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Scientists hope their model will enable risk assessments to more holistically capture the human impact of disasters
HERNDON, Va., February 26, 2025 — One of the human impacts of natural hazards is household displacement. Destructive floods, wildfires, earthquakes and hurricanes often force people to leave their homes — some briefly, others for months or indefinitely.
Most disaster risk assessments, used by insurance companies, government agencies, development banks, and academic researchers to predict the potential future impacts of natural hazards, fail to account for hardships incurred by household displacement. Instead, they focus on direct economic losses, a metric that “often highlights the wealthiest as the most at-risk,” says Nicole Paul, Ph.D. candidate at University College London. “But observations from past disaster events often show that poor and marginalized people have the greatest recovery needs.”
In a new study published by Risk Analysis, Paul and her colleagues used recent, disaster-related data from the Household Pulse Survey (HPS) to train a computer model to predict the length of household displacement and return outcomes after a disaster. The study is the first to use state-by-state data from the U.S. Census Bureau to quantify the contribution of different factors (including household size, tenure status, educational attainment, and income per household member) on household displacement and return.
According to the HPS data, 1.1% of American households were displaced due to disasters between December 2022 and July 2024. Hurricanes were the most common disaster type cited by displaced households, while other households reportedl floods, fires, tornados, and “other” hazard types.
Survey responses from 11,715 households that experienced disaster displacement were used by the researchers to fit predictive computer models for household displacement in three classes: emergency phase displacement (returned in less than one month), recovery phase displacement (returned after one month), and not returned (potentially permanent relocation).
Although most households returned relatively quickly, 20 percent were displaced for longer than a month and 14 percent had not returned by July 2024. The geographical locations of households revealed significant differences among states:
“The duration of displacement is key to understanding the human impact of a disaster,” says Paul. “Short-term evacuations can save lives and be minimally disruptive, while protracted displacement is associated with significant hardships for families.” Those challenges can include disruption of education, income and/or job loss, and various psychological effects.
To understand the impacts of future disasters, Paul adds, the computer model can combine estimates of physical damage with socioeconomic characteristics to predict the duration of household displacement within a community and therefore help inform risk mitigation strategies that reduce displacement risks for members of that community in future disasters.
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The Society for Risk Analysis is a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, scholarly, international society that provides an open forum for all those interested in risk analysis. SRA was established in 1980. Since 1982, it has continuously published Risk Analysis: An International Journal, the leading scholarly journal in the field. For more information, visit www.sra.org.
