Civil society and AI-enhanced disaster resilience in East Asia: Comparative insights from China, Japan, and Korea

Disaster resilience depends not simply on state capacity, civic participation, or technology, but on how these are institutionally combined in disaster governance. Focusing on East Asia, this study compares three recent disasters—the 2021 Henan Floods in China, the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake in Japan, and the 2022 Seoul Floods in Korea—through a qualitative comparative design based on documentary evidence. The analysis shows that resilience was co-produced through distinct institutional arrangements, yielding three protection logics: embedded continuity in Japan, bounded targeting in China, and uneven protection in Korea. AI-enabled disaster preparedness education also emerges as one mode of anticipatory readiness. A supplementary global contextualization places these findings within a broader discursive field, suggesting that the public visibility of AI-EDR varies with wider contextual conditions, while remaining exploratory and non-causal. The study reframes disaster resilience as differentiated, institutionally mediated, and co-produced. • This study demonstrates that civil society organizations (CSOs) in East Asia co-produce disaster resilience through three distinct but structurally comparable models: China's surge mobilization, Japan's intermediary institutionalization, and Korea's platform-centric infrastructure. • Despite the shared deployment of emerging technologies—including AI analytics, IoT sensors, UAV reconnaissance, and immersive simulations—their effectiveness varied markedly. • These differences confirm that technological sophistication alone does not yield resilience. • Instead, it is the openness of governance systems and the presence of intermediary mechanisms that determine whether technologies function as inclusive enablers or remain ad hoc and exclusionary.