The research, published in SN Social Sciences by a team led by Satrio Amrullah and colleagues at Universitas Gadjah Mada’s Master of Disaster Management program, examines how livelihoods fared among households permanently resettled after the eruption. Using the Sustainable Livelihood Approach, a widely applied analytical framework that decomposes household well-being into five asset categories—human, financial, physical, natural and social capital—the team conducted in-depth interviews with affected families to trace how each form of capital was destroyed, reconfigured or rebuilt through the relocation process. The framework, originally developed by the UK Department for International Development and later adopted by the United Nations Development Programme, treats a household as a portfolio of assets that can be drawn upon, combined and converted to withstand shocks. Its strength lies in making visible the losses that conventional damage assessments miss.

The eruption’s physical mechanics explain much of the economic damage. Semeru’s December 2021 event produced large-volume pyroclastic density currents and subsequent rain-triggered lahars that coursed down river valleys, scouring agricultural land and the sand-mining sites that line the volcano’s flanks. For households that depended directly on those natural resources—farmers cultivating volcanic soils and workers extracting sand and gravel from riverbeds—the disaster eliminated the very asset base on which their incomes rested. The study finds that these natural-capital-dependent households suffered the deepest and most persistent livelihood losses, compounded by a lack of alternative employment in the relocation area. Their skills, social ties and daily routines were all bound to landscapes that no longer existed in usable form.

By contrast, families who entered relocation with diversified income streams or stronger human capital—formal education, transferable skills, trading experience—demonstrated markedly greater adaptive capacity. A household that combined farming with small commerce, or whose members could take up wage labor or transport work in a new location, could absorb the loss of one asset by drawing on others. This asymmetry is one of the study’s central technical findings: livelihood resilience after relocation is not distributed evenly across a displaced population but tracks the pre-disaster composition of each household’s asset portfolio. Relocation, in other words, does not reset vulnerability to zero; it can preserve or even amplify pre-existing inequalities in adaptive capacity.

The relocation sites themselves delivered genuine gains in physical capital. Respondents reported better housing construction standards, improved infrastructure, and closer access to education and health services than in their former villages on the volcano’s slopes. These improvements matter: safer structures and better services reduce exposure and improve long-term human development outcomes. Yet the study’s interviews reveal a critical gap between physical safety and economic security. The relocation program provided houses but not livelihoods. There was little vocational training aligned with actual local labor-market demand, limited support for starting or relocating small enterprises, and no systematic mechanism for restoring the income-generating functions that farming and sand mining had previously provided. Families found themselves living in safer homes with less money and fewer prospects.

Social capital, the connective tissue of recovery, fared poorly in a way that the study links directly to resettlement design. Because households were not relocated in intact community groups, pre-existing networks of mutual aid, labor exchange and informal credit were dispersed and weakened. This finding echoes a well-known natural experiment from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, published in Science Advances, which showed that residential relocation produced measurable declines in social capital among displaced residents. In the Semeru case, the fragmentation of community ties removed an informal safety net precisely when formal support was thinnest. Disaster scholars have long warned of this trade-off: the same dispersal that reduces exposure to volcanic hazards can sever the relationships that households rely on to recover.

Encouragingly, the research also documents grassroots recovery initiatives that point toward workable solutions. Some relocated residents launched small businesses, and livestock cooperatives emerged as a promising mechanism for rebuilding both income and social connection. These initiatives succeeded where they converted other forms of capital—financial savings, human skills, residual social ties—into new productive assets suited to the relocation context. They suggest that recovery policy should treat relocated households not as passive recipients of housing but as economic agents whose asset portfolios can be deliberately rebuilt. The cooperatives in particular illustrate how a single intervention can simultaneously generate financial capital and reconstitute the social networks that dispersal had broken.

The study’s conclusions carry weight well beyond Lumajang. Post-disaster relocation has become a standard recovery tool worldwide, from volcanic hazard zones in El Salvador to landslide-prone districts in Sri Lanka to flood-exposed communities in China, and climate change is expected to expand planned relocation dramatically in the coming decades. Yet a substantial body of literature—including systematic reviews of resettlement outcomes in Ambio and the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction—reaches conclusions consistent with the Semeru findings: relocated households frequently experience income decline, livelihood insecurity and social disruption even when housing quality improves. The Semeru case adds granular, asset-by-asset evidence of how that gap opens, showing precisely which capitals collapse and which can be leveraged for recovery.

The authors argue that relocation policy must extend beyond the provision of physically safe housing to address the multidimensional challenge of livelihood restoration. Their recommendations are concrete: vocational training should be designed against actual local market demand rather than generic curricula; small enterprise development should receive dedicated support, including credit and market access; and planning should be participatory and community-driven, so that resettlement preserves social groupings and reflects residents’ own livelihood strategies. Each recommendation maps onto a specific capital identified by the Sustainable Livelihood Approach—human capital through training, financial capital through enterprise support, social capital through grouped, participatory resettlement—giving policymakers a coherent framework rather than a checklist of good intentions.

For the families of Lumajang, the lesson is already lived experience: a house on safe ground is a necessary foundation for recovery, but it is not recovery itself. For the growing global community of planners confronting climate-driven relocation, the Semeru evidence offers a clear technical warning. Relocation programs that measure success in structures built and people moved will systematically underperform programs that measure success in livelihoods restored. The five capitals—human, financial, physical, natural and social—must be assessed, protected and rebuilt together, because a household’s resilience is only as strong as the weakest asset it has left.

Subject of Research: Livelihood resilience and asset reconfiguration among households permanently relocated after the 2021 Mount Semeru volcanic eruption in Indonesia

Article Title: Livelihood resilience after the 2021 Mount Semeru eruption: lessons from resettled communities

Article References: Amrullah, S., Firmantini, T., Widyaningsih, A. E., Rijal, Z. K., Bakarbessy, J. C., Sulistiyo, S., Putri, R. A. P., Rosadi, F. A., Dzikiro, T. K., Puspitasari, D., Amri, I., Giyarsih, S. R., & Ruslanjari, D. (2026). Livelihood resilience after the 2021 Mount Semeru eruption: lessons from resettled communities. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 470. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01758-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01758-1

Keywords: Mount Semeru, livelihood resilience, post-disaster relocation, Sustainable Livelihood Approach, volcanic eruption, disaster recovery, social capital, Indonesia, resettlement, human capital, natural hazards, community resilience