**1. Introduction**

A natural disaster is a major adverse event resulting from natural processes of the earth. Natural disasters may have the properties of being environmentally disruptive (war, earth‐ quake, flood), a hazard (major but temporary disruption to environment) and/or socially focused (no major impact on land or infrastructure but on a human populous). The classic definition of a disaster is of an 'occurrence causing widespread disruption or distress'. As Lindell points out, a disaster may be characterised by three temporal periods—pre‐impact, trans‐impact and postimpact; however, some disasters have multiple or secondary impacts [1]. Furthermore, disasters are sometimes identified by a series of impact zones which display irregularities in effect. In general, society tends to have more knowledge about what has gone wrong in natural disasters than what goes right in recovery [2]. Even today, relatively little is known about how quickly an area affected by natural disaster may be rehabilitated and in what circumstances and under what conditions. As the World Bank reported in 2014:

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

*During the 1980–2012 period, estimated total reported losses due to disasters amounted is US\$3.8 trillion…. Hydro-meteorological disasters accounted for 74% (US\$2.6 trillion) of total reported losses, 78% (18,200) of total disasters and 61% (1.4 million) of total lives lost. Looking ahead, climate change will have major implications on global ecosystems, agriculture and water supply, sea level rise and storm surges [3].*

It can be argued that natural and human‐made disasters that effect human populations are becoming more common worldwide due to a myriad of factors related to population growth and urbanisation. But in fact natural disasters are not becoming more prevalent; rather, there is increased reporting of them. In fact, as Lowrey et al. point out, of the 15,833 reported disas‐ ters worldwide from 1900 to 2006, over a third of these occurred between 2000 and 2006 [4]. Nevertheless, the prevalence of natural disasters themselves is unlikely to be much increas‐ ing, though the reporting of them is, but as Strӧmberg states, '… the average magnitude of the reported disasters has fallen' [5]. While more than half the globe becomes urbanised, the prevalence of the effect of natural disasters is greater than previously experienced, although due to increased technical know‐how in building and in healthcare, the effects of natural disasters may be decreasing.

It is possible that prior to modernisation, urbanisation and globalisation, many events that could have been assigned the status of natural disaster remained unreported due to their geo‐ graphical remoteness or the lack of impact on large populated areas. It is therefore not strange that the incidence of natural disaster causing events is increasing, though the impact of them has become more measured. In this context rehabilitation from natural disaster is a topic that increasingly necessitates a multidisciplinary approach to social scientific analysis.

Traditionally it was assumed that disaster recovery would be predicated on the extent of dam‐ age within a natural disaster zone. As Lindell points out, disaster effects may be determined by three pre‐impact conditions: 'hazard exposure, physical vulnerability and social vulner‐ ability—as well as three event‐specific conditions—hazard event characteristics, improvised disaster responses and improvised disaster recovery' [6]. It is no longer necessarily the case that as Dacy and Kunreuther state that '[i]t just seems reasonable to assume that the speed of recovery following a disaster will be determined primarily by the magnitude of the physical damage' [7]. Rather, increasingly social networks and community resilience are shown to play a larger part in recovery from catastrophe than simply that measured by the restoration of infrastructure. The overcoming of catastrophe does not produce replacement communities; it produces reinvented, renewed and differently evolved communities. As Dynes has sug‐ gested, based on experiences of survivors in a number of disasters, social capital may be the basis for resilience as it provides information and resources at a critical moment [8]. However, as Aldrich relates, population density (the population per unit area) determines the rate of recovery, the greater the density the population conversely the more slowly it may recover due to the difficulty in providing permanent and temporary housing in the disaster period [9]. Consequently, rather than area damage, some social scientists have argued that population density—the population per unit area—alters the rate of recovery. Areas with greater popula‐ tion densities may recover more slowly because of the difficulty in providing temporary and permanent housing for displaced people during the post‐disaster period. Nevertheless, there are behavioural typologies which do produce resilient and rehabilitated communities.


**Table 1.** Factors of vulnerability in disaster impacts (after Lindell [1, 6, 42]).

According to Aldrich, four factors are thought to influence the rate of recovery from disaster zones resulting from earthquakes. These are the amount of damage, the population density of the affected area, the efficacy of human capital and the amount of available economic capital [2]. As Ross and Carter explain, '[t]he spontaneous activation of "social capital"—bonds within and between social groups—has been impressive, a solace to those affected, as well as a huge practical and economic benefit. Organised volunteers, such as from the Red Cross, were the foundation of evacuation centres' [10]. However, Aldrich also notes that 'social capital', namely, the 'networks, norms and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit' [11], best predicted a population recovery. 'Human capital' is the ability of people to remain cooperative and resilient in communities and to work in a coordinated way together on sustainable relief. This is a requisite of community rehabilitation from earthquakes. Finally, Lindell suggests that '[p]hysical impacts can be reduced by hazard mitigation practices and emergency preparedness practices, whereas social impacts can be reduced by recovery preparedness practices' [6]. This requires extensive pre‐impact planning (see **Table 1**).
