Editorial: Natural Hazards and Risks in a Changing World: Incorporating Justice in Disaster Research

Olasunkanmi Habeeb Okunola^1,2*Christopher Ihinegbu^3,4Thecla Akukwe⁴Israel Ropo Orimoloye^5,6

• ¹Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU), Bonn, Germany
• ²School of Humanitarian Studies, Royal Roads University, Victoria, Canada
• ³Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy, University of California Irvine, Irvine, United States
• ⁴Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria
• ⁵Government of San Juan County, New Mexico, United States
• ⁶Disaster Management Training and Education Centre for Africa (DiMTEC), University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa

In an era marked by compound disasters, cascading infrastructure failures, and climate-driven extremes, the uneven toll of hazards is no longer exceptional, it is systematic. Natural hazards are not merely extreme environmental events; they are manifestations of deeper political, social, and institutional arrangements that shape how risk is produced, distributed, and governed. As climate change accelerates the frequency, magnitude, and spatial reach of floods, droughts, wildfires, and storms, disasters increasingly unfold as complex, cascading, and systemic phenomena. In such contexts, the central question is no longer whether disasters are unjust, but how injustice actively structures risk trajectories over time.This Research Topic, Natural Hazards and Risks in a Changing World: Incorporating Justice in Disaster Research, advances a critical rethinking of disaster justice. Rather than treating justice as a normative principle applied after disaster impacts occur, the contributions collectively demonstrate that justice operates as a risk-generating and risk-stabilizing mechanism. Distributive, procedural, and recognition injustices do not simply exacerbate disaster outcomes; they shape exposure, constrain response options, and lock communities into path-dependent cycles of vulnerability. Drawing on environmental and disaster justice scholarship, the contributions engage distributive, procedural, and recognition dimensions of justice, while extending these lenses to show how injustice operates dynamically across disaster phases and over time. Justice, in this framing, is not only a corrective to harm but a constitutive dimension of disaster risk itself. Collectively, these contributions reposition justice from a normative concern to an analytical lens for understanding how disaster risk is produced, stabilized, and governed over time.Building on foundational disaster and environmental justice scholarship, which has long documented unequal exposure and outcomes, this Research Topic extends the debate by showing how injustice operates dynamically across time and phases of disasters. Disaster scholarship has long established that marginalized populations, shaped by poverty, racialization, gendered exclusion, colonial legacies, and political neglect, bear a disproportionate share of disaster impacts. Yet, the contributions assembled here move beyond documenting inequality to interrogate the institutional, epistemic, and governance processes through which inequality is reproduced, normalized, and carried forward into future risk. This body of work aligns with emerging perspectives that view disasters as outcomes of complex adaptive systems, where feedback, path dependence, and institutional inertia shape risk trajectories. Within such systems, injustice functions not as a discrete failure but as a stabilizing force that reinforces maladaptive risk pathways.Several contributions explicitly engage with the temporal dimensions of injustice, demonstrating how historical decisions, governance failures, and dominant measurement practices continue to shape contemporary and future risk. This perspective resonates with emerging work that conceptualizes disaster risk not as an exogenous shock, but as a governance outcome shaped by institutional arrangements, power relations, and historical trajectories (e.g., Mitra & Shaw, 2023;Okunola et al., 2026). Justice, viewed through this lens, becomes a form of temporal governance, mediating whether past injustices are reinforced or disrupted over time.A first cluster of papers advances what can be described as a justice-as-measurement critique, challenging the epistemic foundations of dominant risk and resilience tools. Roper and Casagrande (2025) interrogate the widespread reliance on Social Vulnerability Indices, demonstrating that while such indices may capture distributive inequities, they often obscure historical and structural processes such as redlining, displacement, and post-disaster gentrification. Read alongside Onuoha et al. ( 2025), who reveal how social capital differentially shapes displacement outcomes in Nigeria, these studies expose how aggregated indicators can depoliticize risk and mask relational and temporal injustices. Collectively, they show that technocratic measurement frameworks, when detached from justice considerations, can actively reproduce vulnerability rather than reduce it.A second cluster conceptualizes justice as governance failure and political abandonment, illustrating how procedural injustice structures disaster risk in complex systems. Rivera-Rodríguez et al. ( 2025) situate energy insecurity and public health crises in rural Puerto Rico within longer histories of colonial governance, privatization, and institutional neglect. Their analysis demonstrates that disasters cannot be understood as discrete shocks, but as ongoing conditions produced through governance arrangements that normalize exceptionality and abandonment. Wu et al. (2025), from a different methodological vantage point, similarly reveal how coordination failures in multi-actor disaster response are shaped by incentive structures and regulatory design. Read together, these contributions expose the limits of efficiency-driven governance models and underscore the political nature of coordination in complex risk environments.A third set of contributions extends disaster justice into cross-sectoral and intergenerational domains, highlighting how disaster risk spills into institutions not traditionally considered within disaster risk management. Jokovic-Wroe et al. (2025) demonstrate how environmental disasters intersect with youth vulnerability and criminal justice systems in Australia, particularly for Indigenous communities. Their work illustrates how disaster exposure can amplify existing pathways of criminalization, producing long-term and intergenerational harm. Thiel et al. (2025), focusing on wildfire recovery among Latine communities in the Pacific Northwest, similarly show how recognition failures, manifested through language barriers, exclusion from decision-making, and culturally mismatched assistance, shape recovery trajectories. Together, these studies reveal that disaster justice cannot be confined to hazard management alone; it must account for how risk propagates across interconnected social systems. Across these diverse contexts, a common thread emerges: complex risk governance without justice defaults to technocratic optimization, while justice frameworks that ignore complexity risk oversimplify systemic interactions. The contributions in this Research Topic demonstrate that justice is not external to complexity but embedded within it. In complex adaptive systems, past injustices shape present vulnerabilities, constrain future options, and stabilize maladaptive risk pathways. Justice, therefore, operates as a systemic constraint and enabling condition within complex risk environments. This perspective carries important methodological implications. Understanding justice as a temporal and systemic condition of risk demands approaches that move beyond event-based assessments toward historical analysis, institutional critique, participatory research, and longitudinal perspectives. Justiceoriented disaster research, as reflected across the contributions, requires methodological pluralism capable of capturing how risk is produced, governed, and experienced over time.The policy implications are equally significant. Current disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation frameworks often prioritize resilience as rapid recovery or system efficiency, with limited attention to power, political economy or historical injustice. When justice is sidelined, such frameworks risk reinforcing resilience-as-return, entrenching pre-existing vulnerabilities rather than transforming them. A justiceinformed approach demands different priorities: governance systems that acknowledge historical responsibility, metrics that reveal rather than conceal inequality, and recovery pathways that redistribute power and decision-making authority alongside resources.By positioning justice as a constitutive dimension of complex risk, this Research Topic makes a substantive contribution to contemporary disaster scholarship. It challenges dominant paradigms that treat risk as a technical problem to be managed, instead of positioning disaster risk as a political and institutional outcome that can be reshaped. In an era of accelerating climate change, compound crises, and deepening inequality, incorporating justice into disaster research is not optional. It is indispensable for understanding how risks are produced, why they persist, and how they might be governed without reproducing the very vulnerabilities disaster risk management seeks to address. The challenge ahead is not merely to incorporate justice into disaster research, but to confront how existing risk governance systems depend on injustice to function, and to imagine alternatives capable of disrupting those dynamics.