Spatial and temporal quantification of resilience at the community scale

Abstract

Indicators of natural disaster resilience are factors that impact the ability to cope with and adapt to a natural disaster and climate change events. They can either contribute to or detract from resilience. Existing research has emphasized the importance of quantifying resilience in order to estimate baseline resilience and measure progress toward resilience enhancement. Previous attempts at quantification of resilience have not incorporated place-specific indicators or differential weighting of indicators for prioritization of resilience enhancement actions. Previous research efforts have also not incorporated spatial and temporal contexts when attempting to quantify resilience indicators. This research demonstrates the importance for quantifying resilience place-specific indicators, differential weighting of indicators, and the spatial and temporal contexts of indicators for resilience estimation and quantification through a case study of Sarasota County, Florida. This case study was conducted in four phases: preliminary interviews, plan review, focus group, and spatial analysis. Preliminary interviews were intended to contribute to development of research goals. The plan review process served to identify Sarasota County's planning priorities to determine possible indicators of resilience unique to Sarasota County as well as existing and planned county hazard mitigation strategies. The focus group was concerned with identifying resilience indicators through a workshop with officials from Sarasota County. The spatial analysis portion used findings from all three previous phases to demonstrate spatial patterns of resilience. This research demonstrates that although national resilience quantification metrics are useful, local scale resilience estimates appear more useful if community hazard mitigation and climate change adaptation is the primary goal.