On October 28, 2025, Hurricane Melissa struck Jamaica’s west coast. It brought extensive devastation, demolishing 90% of residences in the Black River area and resulting in an initial death toll of 37 individuals—a figure likely to increase as search and rescue efforts persist.
The exact nature of the recovery process remains uncertain, but it’s clear that Jamaica will require external assistance. From 1961 onward, the United States managed international disasters through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). However, recent legislative changes have created uncertainty regarding the U.S.’s disaster response capabilities. Although the State Department has announced the establishment of a new ‘Office for Disaster Response,’ significant questions remain about its operational implementation.
To grasp disaster recovery in the Caribbean, examining the 2010 Haiti Earthquake or 2017’s Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico proves instructive. The historical impact of colonialism significantly influenced the recovery processes in these cases. For instance, Haiti was compelled to repay France for its liberation from slavery. It is estimated that this payment cost Haiti billions of dollars in economic growth. In Puerto Rico, the island’s territorial status and its classification as a Caribbean island presented complexities for the federal government’s response.
Despite these challenges, these vibrant communities also developed their own solutions and demonstrated resilience. Jamaica has been at the forefront of strengthening its capacity to recover from disasters. It was the first country where every section of its local government signed onto the ‘Making Cities Resilient 2030’ initiative, a United Nations effort aimed at building disaster resilience and fostering professional networks in the field. It has also worked to secure its financial future by issuing catastrophe bonds; these bonds provide payouts triggered by verified central pressure readings from hurricanes, with the funds dedicated to responding to and recovering from such events. These measures provide hundreds of millions of dollars for disaster recovery. However, if initial assessments prove accurate, Jamaica faces billions of dollars in damages.
A consensus that has emerged among disaster researchers over decades is that real progress in mitigating and recovering from disasters can be achieved by addressing social vulnerabilities. Generally, the formula we use for a disaster is that a Hazard (such as a hurricane, flood, or earthquake) combined with a Vulnerability equals a disaster.
Vulnerabilities can be divided into two main types: physical and social. Physical vulnerabilities include factors such as low-lying land, hills prone to landslides, or dry forests where wildfires are probable. Social vulnerabilities encompass issues like income inequality, gender discrimination, and racial segregation.
To understand what this means in practical terms, consider the 2010 Haiti Earthquake and the 2011 3.11 Triple Disaster in Japan. The earthquake in Haiti was significant at 7.0 on the Richter scale. The 3.11 earthquake was even more powerful, registering 9.0 on the Richter scale. Keep in mind that the Richter scale is non-linear, meaning a 9.0 earthquake is considerably stronger than a 7.0.
Despite this difference in relative strength, an estimated 220,000 to 300,000 people died in the Haiti earthquake, whereas nearly 16,000 fatalities occurred in Japan. Most of those deaths were not due to the earthquake itself, but rather to the resulting tsunami.
What can explain a less powerful earthquake resulting in many more deaths? This is where social vulnerability comes into play. Poverty, inequality, building standards, access to materials, the capacity of civil society, and legacies of colonialism can all lead to more deaths. It is not that the physical environment plays no role, but rather that the terrain making a substantial difference is a socioeconomic one.
The international community has been systematically working to unravel the complexity of disasters for the last 30 years. Beginning in the mid-1990s, under the auspices of the United Nations, countries collaborated to generate a broadly accepted framework for responding to disasters.
The current iteration of this is the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, which incorporates this understanding of social vulnerabilities and calls on its signatories—of which Jamaica is one—to undertake a ‘Build Back Better’ approach to post-disaster reconstruction.
Build Back Better advocates for not just a return to the pre-disaster status quo, but for a mitigation of social vulnerabilities through the recovery process. Build Back Better is not a perfect concept; some argue it can lead to top-down approaches. Yet it represents a step forward in understanding that simply reconstructing does not inherently improve a community’s resilience to further disasters.
To rebuild from a disaster offers an opportunity to reconsider both the physical and social arrangements of a society. As Jamaica shifts from emergency response to recovery, change should come from the grassroots, be community-based and community-driven.