Temporal Variability and Compositional Shifts in Natural Disaster Impacts in South Korea: An Analysis of Economic Damage and Recovery Costs (2015–2024)

Climate change has heightened concerns regarding the economic impacts of natural disasters, particularly in countries highly exposed to weather-related hazards, such as South Korea. Although official disaster statistics are published regularly, national-level analyses that jointly examine economic damage, recovery expenditures, and hazard composition remain limited. This study analyzes data from the Korean Disaster Yearbook to investigate temporal patterns in natural disaster impacts over the period 2015–2024. Descriptive statistics, cause-based decomposition, and non-parametric trend tests are employed to assess interannual variability, monotonic trends, and changes in the contributions of different disaster causes. The results reveal substantial year-to-year variability in both economic damage and recovery costs, with a small number of extreme years accounting for a large share of cumulative losses. Mann–Kendall tests do not detect statistically significant monotonic trends; however, positive Kendall’s tau values and Sen’s slope estimates indicate an overall increasing tendency. In addition, the composition of economic damage by disaster cause varies markedly across years, reflecting shifts in dominant hazards. These findings suggest that recent disaster risks in South Korea are driven more by episodic extreme events and evolving hazard compositions than by smooth linear trends, underscoring the importance of preventive and adaptation-oriented disaster management strategies for long-term sustainability.