Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards

Monitoring Ecological Impacts – Concepts and Practice in Flowing Waters

Climate change potentially brings continuous and unpredictable changes in weather patterns. Consequently, it calls for institutions that promote the adaptive capacity of society and allow society to modify its institutions at a rate commensurate with the rate of environmental change. Institutions, traditionally conservative and reactive, will now have to support social actors to proactively respond through planned processes and deliberate steps, but also through cherishing and encouraging spontaneous and autonomous change, as well as allowing for institutional redesign. This paper addresses the question: How can the inherent characteristics of institutions to stimulate the capacity of society to adapt to climate change from local through to national level be assessed? On the basis of a literature review and several brainstorm sessions, this paper presents six dimensions: Variety, learning capacity, room for autonomous change, leadership, availability of resources and fair governance. These dimensions and their 22 criteria form the Adaptive Capacity Wheel. This wheel can help academics and social actors to assess if institutions stimulate the adaptive capacity of society to respond to climate change; and to focus on whether and how institutions need to be redesigned. This paper also briefly demonstrates the application of this Adaptive Capacity Wheel to different institutions.

The Adaptive Capacity Wheel: a method to assess the inherent characteristics of institutions to enable the adaptive capacity of society

The role of social resilience in disaster management continues to gain increasing attention and interest from both researchers and practitioners. This paper critically reviews existing frameworks and methods to understand their application in a disaster context, to highlight key challenges and future directions for developing robust social resilience assessment frameworks. The analysis revealed a lack of consistency in key concepts used to measure social resilience to disasters. This results in significant confusion in the way key concepts are understood, interpreted, and applied. Due to the multi-faceted nature of social resilience concepts, there are pronounced theoretical and practical difficulties in carrying out a rapid, but rational, accurate, and meaningful assessment of social resilience to disasters. Many of the key process-oriented indicators are not included in the existent social resilience frameworks, since they are not easy to operationalise due to their dynamic nature. Therefore, a comprehensive social resilience framework that can be adapted to different contexts and integrated with specific measurement tools and guidelines is necessary. Such a comprehensive framework can make resilience measurement consistent across geographies by adapting it with context specific resilience characteristics.

A critical review of social resilience assessment frameworks in disaster management

Resilience is a multifaceted phenomenon, and approaches to measure resilience across disciplines have produced wide-ranging methods. This paper presents an inclusive and adaptive ‘5S’ social resilience framework that was developed based on the critical review of existing social resilience frameworks discussed in the literature. The proposed social resilience framework consists of five sub-dimensions of social resilience, namely, social structure, social capital, social mechanisms, social equity, and social belief, a set of 16 characteristics, and corresponding 46 indicators. While the key social resilience characteristics are integrated within a single framework, it is flexible enough for adapting to a specific context as needed. Key challenges in resilience measurement approaches developed in disaster management context are also highlighted in this paper. The direct measures of social resilience are resource intensive. Hence, proxy measures have been widely used using data available in the public domain which often result in inadequate measurement of social resilience. It is imperative to explore use of surrogates in measuring social resilience characteristics that are complex and not easily measurable directly.

An inclusive and adaptive framework for measuring social resilience to disasters

Assessment of disaster resilience using an index is often a key element of natural hazard management and planning. Many assessments have been undertaken worldwide. Emerging from these are a set of seven common properties that should be considered in the design of any disaster resilience assessment: assessment purpose, top-down or bottom-up assessment, assessment scale, conceptual framework, structural design, indicator selection, data analysis and index computation and reporting and interpretation. We introduce the design of an Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index (ANDRI) according to the common properties of resilience assessment. The ANDRI takes a top-down approach using indicators derived from secondary data with national coverage. The ANDRI is a hierarchical design based on coping and adaptive capacities representing the potential for disaster resilience. Coping capacity is the means by which people or organizations use available resources, skills and opportunities to face adverse consequences that could lead to a disaster. Adaptive capacity is the arrangements and processes that enable adjustment through learning, adaptation and transformation. Coping capacity is divided into themes of social character, economic capital, infrastructure and planning, emergency services, community capital and information and engagement. Adaptive capacity is divided into themes of governance, policy and leadership and social and community engagement. Indicators are collected to determine the status of each theme. As assessments of disaster resilience develop worldwide, reporting of their design as standard practice will track knowledge generation in the field and enhance the relationship between applied disaster resilience assessment and foundational principles of disaster resilience.

https://cyberleninka.org/article/n/662918.pdf

Top-down assessment of disaster resilience: A conceptual framework using coping and adaptive capacities

This paper reports a national-scale assessment of disaster resilience, using the Australian Disaster Resilience Index. The index assesses resilience at three levels: overall capacity for disaster resilience; coping and adaptive capacity; and, eight themes of disaster resilience across social, economic and institutional domains. About 32% of Australia's population (7.6 million people) live in an area assessed as having high capacity for disaster resilience. About 52% of Australia's population (12.3 million people) live in an area assessed as having moderate capacity for disaster resilience. The remaining 16% of Australia's population (3.8 million people) live in an area assessed as having low capacity for disaster resilience. Distribution of disaster resilience in Australia is strongly influenced by a geography of remoteness. Most metropolitan and inner regional areas were assessed as having high capacity for disaster resilience. In contrast, most outer regional, remote and very remote areas were assessed as having low capacity for disaster resilience, although areas of low capacity for disaster resilience can occur in metropolitan areas. Juxtaposed onto this distribution, themes of disaster resilience highlight strengths and barriers to disaster resilience in different communities. For example, low community capital and social cohesion is a disaster resilience barrier in many metropolitan areas, but higher community capital and social cohesion in outer regional and some remote areas supports disaster resilience. The strategic intent of a shared responsibility for disaster resilience can benefit from understanding the spatial distribution of disaster resilience, so that policies and programmes can address systemic influences on disaster resilience.

https://rune.une.edu.au/web/bitstream/1959.11/30995/2/openpublished/DisasterParsonsReeveMcGregorMarshallMcNeillStaynerGlavac2021JournalArticle.pdf

Disaster resilience in Australia: A geographic assessment using an index of coping and adaptive capacity

Global and national strategy emphasises land use planning as a key mechanism for disaster risk reduction (DRR). The practice of planning for natural hazards is devolved to local levels, making the ...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02697459.2021.1919431

Local Government Capacity and Land Use Planning for Natural Hazards: A Comparative Evaluation of Australian Local Government Areas

The Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index: Conceptual framework and indicator Approach

This content was presented as a poster presentation. The poster is not available in the proceedings book, but can be found on the conference website: https://www.bnhcrc.com.au/events/2018-annual-conf

James McGregor

Papers

Top-down assessment of disaster resilience: A conceptual framework using coping and adaptive capacities

Disaster resilience in Australia: A geographic assessment using an index of coping and adaptive capacity

Local Government Capacity and Land Use Planning for Natural Hazards: A Comparative Evaluation of Australian Local Government Areas

The Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index: Conceptual framework and indicator Approach

The Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index