Recovery work in cascading and compounding disasters: A qualitative study of community recovery workers in Australia

Disaster recovery has traditionally been conceptualised and operationalised on the basis of disasters occurring as single ‘events’ that are managed separately. However, there are cases where communities experience disasters that overlap, repeat, and compound in effects. This study addresses the following research questions: What do recovery workers see as the impacts of multiple disasters on community recovery? How is the process of supporting disaster recovery affected by another disaster, or disasters, occurring? Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with recovery workers based in Australian communities that experienced two or more disasters between 2017 and 2022 (including drought, bushfires, landslides, and repeat floods). Recovery workers encountered interconnected impacts of disasters in the communities where they worked, including effects that accumulated, resurfaced and exacerbated each other. However, these workers experienced constraints in their roles, which were structured and funded in relation to a single specified disaster, hazard type, or ‘stage’ of disaster. This paper argues that events-based emergency management and its embedded disaster cycle of prevention, preparedness, response and recovery (PPRR) is at odds with the lived realities of recovery work after multiple disasters. Through making the case for moving past the framing of organisations and roles around single disasters, this paper underscores the need for new approaches to conceptualising, funding and structuring disaster recovery work for compounding and cascading disasters.