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This paper reflects on what materialised during recovery operations following the earthquake in L'Aquila, Italy, on 6 April 2009. Previous critiques have focused on the actions of the Government of Italy and the Department of Civil Protection (Protezione Civile), with little attention paid to the role of local authorities. This analysis sheds light on how the latter used emergency powers, the command-and-control approach, and top-down planning to manage the disaster context, especially in terms of removal of rubble, implementing safety measures, and allocating temporary accommodation. It discusses how these arrangements constituted the mechanism via which ‘disaster capitalism’ took hold at the local and national level, and how it violated human rights, produced environmental and social impacts, hindered local communities from learning, transforming, and building resilience, and facilitated disaster capitalism and corruption. To make the disaster risk reduction and resilience paradigm more effective, a shift from centralised civil protection to decentralised, inclusive community empowerment systems is needed.

This paper examines the vulnerability of households to disasters, using an asset vulnerability framework to represent livelihoods. Such frameworks are widely employed to analyse household poverty and focus on living conditions and well-being rather than money-metric measures of consumption and income. The conceptualisation of household vulnerability is a challenge in current studies on coping with disasters. The paper considers whether a capital assets framework is useful in identifying and assessing household vulnerability in the context of the Wenchuan earthquake in China in 2008. The framework has five categories of assets (financial, human, natural, physical, and social capital) and attempts to measure the resilience and vulnerability of households. When applied to a major disaster, asset-based methods face the problem of heterogeneity of the population, such as with regard to livelihood type or residence. Moreover, the effect of external interventions, such as the provision of relief assistance, must be taken into account.

A significant increase in atmospheric radon concentration was observed in the area around the epicentre before and after the occurrence of the shallow inland earthquake in the northern Wakayama Prefecture on 5 July 2011 (Mj 5.5, depth 7 km) in Japan. The seismic activity in the sampling site was evaluated to identify that this earthquake was the largest near the sampling site during the observation period. To determine whether this was an anomalous change, the atmospheric daily minimum radon concentration measured for a 13-year period was analysed. When the residual radon concentration values without the seasonal radon variation and the linear trend was > 3 standard deviations of the residual radon variation corresponding to the normal period, the values were deemed as anomalous. As a result, an anomalous increase in radon concentration was determined before and after the earthquake. In conclusion, anomalous change related to earthquakes with at least Mj 5.5 can be detected by monitoring atmospheric radon near the epicentre.