Developing Resilience to Natural Hazards—A Challenge for Community as a System -

Abstract

In a community, technical systems act together interdependently with socio-economic systems making it the overall community system as a complex system. The relationship among various sub-systems is non-linear and complex. Although interdependence among technical systems can be quantified to some degree, it is difficult to capture it in totality as actions by various stakeholders are involved in operations and the behavior of the system changes based on the feedback from these actions. On a broader basis, resiliency can be thought of as originating from two disparate areas: system design and operations. Developing greater resilience in each technical system, economic system, and social system is critical to minimize the impact of natural hazards. Developing resilience in technical system is entirely different than developing resilience in economic or social system. By the very definition, community resiliency is multi-disciplinary, and multi-stakeholder dependent, thus developing community resiliency as a unified approach is challenging. The focus of this paper is on long –term actions by various stakeholders to develop community resiliency. GENERAL When a natural hazard occurs, community is adversely impacted. The impact on the community depends on the magnitude of the hazard, duration of the hazard, the location of the community with respect to the hazard and the vulnerability of the community. Community, on a broader basis can be considered as comprising of technical systems, social systems, economic systems and organizational systems. Community preparedness to deal with a hazard also depends upon its perception of the risk due to a particular natural hazard. For example, if the probability of a hazard is low, the community may not invest the necessary resources in preparedness. Mitigation of the built environment is necessary to minimize the damage. However, mitigation has upfront costs and the community may not allocate the necessary resources for mitigation due to priorities in other areas that are socially and politically more important, thus leaving the community built environment vulnerable to the effects of a hazard.