Exploring the Evolutionary Traits of Post-Disaster Reconstruction Under the Background of Sustainable Development

Sustainable development serves as a key gripper and critical juncture for disaster-stricken regions to achieve the goal of “building back better”, and post-disaster reconstruction (PDR) involves complex system engineering. To explore the evolutionary traits of PDR under the background of sustainable development, this paper analyzes the internal subsystems and the corresponding state variables of PDR based on complex system thinking, and establishes a nonlinear dynamic model to describe how PDR evolves by using synergetics and the Logistic equation. Through dissecting the model, this paper determines all the evolutionary equilibrium points of PDR as well as the conditions allowing these points to stabilize, identifies the evolutionary pathways of PDR, and verifies the proposed model and the results deduced from the model by simulations. Results show that the ideal steady state of PDR needs to balance multi-dimensional sustainability. This study also finds that the evolutionary pathways of PDR, along with the corresponding stage-specific measures, are mainly determined by the initial conditions of PDR, the resource inputs of each subsystem, and the interactions between subsystems.