Response and Recovery Following the Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster

The scale and severity of the catastrophic consequences - human, physical, and economic - of the Great East Japan Earthquake disaster have created unprecedented response and recovery challenges for Japan's social, political, and disaster management systems. At an estimated 16.9 trillion yen, or US$210 billion, damage resulting from the earthquake and tsunami (and largely excluding the nuclear incident) make this the costliest disaster in Japan's modern history, and quite possibly the costliest natural disaster in the world. Recovery and reconstruction is going to require special land use, economic, and disaster management measures that potentially include community relocations, port consolidations, and significant modifications to traditional tsunami risk engineering approaches.