Building resilience: Mainstreaming community participation into integrated assessment of resilience to climatic hazards in metropolitan land use management

Abstract

Building resilience is critical for metropolitan land use planning to strengthen the ability to cope with and minimize climatic disaster risks. Challenges still remain for metropolitan agencies in identifying the components or metrics for measuring resilience. Particularly, uncertainties in climate change and diversification in local contexts compel urban planners to mainstream community participation, indigenous knowledge and local attributes into the resilience assessment. This article aims to propose a novel methodology for assessing resilience, which can encourage stakeholder participation and communicate planners in shaping metropolitan land use policies. Using the Taichung metropolis, Taiwan as the study area, this article created a resilience metric called the Climatic Hazard Resilience Indicators for Localities (CHRIL) that is appropriate for use in a policy context. Then, this metric combined a fuzzy multicriteria decision analysis with a participatory geographic information system approach to measure and map resilience to climatic hazards. Through the participation of experts, local officers and community members, a multivariate analysis was applied to explain why low resilience areas occur in specific locations. Moreover, we performed a cluster analysis to group the areas into several types of resilience and revealed the relationship between the resilience factors and overall local development patterns. Results show that conflicts and tradeoffs may exist between some resilience factors, especially socioeconomic vulnerability and adaptive capacity. The findings provide stakeholders and policy-makers with a better governance structure to design and synthesize appropriate patchworks of planning measures for different types of resilience areas to reduce climatic hazard risks.