Can pre-disaster community resilience enhance post-disaster recovery among older adults? A natural experiment in Iwanuma City after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

As large-scale disasters occur more frequently worldwide, understanding how pre-disaster community resilience influences post-disaster recovery has become imperative for disaster risk-reduction policy and practice. This study investigated whether pre-disaster community resilience helped explain post-disaster subjective recovery following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. We conducted a baseline survey of older residents in Iwanuma City in 2010 and a follow-up survey 2.5 years after the disaster, yielding an analytical sample of 3,523 respondents nested within 98 districts. Ten resilience indicators reflecting social capital and economic development were measured at both individual and community levels before the disaster. Using multilevel logistic regression models, we examined the association between these indicators and two outcomes: self-reported recovery of daily life and perceived recovery of the neighborhood. Housing damage, bereavement, and high community-level housing destruction substantially reduced the participants’ perceived recovery. Pre-disaster community-level social participation was significantly associated with better recovery of individual daily life, whereas local activities and interactions mitigated the negative impact of severe housing damage. By contrast, respondents with severe damage living in districts with higher pre-disaster evaluations of administrative services reported poorer neighborhood recovery. This natural experimental evidence demonstrates that community environments characterized by high social participation and frequent local interactions before a disaster foster more favorable recovery perceptions. The findings provide prospective evidence on the associations between the selected community resilience indicators and post-disaster recovery, and highlight the importance of strengthening social connectedness in ordinary times as a practical strategy for enhancing disaster resilience. • Pre-disaster resilience was associated with perceived post-disaster recovery. • Pre-disaster community-level social participation improved individual recovery. • Local activities and interactions eased impacts of severe housing damage. • Severe district damage strongly reduced perceived neighborhood recovery. • Findings highlight the importance of social connectedness for disaster recovery.