Resilience Assessment at the State Level Using the Sendai Framework

Abstract

The multitude of uncertainties of both natural and man-made disasters have prompted an increased attention in resilience engineering and disaster management. To overcome the effects of disastrous events, such as economic and social effects, modern communities need to be resilient. Natural disasters are unpredictable and unavoidable. While it is not possible to prevent them and protect individuals and societies against such disasters, modern communities should be prepared by incorporating both pre-event (preparedness and mitigation) and post-event (response and recovery) resilience activities to minimize the negative effects after a severe event. Resilience indicators may be fundamental to help the planners and decision-makers to develop strategies and action plans for making communities more resilient. This chapter presents a quantitative approach to estimate the resilience and resilience-based risk at the state level. In the proposed method, the resilience-based risk is a function of resilience, hazard, and exposure. To evaluate the resilience parameter, data provided by the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) are used. The framework is developed using resilience indicators with the primary goal of achieving disaster risk reduction. To use those indicators in the resilience assessment, it is necessary to define the impact and the contribution of each indicator towards resilience. To do that, two possible methods to combine and weight the different SFDRR indicators are presented: Dependence Tree Analysis (DTA) and Spider Plot Weighted Area Analysis (SPA). The proposed approach allows the decision-makers and governments to evaluate the resilience and the related resilience-based risk (RBR) of their countries using available information.