Development of a resilience measurement tool to evaluate the community resilience

Abstract

The frequency of disasters and emergencies has increased rapidly during the past few decades and it is necessary to conduct more research in this field to improve the knowledge levels and capacities of individuals/systems. And subsequently this can assist policy makers. Instead of managing disasters after the outbreak, in the present situation the researchers are more concerned about improving the resilience of communities to face impacts. Under this background, methods to measure community resilience are vital because it can be used to identify the vulnerable communities and resilience scores can be used in the decision-making process. To assist the process, this research aims to develop a universal tool to quantify the levels of resilience of communities to the impacts. From the literature, indicators which are relevant to resilience measurements were listed, suitable indicators were filtered and then the method of measurement was defined. Overall, 108 indicators have been listed on this scorecard under five main capital domains, including, social, economic, physical, human and environmental. This list was sent to the experts and the index was refined based on the expert comments. To provide the resilience score, two types of scoring methods (Community Resilience Scores - CRS1 and CRS2) have been introduced in this dissertation where the first method uses a general approach to calculate the resilience and the second method uses a more descriptive approach including the four main disaster management phases (Mitigation, Preparedness, Response and Recovery). The scoring method has been defined to calculate the overall resilience, resilience to floods and resilience to droughts. The method has not validated yet and open for researchers to test this method. However, applicability of the tool is explained using a few case studies and these cases show the overall resilience values, values for resilience for floods and droughts in some selected regions in Sri Lanka. From the case studies, the overall resilience values (CRS1) show that social and environmental resilience is higher in the rural areas compared to the urban areas while the economic and physical resilience is higher in the urban areas compared to the rural areas. According to the CRS2 the response stage shows lower scores in many of the selected regions. Similarly, using the values of the proposed two matrices (CRS1 and CRS2), gaps in the major capital domains in a given administrative region can be identified and this is important to undertake further developments and for allocation of resources. The proposed scoring method can be used to prepare resilience level maps and to identify vulnerable regions as well. The study can be extended to improve the index to measure the resilience to other disasters, including hurricanes, landslides, tsunamis and other coastal hazards.