ABSTRACT
The main rationale behind this work is that the social system is not an inert thing, but a living organism, which is endowed with systemic networks and reactive feedbacks that aim at self-preservation by keeping required balances and counteracting functionality losses in a sustainable fashion. Local disaster failures are then primarily tackled via inbuilt compensations, substitutions and circumventions, which are aimed at rehabilitating impaired productive and distributional functions by means of counterbalancing flows. These should be identified and tapped to help the design of public and international responses. In most cases, sudden disasters would not have serious consequences on the functionality of the macroeconomy, even if the directly affected locality was badly affected and still trying to recover a few years after the impact. The latter may be an indication of functionality bypassing, which responds to a permanent systemic tension between the local and the national, for which ex-ante and ex-post public response policy may play a systemic role to secure a minimal balance so that neither is the local economy exogenously sustained by public and foreign resources nor is the affected local economy fully insulated and bypassed by the national economy.
