Review article: Current approaches and critical issues in multi-risk recovery planning of urban areas exposed to natural hazards

Post-disaster recovery has been addressed in the literature by different sectoral perspectives and scientific communities. Nevertheless, studies providing holistic ap- proaches to recovery, integrating reconstruction procedures and socio-economic impacts, are still lacking. Additionally, there is a gap in disaster recovery research addressing the ad- ditional challenges posed by the effect of complex, multiple, and interacting risks on highly interconnected urban areas. Furthermore, recovery has only been marginally explored from a pre-disaster perspective in terms of planning and ac- tions to increase urban resilience and recoverability. This pa- per provides a critical review of existing literature and guide- lines on multi-risk disaster recovery with the twofold aim of identifying current gaps and providing the layout to address multi-risk recovery planning tools for decision-making. The literature on disaster recovery is investigated in the paper by focusing on the definition of the recovery phase and its sep- aration or overlapping with other disaster risk management phases, the different destinations and goals that an urban sys- tem follows through recovery pathways, the requirements to implement a holistic resilience-based recovery roadmap, the challenges for shifting from single-risk to multi-risk recov- ery approaches, and the available tools for optimal decision- making in the recovery planning. Finally, the current chal- lenges in multi-risk recovery planning are summarized and discussed. This review can be a ground basis for new re- search directions in the field of multi-risk recovery planning to help stakeholders in decision-making and optimize their pre-disaster investments to improve the urban system’s re- coverability.