Disaster risk management, and post-disaster recovery (PDR) in particular, become increasingly important to assure resilient development. Yet, PDR is the most poorly understood phase of the disaster management cycle and can take years or even decades. The physical aspects of the recovery are relatively easy to monitor and evaluate using, e.g. geospatial remote sensing data compared to functional assessments that include social and economic processes. Therefore, there is a need to explore the impacts of different dimensions of the recovery, including individual behaviour and their interactions with socio-economic institutions. In this study, we develop an agent-based model to simulate and explore the PDR process in urban areas of Tacloban, the Philippines devastated by Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. Formal and informal (slum) sector households are differentiated in the model to explore their resilience and different recovery patterns. Machine learning-derived land use maps are extracted from remote sensing images for pre- and post-disaster and are used to provide information on physical recovery. We use the empirical model to evaluate two realistic policy scenarios: the construction of relocation sites after a disaster and the investments in improving employment options. We find that the speed of the recovery of the slum dwellers is higher than formal sector households due to the quick reconstruction of slums and the availability of low-income jobs in the first months after the disaster. Finally, the results reveal that the households' commuting distance to their workplaces is one of the critical factors in households’ decision to relocate after a disaster. ... Read more

Rapid increase in population and growing concentration of capital in urban areas has escalated both the severity and longer-term impact of natural disasters. As a result, Disaster Risk Management (DRM) and reduction have been gaining increasing importance for urban areas. Remote sensing plays a key role in providing information for urban DRM analysis due to its agile data acquisition, synoptic perspective, growing range of data types, and instrument sophistication, as well as low cost. As a consequence numerous methods have been developed to extract information for various phases of DRM analysis. However, given the diverse information needs, only few of the parameters of interest are extracted directly, while the majority have to be elicited indirectly using proxies. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the proxies developed for two risk elements typically associated with pre-disaster situations (vulnerability and resilience), and two post-disaster elements (damage and recovery), while focusing on urban DRM. The proxies were reviewed in the context of four main environments and their corresponding sub-categories: built-up (buildings, transport, and others), economic (macro, regional and urban economics, and logistics), social (services and infrastructures, and socio-economic status), and natural. All environments and the corresponding proxies are discussed and analyzed in terms of their reliability and sufficiency in comprehensively addressing the selected DRM assessments. We highlight strength and identify gaps and limitations in current proxies, including inconsistencies in terminology for indirect measurements. We present a systematic overview for each group of the reviewed proxies that could simplify cross-fertilization across different DRM domains and may assist the further development of methods. While systemizing examples from the wider remote sensing domain and insights from social and economic sciences, we suggest a direction for developing new proxies, also potentially suitable for capturing functional recovery. ... Read more