Development and Validation of a Neighbourhood Disaster Resilience Index : A Case Study from Australia

Abstract

Since the adoption of the Hyogo Framework for Action in 2005 ‘Building the resilience of nations and communities to disasters’, the concept of disaster resilience has attracted substantial attention among researchers and practitioners. Although recent disaster literature refers to resilience as a managerial principle of an effective disaster risk management, there are still critical challenges in making resilience operational and adopting it in planning and decision making. Currently available resilience measurement frameworks are mostly focused on large spatial scales such as sub- national/regional levels and do not meet the local needs of designers and planners, while communities are the focus of mitigation and recovery planning, with unique local socio-economic and physical characteristics, and inherent adaptation potential. More specifically, urban form characteristics are assumed by several studies to contribute to the disaster resilience of communities. However, such an assumption has not been examined empirically and urban form factors are mostly under-represented in the resilience models. In addition, sensitivity, reliability and validity of the resilience models have not been addressed comprehensively, and when it comes to the Australian context, resilience models have not been validated at all. The purpose of this dissertation is to address the above gaps through (1) development of a Neighbourhood Disaster Resilience Index (NDRI) with emphasise on resilience attributes within community elements; and (2) validation of the proposed index (NDRI) by assessing the extent to which it contributes to real-world recovery outcomes and pathways following the 2011 floods in the Brisbane and Ipswich neighbourhoods, using readily available longitudinal reconstruction data.