Ying Wang¹, Hao Chen², Juan Li²

¹ State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Beijing Normal University, No.19, XinJieKouWai St., HaiDian District, Beijing 100875, People’s Republic of China;

² Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Disaster of MOE, Beijing Normal University, No.19, XinJieKouWai St., HaiDian District, Beijing 100875, People’s Republic of China.

 

Abstract: Households vary in their ability to deal with disasters, and this may lead to different recovery results. Aiming to examine this differentiation, this paper studied the 2009 Yao’an earthquake in China. Surveys of 200 destroyed rural households were conducted in field investigations and follow-ups at 1 month, 1 year, and 1.5 years after the earthquake. The results showed a clear difference in recovery, the households observably being classified into five groups. These are the O group, which has different recovery time and economic cost from the other four; and the special group, comprising E_LT_O and E_OT_L (vulnerable during recovery); E_HT_O (strong during recovery); and E_LT_S (neither vulnerable nor strong). Logistic regression analysis revealed that differentiation in recovery patterns arose from the combined effect of demographic factors and external assistance provided to households. Lower income is the root cause of vulnerability in some households during the recovery process. However, other factors cause recovery differences between the two vulnerable groups, causing the economic recovery cost of the E_LT_O group to be lower, and the recovery time of the E_OT_L group to be longer. There was consensus that external assistance had an impact on all households. The more provided and the earlier it arrived, the lower the cost for recovery and the shorter the recovery time. This study shows that research on group differentiation of recovery is useful in understanding post-earthquake recovery processes and calls for taking group differentiation considerations into account in post-disaster recovery resource allocation practices.

 

Keywords: Recovery; Group differentiation; Earthquake; Factors.