Linking Risk to Resilience: A Quantitative Method for Communities to Prioritize Resilience Investments-Aug. 7, 2017 (original) (raw)

Disaster resilience quantification of communities: A risk-based approach

International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2022

Community and infrastructure resilience against natural and man-made hazards is paramount for the well-being of modern societies. To adapt to the fast-changing world, having communities that can effectively respond to the continuously changing (physical and social) environment is essential. Despite the existing literature on resilience definition and estimation, few frameworks and associated tools can effectively help decision-making. In addition, these tools are usually not well integrated into the community and infrastructure management processes so that decision-makers and authorities can effectively use them. This paper aims at developing a resilience-based risk assessment approach at the community level. It combines the risk analysis parameters with the intrinsic resilience of the community. The proposed approach offers essential insights into the quantitative resilience analysis of communities at different scales and for different natural hazards. It enables the combination of the risk parameters (hazard, exposure, and vulnerability) with the inherent resilience of all the systems that constitute a community. This paper also presents an easy-to-interpret tool for visualizing the resilience results obtained from the introduced approach. It translates the paper's scientific contribution into an interactive and visualization instrument that can ultimately support policymaking to ensure their communities' short and long-term resilience under known and unknown hazardous events.

Making Communities More Flood Resilient: The Role of Cost Benefit Analysis and Other Decision-support Tools in Disaster Risk Reduction

2014

Given the series of large-scale flood disasters that have occurred in recent years, there is a growing recognition among community leaders, businesses, insurers, governments and international donors of the need to invest in risk reduction measures before such events happen. Due to the costs of risk reduction measures, these actions need to be justified and as a result there is an increasing need to utilize decision-support tools, which can help to make the case for action to reduce disaster risks and build flood resilience when faced with limited resources. Across stakeholders, the specific objectives from the use of decision-support tools include (i) demonstrating the efficiency of the action ex-ante (before the flood); (ii) aiding in the selection of a particular intervention in enhancing community flood resilience from a suite of possible options; (iii) helping communities make the right choice when faced with limited investments; (iv) demonstrating the benefits of donor funding ...

Validating Resilience and Vulnerability Indices in the Context of Natural Disasters

Risk Analysis, 2016

Due to persistent and serious threats from natural disasters around the globe, many have turned to resilience and vulnerability research to guide disaster preparation, recovery, and adaptation decisions. In response, scholars and practitioners have put forth a variety of disaster indices, based on quantifiable metrics, to gauge levels of resilience and vulnerability. However, few indices are empirically validated using observed disaster impacts and, as a result, it is often unclear which index should be preferred for each decision at hand. Thus, we compare and empirically validate five of the top U.S. disaster indices, including three resilience indices and two vulnerability indices. We use observed disaster losses, fatalities, and disaster declarations from the southeastern United States to empirically validate each index. We find that disaster indices, though thoughtfully substantiated by literature and theoretically persuasive, are not all created equal. While four of the five indices perform as predicted in explaining damages, only three explain fatalities and only two explain disaster declarations as expected by theory. These results highlight the need for disaster indices to clearly state index objectives and structure underlying metrics to support validation of the results based on these goals. Further, policy makers should use index results carefully when developing regional policy or investing in resilience and vulnerability improvement projects.

Spatial and temporal quantification of resilience at the community scale

Applied Geography, 2013

Indicators of natural disaster resilience are factors that impact the ability to cope with and adapt to a natural disaster and climate change events. They can either contribute to or detract from resilience. Existing research has emphasized the importance of quantifying resilience in order to estimate baseline resilience and measure progress toward resilience enhancement. Previous attempts at quantification of resilience have not incorporated place-specific indicators or differential weighting of indicators for prioritization of resilience enhancement actions. Previous research efforts have also not incorporated spatial and temporal contexts when attempting to quantify resilience indicators. This research demonstrates the importance for quantifying resilience place-specific indicators, differential weighting of indicators, and the spatial and temporal contexts of indicators for resilience estimation and quantification through a case study of Sarasota County, Florida. This case study was conducted in four phases: preliminary interviews, plan review, focus group, and spatial analysis. Preliminary interviews were intended to contribute to development of research goals. The plan review process served to identify Sarasota County's planning priorities to determine possible indicators of resilience unique to Sarasota County as well as existing and planned county hazard mitigation strategies. The focus group was concerned with identifying resilience indicators through a workshop with officials from Sarasota County. The spatial analysis portion used findings from all three previous phases to demonstrate spatial patterns of resilience. This research demonstrates that although national resilience quantification metrics are useful, local scale resilience estimates appear more useful if community hazard mitigation and climate change adaptation is the primary goal.

Analytically comparing disaster resilience across multiple dimensions

Socio-economic Planning Sciences, 2020

It is important to compare the resilience of complex human systems to different types of disasters, in order to assess their inherent vulnerabilities and take appropriate actions to strengthen them. Resilient behavior can be complicated and multi-dimensional, however, and one must be able to characterize the different ways in which that resilience actually exhibits itself in practice. With this in mind, this paper discusses creating a multi-dimensional indicator for the resilience of a complex human system, and it explores an approach for visualizing and analyzing the relationships between each of the individual resilience dimensions. Because decision makers may differ on the relative contribution of the different dimensions to overall resilience, the paper further discusses the issue of weighting the different dimension values and the impacts that such a weighting scheme can have on the relative ranking of different scenarios. We illustrate the ability to characterize the complexity of multi-dimensional resilience by analyzing an empirical data set that measures the relative resilience of the New York metropolitan area to seven different natural disasters between 2010 and 2012.

Disaster risk reduction, community resilience, and policy effectiveness: the case of the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program in the United States

Disasters, 2019

Resilience is the ability of an individual, a household, a community, a country or a region to withstand, to adapt, and to quickly recover from stresses and shocks. The concept of resilience has two dimensions: the inherent strength of an entity-an individual, a household, a community or a larger structure-to better resist stress and shock and the capacity of this entity to bounce back rapidly from the impact. Increasing resilience (and reducing vulnerability) can therefore be achieved either by enhancing the entity's strength, or by reducing the intensity of the impact, or both. It requires a multifaceted strategy and a broad systems perspective aimed at both reducing the multiple risks of a crisis and at the same time improving rapid coping and adaptation mechanisms at local, national and regional level. Strengthening

A QUANTITATIVE FRAMEWORK TO ASSESS COMMUNITIES' RESILIENCE AT THE STATE LEVEL

6th International Disaster and Risk Conference IDRC Davos 2016, 2016

This paper presents an analytical approach to assessing the resilience of communities and states based on the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA). The United Nations (UN) through their advancements in the Disaster Risk Reduction have released multiple international blueprints to help build the resilience of nations and communities, among which we mention the Hyogo Framework for Action and the Sendai Framework. The latter is still under development as the risk bases and the resilience indicators are yet to be defined. For this reason, the work presented here is built upon a complete HFA framework. A number of weighted indicators taken from HFA are used to compute resilience. Those indicators, however, do not affect the resilience index equally. This discrepancy necessitates the need to weigh the indicators on the basis of their individual contribution towards resilience. In order to achieve this, we have used the Dependence Tree Analysis (DTA). This method allows identifying the dependencies between the HFA indicators and the resilience index and evaluates in an unbiased way the weight factors of the different indicators. The paper is also proposing an analytic formulation to assess a new index, Bounce Back index (BBI), which combines both community’s Exposure, Hazard, and Resilience together. To illustrate the methodology in full details, a case study composed of 37 countries is presented in this paper, where the Resilience and the Bounce Back indexes of each country are evaluated.

A guide to develop community resilience performance goals and assessment metrics for decision making

2015

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is conducting outreach and research to develop a Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems and quantitative science-based assessment tools and metrics for community resilience. The research focuses on the performance and rapid recovery of the built environment to a functional level for significant hazard events, and the associated technical and social challenges. Major objectives include the development of a community-level methodology based on performance goals, quantitative sciencebased resilience assessment tools and metrics based on reliability and risk analysis, and guidance and pre-standard documents that can be adopted by communities and code and standard bodies to support rational public policies for mitigating risk to communities. Science-based decision support tools and metrics are needed to help communities evaluate the performance of built systems that support social and economic...