**Natural Disaster and International Development**

**Natural Disaster and International Development**

#### Luke Strongman Luke Strongman Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/67063

#### **Abstract**

Recovery from natural disaster has for many years been seen in objective terms as simply the time taken to replace damaged infrastructure. Increasingly, however, social scien‐ tists are describing the large part that human capital plays in the recovery from natural disaster in the form of 'resilience'. The purpose of the chapter is to delineate, from a social scientific perspective, the main factors involved in disaster rehabilitation from a necessarily superficial but nevertheless accurate and useful viewpoint. The main areas to be considered are infrastructural impacts, psychological impacts and communication fac‐ tors. The chapter concludes by defining various perspectives that contribute to the qual‐ ity of resilience that underscores the investment in human capital in post‐disaster zones.

**Keywords:** natural disaster, infrastructure, psychology, social networks, psychological effects, communication, resilience
