Abstract
Resilience has become important in disaster preparedness and response. Unfortunately, little is known about resilience at the household level. This study presents the results of a survey into individual and household level preparedness to disaster events in Yangon, Myanmar, which is prone to natural disasters such as tropical cyclones, flooding, and earthquakes. The study aimed to understand societal resilience and to provide information that could be used to develop a holistic framework. In four different Yangon townships, 440 households were interviewed. The results of the survey indicate how risk preparedness could be improved by specific measures related to the following five factors: (1) increasing the general public’s knowledge of first aid and its role in preparedness; (2) improving mobile phone infrastructure and capacity building in its usage so that it can be used for communication during disasters, along with building up a redundant communication structure; (3) better use and organisation of volunteer potential; (4) more specific involvement of religious and public buildings for disaster response; and (5) developing specific measures for improving preparedness in urban areas, where the population often has reduced capacities for coping with food supply insufficiencies due to the high and immediate availability of food, shops and goods in regular times. The findings of this survey have led to specific recommendations for Yangon. The identified measures represent a first step in developing a more general framework. Future research could investigate the transferability of these measures to other areas and thus their suitability as a basis for a framework.
Highlights
In recent years, the term resilience has been used increasingly in many fields of society and in the science and practitioners’ communities dealing with disaster risk reduction, sustaina‐ ble development, and climate change adaptation (Folke et al 2002; Alexander 2013; Etinay et al 2018; Leal Filho et al 2018; Woodruff et al 2018; Elmqvist et al 2019)
3.1 Household survey In February 2020, imminently before the CoViD-19 pandemic, a household survey on private disaster preparedness and the willingness to volunteer in disaster preparedness was conducted in the City of Yangon
The townships are prone to flooding due to high precipitation during the monsoon season and river floods or to high-tide during and after tropical cyclones and flooding by blocked drainages
Summary
The term resilience has been used increasingly in many fields of society and in the science and practitioners’ communities dealing with disaster risk reduction, sustaina‐ ble development, and climate change adaptation (Folke et al 2002; Alexander 2013; Etinay et al 2018; Leal Filho et al 2018; Woodruff et al 2018; Elmqvist et al 2019). Acknowledging that systems can have multiple equilibriums, ecological resilience is based on the understanding that recovery does not necessarily mean returning to the initial condi‐ tion; it is more likely to lead to new quasi-stable system states (“bouncing forward”) (Holl‐ nagel et al 2006; Hollnagel 2013). This concept of resilience was later extended to socioecological systems, providing a conceptual framework of nested systems interacting with each other across scales (panarchy) (Holling and Gunderson 2002). Resilience is understood more as a process of transformation and adaptation, facilitated by learning and remembering from past transformations
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