A measurement framework of community recovery to earthquake: a Wenchuan Earthquake case study

Abstract

This paper builds a measurement framework of community recovery to earthquake as a way to measure the recovery capacity and performance of local government. First, the paper examines and documents the concept of community recovery to summarize the evidence on dimensions and indicators of community recovery. And four dimensions of community recovery—population, economy, building, and infrastructure, are established on the basis of interviewing the organizational specialists on post-disaster recovery and reconstruction. Second, this paper extents the concept of the resilience triangle to propose a two-stage stochastic program for building a measurement framework of community recovery. Third, this measurement framework is demonstrated for Wenchuan Community, China, in the context of earthquake. The results illustrate that the four dimensions of Wenchuan Community achieve vastly different recovery levels, and the economy has the lowest recovery level, which provides a robust basis to prioritize dimensions of community recovery, and reinforces the vital role and position of local governments in improving the community recovery.