated the impacts of the PADAA program on the disaster recovery process across the 269 counties in both the short and long term. We concluded that the impact of the PADAA program on the post-disaster economic recovery was significant in both the short and long term, whereas its impact on the recovery of the institutional and built environment occurred in the short term. Its impact on post-disaster social recovery was inconclusive.

The goal of disaster recovery is for survivors to regain stability in their lives, livelihoods, and housing. A people-centered housing recovery requires that residents are empowered to make decisions about their housing reconstruction, and that policies create housing options that support the ability of all residents to reconstruct their homes and lives. The 1995 Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake caused the largest amount of damage in Japan since World War II, and the subsequent recovery is a starting point for understanding contemporary post-disaster housing reconstruction policies in Japan. Beyond an overview of housing reconstruction programs, we can understand the impact these policies had on Kobe residents' housing and community recovery. In many cases, housing policies implemented after the Kobe earthquake fragmented communities and caused further damage and disruption in the lives of the survivors. A single-track approach failed to support the entire population of the disaster-stricken area. In subsequent years, Japanese disaster reconstruction laws and policies have seen modifications and improvements. Some of these changes can be seen in cases of recovery after more recent disasters, notably after the 2004 Chuetsu Earthquake in Niigata Prefecture. In the context of these past examples, we can consider what is needed for a people-centered recovery in the Tohoku area after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of disaster recovery and contingency planning for digital library systems.Design/methodology/approachUsing best practices, the paper develops a context for developing business continuity and disaster recovery plans.FindingsBusiness continuity planning and disaster recovery are important components of digital library system planning. Two out of five organizations that incur a major disaster event are unable to permanently recover, but by developing a continuity and recovery plan in advance, libraries can greatly increase the likelihood of long‐term recovery of institutional resources.Originality/valueThis paper will be of interest to systems developers and managers, as well as senior library management, who need to plan for unexpected organizational disruption. The paper provides a context and outline for developing a business continuity and disaster recovery plan.