Measuring Community Disaster Resilience in the Conterminous Coastal United States

Shaikh Rifat,Weibo Liu

doi:10.3390/ijgi9080469

Shaikh Rifat, Weibo Liu

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi9080469

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Abstract

In recent years, building resilient communities to disasters has become one of the core objectives in the field of disaster management globally. Despite being frequently targeted and severely impacted by disasters, the geographical extent in studying disaster resilience of the coastal communities of the United States (US) has been limited. In this study, we developed a composite community disaster resilience index (CCDRI) for the coastal communities of the conterminous US that considers different dimensions of disaster resilience. The resilience variables used to construct the CCDRI were justified by examining their influence on disaster losses using ordinary least squares (OLS) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) models. Results suggest that the CCDRI score ranges from −12.73 (least resilient) to 8.69 (most resilient), and northeastern communities are comparatively more resilient than southeastern communities in the study area. Additionally, resilience components used in this study have statistically significant impact on minimizing disaster losses. The GWR model performs much better in explaining the variances while regressing the disaster property damage against the resilience components (explains 72% variance) than the OLS (explains 32% variance) suggesting that spatial variations of resilience components should be accounted for an effective disaster management program. Moreover, findings from this study could provide local emergency managers and decision-makers with unique insights for enhancing overall community resilience to disasters and minimizing disaster impacts in the study area.

Highlights

Natural hazards are considered as one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century around the globe
Since the geographically weighted regression (GWR) model accounts for the geographical location and variations in the data, the influence of the independent variables varies across the study area
We first measured the overall disaster resilience of the coastal communities in the United States (US) based on the variables that has been used in previous studies and represent five different dimensions of disaster resilience by creating composite index scores of community resilience using Principal component analysis (PCA)

Summary

Introduction

Natural hazards are considered as one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century around the globe. Disasters have increased both in frequency and severity over the last few decades, causing unparalleled damage to properties and loss of human lives [1,2,3]. Communities in the coastal areas are vulnerable to natural hazards that are concentrated along the coast [4,5]. As well as increased human activities such as rapid urbanization and population growth, act as drivers of natural hazard impacts; especially in the coastal regions. Identifying the principal factors that make these communities less vulnerable and more resilient to coastal hazards is extremely important for disaster preparedness and mitigation

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