Disability, Disasters, and Resilience

Disasters are “serious disruptions to the functioning of a community that exceed its capacity to cope using its own resources” (International Federation of Red Cross, 2022). Disasters include natural hazard events, pandemics, terrorist attacks, war, and industrial accidents. Within the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR, 2015, p. 9) disaster resilience is defined as “[t]he ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions.” Disability is included in the Sendai Framework in relation to vulnerability and risk as well as inclusion in disaster preparedness, the need for disaggregated reporting statistics, and participation in disaster policy and planning (UNISDR, 2015). The United Nations (2015) definition of resilience encompasses built infrastructure, as well as environmental and social resilience. However, disaster resilience is a contested and complex term encompassing contingent, local, and particular relationships between societal, organizational, community, and psychological capacity (Kendra et al., 2018). At the individual level, psychological resilience is an adaptive capacity and the ability to positively deal with adversity while community resilience refers to the collective capacity and the ability of communities to bounce back (Wright, 2021) during the disaster recovery phase. Adaptive capacity is shaped by social inequalities and relations of power, which are, in turn, related to structural inequities associated with gender, race, class, (Wright, 2021) age, and disability. Critical approaches to resilience focus on the potential for local capacity to be co-opted by governments in order to justify the withdrawal of state resources for reducing vulnerability, building capacity, strengthening infrastructure, and ensuring sustainability (Kendra et al., 2018). The inverse response law (Phibbs et al., 2018) identified that vulnerable and marginalized groups are more likely to be impacted, to experience disparities in service provision during the disaster response and recovery phase, and to experience inequitable social and well-being outcomes over time. Within the disaster literature, vulnerable populations include migrant and indigenous peoples, children, the elderly, and those who are physically and mentally disabled, medically dependent, living in poverty, homeless, or rurally isolated (Phibbs et al., 2016). People with disabilities are over-represented in risk factors that are associated with disaster vulnerability including living in poverty, having high healthcare needs, residing alone in low-income neighborhoods, and being unable to respond quickly during an emergency (Phibbs et al., 2014). Disabled people are also reluctant to evacuate due to concerns that emergency shelters will not be able to meet their needs (Phibbs et al., 2014; Stough & Kelman, 2018). There is limited research that documents the experiences of disabled people who have