Disaster resilience quantification of communities: A risk-based approach

Abstract

Community and infrastructure resilience against natural and man-made hazards is paramount for the well-being of modern societies. To adapt to the fast-changing world, having communities that can effectively respond to the continuously changing (physical and social) environment is essential. Despite the existing literature on resilience definition and estimation, few frameworks and associated tools can effectively help decision-making. In addition, these tools are usually not well integrated into the community and infrastructure management processes so that decision-makers and authorities can effectively use them. This paper aims at developing a resilience-based risk assessment approach at the community level. It combines the risk analysis parameters with the intrinsic resilience of the community. The proposed approach offers essential insights into the quantitative resilience analysis of communities at different scales and for different natural hazards. It enables the combination of the risk parameters (hazard, exposure, and vulnerability) with the inherent resilience of all the systems that constitute a community. This paper also presents an easy-to-interpret tool for visualizing the resilience results obtained from the introduced approach. It translates the paper's scientific contribution into an interactive and visualization instrument that can ultimately support policymaking to ensure their communities' short and long-term resilience under known and unknown hazardous events.