A Disaster Is More Than a Number: Why Recovery Must Start With People

Ain Muhaldin

Image sourced from Byne Arul via Wikimedia Commons

Imagine standing beside a car destroyed by a flood. On a disaster assessment form, it may become one more figure: one damaged vehicle, one material loss. But for the person standing beside it, the loss may mean much more. What if that car was how they travelled to work? What if it was essential to running a small business, taking children to school or caring for an elderly parent? What begins as a recorded property loss can quickly become lost income, disrupted responsibilities and psychological distress.

The number is not wrong. It is simply incomplete.

Across disaster-prone Southeast Asia, governments need quantitative assessments to understand the scale of destruction and determine where limited resources should go. Yet these assessments are most effective when complemented by qualitative, community-informed evidence that captures what those losses mean in practice. The ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (AADMER) establishes regional cooperation on reducing disaster losses, while ASEAN’s disaster management framework places resilient recovery and disaster-resilient communities among its priorities.

While quantitative assessments are essential for understanding the scale and distribution of disaster impacts, standardised indicators may not always capture the full context in which those impacts are experienced. A damaged vehicle can represent a lost livelihood, while a damaged home can disrupt education, caregiving and social networks. Lost income can create pressures long after floodwaters recede. Qualitative evidence can help reveal these less visible consequences and provide context for the figures. The Asian Development Bank's disaster-recovery guidance similarly emphasises accounting for economic and social impacts, including personal income, food security and social recovery alongside damage to property and infrastructure.

Numbers show how many households were affected; qualitative evidence helps explain what recovery requires. UN Women recommends combining quantitative disaster-impact data with qualitative studies and listening to the experiences, priorities and needs of groups whose perspectives may otherwise be missing.

Some of these overlooked needs are especially difficult to identify because they are personal or culturally sensitive. Menstrual health illustrates this problem: broad categories such as “basic needs” may not capture specific requirements unless affected people can identify them. Disaster relief may provide food, water and shelter while failing to adequately account for menstrual products, sanitation and privacy. UNFPA Asia-Pacific has highlighted how disasters can disrupt menstrual health across the region, turning access to basic hygiene into questions of health, safety and dignity. This makes community participation more than a method of data collection: it helps policymakers understand the context behind the data.

The solution, therefore, is not simply to collect more data. It is to listen differently.

Designing for communities assumes policymakers can determine people's needs through existing knowledge and indicators. Designing with communities recognises that affected people bring another form of expertise: lived experience. UNDRR's work on human-centred disaster risk similarly highlights designing systems with and for the communities they serve while creating opportunities for dialogue.

Southeast Asia already offers examples of what this can look like. Following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Indonesia's REKOMPAK programme placed affected communities at the centre of rebuilding homes and local infrastructure in Aceh, from planning to implementation. The approach was later replicated following disasters in Yogyakarta and elsewhere in Indonesia. More recently, the Philippines' Pagkilos Community Resilience Project has involved communities in identifying climate and natural-hazard risks and developing resilience plans, with funding targeted at priorities such as resilient infrastructure and sustainable livelihoods.

Yet designing with communities does not mean every community priority can be incorporated into policy. This is where the gap between what should happen and what can happen becomes important.

Policy ultimately requires governments to translate ideals into decisions under real-world constraints. Governments face finite budgets, bureaucratic procedures, institutional hierarchies and competing priorities. Community participation also faces its own barriers. UNDRR research has found that financial and capacity constraints, information-sharing problems and the structure of participation can prevent local knowledge from being fully used. The challenge, therefore, is designing participation effectively.

The goal is not to replace institutional expertise with community preferences. Governments provide resources, technical expertise and implementation capacity. Communities provide knowledge of how policies are experienced. Bringing these forms of knowledge together can help policymakers identify urgent needs, design culturally appropriate interventions and allocate limited resources more effectively.

Natural disasters are already crises. People affected by them should not face additional hardship because recovery policies fail to recognise the realities of their lives. A damaged vehicle can be counted. A lost livelihood, disrupted family responsibilities or loss of dignity cannot always be reduced to a number.

National governments could incorporate community consultations into post-disaster needs assessments, with ASEAN disaster-management mechanisms providing regional guidance and support. Recovery should be measured not only by what governments rebuild, but also by whether people are able to rebuild their lives.

Ain Muhaldin is a Sociology and Anthropology student at Universiti Brunei Darussalam interested in international affairs, humanitarian diplomacy and human-centred policy. She has undertaken research on disaster preparedness in Southeast Asia and policy work with Brunei’s Prime Minister’s Office.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Young Australians in International Affairs. AI tools were used by this author for idea refinement, grammar and wording checks. All content is original, and no plagiarism has been used in the preparation of this article.