| 22 Aug 2025
Recovery under consecutive disasters: how recovery dynamics shape societal resilience
Abstract. Consecutive disasters, where two or more disasters occur in succession before recovery from the first event has been completed, can have non-linear impacts on societies that can surpass the effects isolated events. Drawing on empirical examples and insights from scientific literature, we explore how consecutive disasters affect societal recovery across four interconnected pillars of society: human settlements, human health, economic systems, and socio-political systems. We identify pathways through which repeated disasters can either erode a community's ability to effectively respond to and recover from disasters or provide opportunities for social learning and positive change. By examining both immediate and long-term effects, we show how societies might be pushed towards critical tipping points, resulting in either a systemic breakdown of societal resilience, or transformative adaptation and improved capacity to manage future risks. Recognising these dynamics underscores the need for a long-term, multi-hazard approach to disaster risk reduction. Recovery planning must move beyond short-term, reactive measures toward integrated, forward-looking strategies, supported by reliable, proactive, and equitable financing mechanisms. Addressing the complexity of recovery under consecutive disasters is essential for both research and policy to enable adaptive, resilient societies in a future of increasingly frequent and intense hazards.
Dear authors,
The paper addresses an interesting topic and is generally well written. I agree with the authors that the recovery process has received comparatively little attention in the literature, especially when it comes to consecutive disasters.
The paper is extremely broad and examines four different societal subsystems: human settlements, human health, the economic system, and the socio-political system. In my view, each of these subsystems is already extremely complex in terms of recovery processes and challenging to address in a single paper, let alone when combining all of them. Moreover, the paper aims to explore the interactions between these systems, considering how they may lead to a deterioration of resilience or to transformative learning. This broad focus inevitably results in a superficial conceptual discussion with rather ad-hoc assembled examples. This issue is also reflected in Figure 1, which essentially indicates that recovery trajectories are diverse, unknown, and involve interactions. Overall, I question whether this approach truly provides many new insights.
In this regard, while the authors accurately describe the examples as empirical, I would consider them anecdotal evidence to support the conceptual points the authors wish to convey. Perhaps presenting the paper as a conceptual piece would be more appropriate, as the title led me to expect something else.
Although the paper largely focuses on the potential negative impacts of consecutive disasters, considerable evidence suggests that disasters can serve as "windows of opportunity" leading to transformative learning (see e.g., Kreibich et al. 2017). This is rather briefly addressed in sections 5.3 and 4.2, but many more examples could be provided for each of the subsystems discussed. For instance, in Section 2, I am sure you can find numerous examples where disasters have led to revised spatial planning policies and/or building codes, significantly reducing the impact of subsequent disasters.
Section 6 also remains vague, offering little insight into what leads to tipping points in terms of deterioration or enhanced learning. The conclusion that these are linked to disaster intensity and frequency seems quite evident based on existing literature and cannot be derived directly from the empirical approach provided in the paper. We gain limited understanding of which discussed pathways are important or common.
Due to the broad focus, most recommendations remain vague, and it is unclear how or why the authors arrived at these specific recommendations. For example, the authors state, “…to support efficient and equitable recovery after disasters, countries need more reliable and proactive financing solutions. These may also include pre-arranged recovery financing mechanisms such as forecast-based financing, where funds are automatically released for humanitarian actions that are agreed upon in advance (IFRC & RCCC, 2020) or parametric insurance, which offers rapid, flexible payouts based on pre-defined parameters such as certain rainfall or wind speed, ensuring rapid payments in post-disaster settings (Ocampo & Moreira, 2024)." (lines 631ff). While I do not disagree with the recommendation itself, I question how this particular suggestion is derived from section 4, and why it was chosen as one of four key recommendations among potentially many others?