Japanese social capital and social vulnerability indices: Measuring drivers of community resilience 2000–2017

Abstract

Recently, scholars have turned to publicly available data to measure the resources and vulnerability of communities in the face of disasters [1,2]. However, when measuring community resilience to climate change, custom surveys of social capital are often costly or unfeasible to conduct for every community in a country. Despite suffering numerous disasters in the last thirty years, Japanese disaster scholarship lacks municipality-level measures of social capital and social vulnerability. This study uses publicly available data to develop new bonding, bridging, and linking social capital indices, paired with a new social vulnerability index, available for each of Japan's 1741 municipalities, using principal component analysis and validation techniques. Scholars and policymakers can directly apply these indices to evaluate the social capital or vulnerability of specific communities, compare across multiple communities, model their effect of outcomes, and better prepare for future disasters.