Anatomizing Societal Recovery at the Microscale: Heterogeneity in Household Lifestyle Activities Rebounding after Disasters

TL;DR

This paper analyzes individual lifestyle changes to assess societal recovery after disasters, revealing heterogeneity in recovery rates even among neighbors and proposing a real-time, human-centric measurement approach.

Contribution

It introduces a granular, individual-level analysis of societal recovery, emphasizing lifestyle fluctuations as a novel indicator and providing a method for near-real-time monitoring.

Findings

Heterogeneity in lifestyle recovery diminishes as overall recovery progresses.

Lower lifestyle recovery rates are associated with higher heterogeneity.

Disaster impact severity, income levels, and minority percentages influence recovery durations.

Abstract

This study presents a granular analysis of societal recovery from disasters at the individual level, focusing on the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Ida. Societal recovery is defined as the restoration of the societal functioning of the affected community to its normal/steady-state level. It evaluates the recovery of impacted residents based on fluctuations in their lifestyle patterns in visits to points of interest. The analysis focuses on: (1) the extent of heterogeneity in lifestyle recovery of residents in the same spatial area; and (2) the extent to which variations in lifestyle recovery and its heterogeneity among users can be explained based on hazard impact extent and social vulnerability. As lifestyle recovery progresses, heterogeneity diminishes, indicating that lower lifestyle recovery rates correlate with higher heterogeneity within a spatial area. This relationship between lifestyle recovery and heterogeneity can lead to the misestimation of recovery timelines, potentially resulting in the inefficient allocation of resources and disproportionate attention to already recovering communities. Key contributions of the study are fourfold: First, it characterizes societal recovery at the finest scale by examining fluctuations in individual lifestyles, revealing heterogeneity even among neighbors. Second, it proposes using individual lifestyle as an indicator of societal functioning to measure, more human centrically, disaster impacts and recovery speeds. Third, it introduces a method for quantifying lifestyle recovery that enables near-real-time monitoring, departing from traditional survey-based methods. Fourth, it provides empirical insights into the relationship between disaster impacts and societal recovery, showing that the severity of disaster impacts and resident income levels and percentage of minority populations influence recovery durations.