Adapting and Reacting to Measure an Extreme Event: A Methodology to Measure Disaster Community Resilience

The 2005 UN Hyogo Declaration introduced the concept of resilience in the field of disaster risk reduction (DRR) unifying environmental sustainability and civil protection concepts. Crucial in this new approach is the development of a new quantitative adaptive strategy, which starting from the risk analysis of a territory, aims at strengthening a symbiotic and adaptive relationship between human communities and their surrounds. This paradigmatic shift needs new analytical and measuring tools in order to describe, evaluate and develop sustainable DRR strategies. Traditional cartographic tools, such as hazard, vulnerability, or risk maps, cannot appropriately represent the overall resilience of a territory (inclusive of its social and environmental dimensions). This article proposes a methodological approach to map such community resilience by assessing energy and resource consumption to maintain the stability of the social-ecological system. Starting from the identification of the complex relations between socioeconomic processes and disasters, this method computes a resilience score or index, integrating hazard and vulnerability factors with emergency management actions (e.g. community planning, mitigation and disaster response capabilities). Such index will enable, inter-alia, the drawing of maps of resilience, necessary to planners and policy makers to assess the effects and sustainability of different DRR strategies and policies.