Rocks and mud remain where houses used to stand and families used to live in Chimanimani, Zimbabwe. Ashraf Hendricks/GroundUp When environmental hazards strike, the damage is usually counted in numbers: how many people died, how many homes were destroyed, how many people were displaced, and how much money it will take to rebuild.
But not all losses and damage can be measured in financial terms. Some of the most profound impacts of climate-induced disasters are emotional, cultural and social, affecting how people feel, relate to each other and think about their world.
Read more: Tropical cyclone Idai: The storm that knew no boundaries
We are scientists who research environmental hazards, climate change impacts and development practice. We wanted to find out what recovery meant for survivors of Tropical Cyclone Idai, which hit eastern Zimbabwe’s Chimanimani District for five days in 2019, turning mountains into mudslides and leaving hundreds of people dead.
We interviewed community members, including survivors and local leaders, and held discussions with government officials and aid organisations. We also spent time in affected communities, observing daily life and listening to how people spoke about the disaster and its aftermath. This allowed us to capture not just what had happened, but what it meant to those who’d lived through it.
Our research found that survivors of climate disasters didn’t only speak of losing their houses and other material goods. They also talked of grief, dislocation, loss of places of cultural significance, and a lingering sense that life would never return to what it once was.
Read more: Cyclone Idai is over – but its health effects will be felt for a long time
These experiences are harder to quantify, but no less important. If recovery efforts overlook these less visible losses, they leave deep social and emotional wounds unaddressed.
Disaster recovery is not just about rebuilding material objects or infrastructure. It is about rebuilding lives.
Tropical Cyclone Idai affected over 3 million people across Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. In many places, it destroyed whole communities. In eastern Zimbabwe’s Chimanimani District hundreds died, many people went missing, and thousands were displaced from their ancestral lands.
The cost of the economic losses and damage was more than US$2 billion. This amount does not include the non-economic losses – the damage to people’s sense of belonging, identity, relationships and emotional well-being that cannot be measured by money.
Our findings show that Cyclone Idai caused four major types of non-economic loss:
The cyclone caused floods in the middle of the night, while people were sleeping, leaving them little chance to escape to higher ground before their houses collapsed or were washed away. Many families lost loved ones and said that grief remained a constant presence. A survivor told us:
What changed most is that we were a big family, but we lost two kids due to the cyclone. That alone has changed our lives and has affected us very much. We can hardly move forward because of these bad memories that we still have.
More than two years after the cyclone, some people said they still lived with injuries that prevented them from working or living as they once did. Mental health impacts, including anxiety, insomnia and post-traumatic stress, are widespread yet rarely addressed in formal recovery efforts.
Displacement was one of the most significant consequences of the tropical cyclone. Families were moved to temporary camps and, later, resettled in new areas that were often very different from their original homes.
For example, people who had survived by farming and selling bananas were moved to a government housing compound (Runyararo village), where low rainfall makes it difficult to grow the fruit.
Read more: Rwanda has moved people into model ‘green’ villages: is life better there?
Their new area also has no tarred roads or electricity, yet people who had lived in urban and peri-urban areas were moved there. For many, this meant more than just relocation. It involved losing connection to ancestral land, familiar environments and ways of life. As one survivor described, it felt like being uprooted not just physically, but emotionally and culturally.
Before the cyclone, communities in Chimanimani were tightly connected through kinship, shared histories and mutual support systems. The disaster fractured these networks by separating families and neighbours. One survivor said:
