  Despite the rising importance of enhancing community resilience to disasters,
our understanding on how communities recover from catastrophic events is
limited. Here we study the population recovery dynamics of disaster affected
regions by observing the movements of over 2.5 million mobile phone users
across three countries before, during and after five major disasters. We find
that, although the regions affected by the five disasters have significant
differences in socio-economic characteristics, we observe a universal recovery
pattern where displaced populations return in an exponential manner after all
disasters. Moreover, the heterogeneity in initial and long-term displacement
rates across communities across the three countries were explained by a set of
key universal factors including the community's median income level, population
size, housing damage rate, and the connectedness to other cities. These
universal properties of recovery dynamics extracted from large scale evidence
could impact efforts on urban resilience and sustainability across various
disciplines.
