A disaster risk and resilience analysis framework provides insights for modelling natural hazard-induced human mobility

This research presents a conceptual disaster risk and resilience framework for modelling natural hazard-induced human mobility, centring on household objective well-being as the key determinant of voluntary, involuntary, and planned movement outcomes. In the face of a changing climate, natural hazards are playing a growing role in shaping human mobility, either propelling or restricting the movement of people across space and time. Existing approaches to modelling natural hazard-induced human mobility often rely on oversimplified assumptions, for instance, accounting exclusively for mobility drivers related to the built environment or market dynamics.

The authors emphasize that mobility outcomes must be understood as inherently contextual, requiring iterative calibration through community consultation, and outline practical guidance for operationalising the framework using existing open-source exposure databases, engineering-based fragility models, and proxies for hard-to-measure secondary resources such as social and cultural capital. They propose three equity principles for real-world application; treating resource gaps as targets for policy support rather than justification for exclusion, ensuring representative community participation in defining well-being indicators, and aligning outcomes with a "Build Back Better" philosophy; while acknowledging that the framework remains a conceptual guide rather than a fully implementable tool, with open challenges including irreducible uncertainty in mobility predictions, the interdependence of secondary resources, and limited transferability across contexts.