Building disaster resilience through emergency Plan updates: A case study of Ya'an, China

Abstract

Developing and updating emergency plans are crucial for enhancing disaster resilience. While extensive attention has been devoted to the technical aspects of plan updates, there is a notable gap in discourse from a policy perspective, particularly one centred on resilience. To delve into how emergency plan updates can effectively contribute to bolstering disaster resilience, this research proposes a conceptual framework that views the emergency plan update process as a complex adaptive system and seeks to elucidate the resilient traits inherent to such systems. We selected the Ya'an earthquake emergency plan updates as a representative case, drawing upon primary and secondary data sources. The research findings derived from content and social network analyses indicate that institutional and organisational resilience can be significantly improved by streamlining the update process, refining plan content, and optimising plan-based networks. Furthermore, this study offers two recommendations for fortifying disaster resilience via plan updates: 1) drawing insights from past disaster response experiences; 2) promoting the continuous production and integration of emergency management knowledge. This research offers a fresh perspective for analysing the process of building disaster resilience and provides valuable insights for the global disaster resilience community.