Natural Disaster Resilience: An Urgent Need and Opportunity for ChileCNID and CREDENAugust 25, 2016

Social Vulnerability and Community Resilience Measurement and Tools

Susan L. Cutter

scutter@sc.eduhttp://artsandsciences.sc.edu/geog/hvri/

Vulnerability and

Resilience Science

• What circumstances place people and localities at risk?

• What enhances or reduces the ability to prepare for, respond to, recover from, successfully adapt to or anticipate environmental threats?

• How does vulnerability and resilience vary geographically and socially?

Vulnerability and ResilienceGoal: Provide scientific basis for disaster and hazardreduction policies through the development ofmethods and metrics for analyzing societalvulnerability and resilience to environmental hazardsand extreme events

Examples of broad concepts:

Special Needs populations

difficult to identify (infirm, transient) let alone measure; invariably left out of recovery efforts; often invisible in communities

Age (elderly and children)

affect mobility out of harm’s way; need special care; more susceptible to harm

Socioeconomic status (rich; poor)

ability to absorb losses and recover (insurance, social safety nets), but more material goods to lose

Race and ethnicity (non-white; non-Anglo)

impose language and cultural barriers; affect access to post-disaster recovery funding; tend to occupy high hazard zones

Gender (women)

gender-specific employment, lower wages, care-giving role

Family structure

female-headed households, people per household

Heinz Center, 2002. Human Links to Coastal Disasters. Washington D.C.: The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment.

Measuring Social Vulnerability

Identification of population characteristics that influence the social burdens of risk

How those factors affect the distribution of risks and losses

Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI)®

Identification of population characteristics that influence social burdens of risk (e.g. special needs, age, socioeconomic status, gender, housing type and tenure)

Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI®) 2010

Comparative metric using 30 variables

Measured from block to county levels

Identify multi-dimensional drivers

7 variables explain 72% variance in data (2010)

Amenable to cross cultural comparisons: Norway, Brazil, Indonesia, Lisbon, China

See Cutter et al. 2003. “Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards,” Social Science Quarterly 84 (1): 242-261.

Factors:

1. Poverty2. Urban/rural development 3. Migration4. Special needs population5. Race (Indian) and poor infrastructure6. Lack of public employment7. Tourism-base economy8. Racial diversity9. Population density10. Extractive industries

Hummell, B. M. de L., S. L. Cutter, and C. T. Emrich, 2016. “Social vulnerability to natural hazards in Brazil”. Intl. J. Disaster Risk Science 7:111-122.

Factors explain 67% of variance

SoVI® in Operation: South Carolina October 2015 Flooding

SoVI® coupled with FEMA verified loss counts tells the story of where resources are needed to support recovery.

Increasing Interest in Resilience

The Resilience Concept

Resilience can be an outcome (static), a process (dynamic) or both

Can have inherent or pre-existing resilience, also adaptive resilience

Applied to multiple scales and units of analysis (individual, group, sectors, systems

Inherent

Adaptive

EventProcess

Outcome

Many definitions of resilience: Bouncing back, bouncing forward

Resilience: Ability to prepare

and plan for, absorb, recover from or more successfully adapt to actual or potential adverse events (US NRC 2012)

What is Community Resilience?

HumanSystems

Natural Systems

Built Environment

andEngineered

Systems

Community: a broad range of scales of community organization (neighborhood to city, county, state, region, nation) with a set of interrelated systems (NRC 2012).

Resilience: Ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from or more successfully adapt to actual or potential adverse events

Resilience is NOT the flip-side (or opposite) of vulnerability

Top

Do

wn

Bo

tto

m U

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Characteristics Capacities

IndicesScorecards

Tools

Method

Method

Do

main

Do

mai

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Measuring Resilience: A messy landscape of options (indices, tools,

scorecards)

1. Method—top down or bottom up, qualitative or quantitative

2. Spatial—scale from local to global; unit of analysis ranges from individual to whole community

3. Focus—describing specific assets for resilience, determining broader baselines for places

4. Domain—examination of characteristics or attributes of places that foster resilience, or capacities (evaluation of performance or quality; abilities) to undertake resilience

Source: S.L. Cutter, 2015. The landscape of disaster resilience indicators in the United States, Natural Hazards, 80:741-758..

Creating a Baseline for Community Resilience

The Need:

How can you measure progress if you don’t have a starting point?

How do you know if programs have been effective or targets reached?

The Challenges:

Need for simplicity

Ability to replicate over time

Evidentiary-based

Meaningful from local to national scales

Components

• Social—age, educational level, special needs

• Economic—homeowners, employed, type of economic activity

• Infrastructure—shelters, road miles, medical facilities

• Institutional capacity—previous experience, municipal expenditures for emergency services

• Community capacity—social capital, innovation potential, attachment to place

• Environmental—wetlands, energy use, perviousness, water stress

Baseline Resilience Index for Communities (BRIC)

Natural Systems

InherentVulnerability

InherentResilience

Science of Resilience Indicators: Putting it all Together

Procedures • Scale values from 0 to 1 where 0

reduces resilience; 1 increases resilience (called linear min-max scaling where X-min/max-min)

• Scores theoretically range from 0 to 49 (all variables); or from 0 to 6 (using sub-indices)

• Create means of each sub-index (to reduce impact of different number of variables within each subindex)

• Sum sub-index means for overall score

Data Use existing national data from

Census, other government agencies

Need periodic updates (every 3-5 years)

Enumeration unit varies (census tract to county to state) depending on purpose

Scaling Example

=

=

=

=

Normalization

Category Weighting SchemesWeighting

49 Total VariablesSocial=10 variablesEconomic=8 variablesCommunity=7 variablesInstitutional=10 variablesHousing/Infrastructure=9 variablesEnvironmental=5 variables

Social

Economic

CommunitycompetenceInstitutional

Housing/Infrastructure

20%

16%

14%20%

18%

10%

Social

Economic

Communitycompetence

Institutional

Housing/Infrastructure

Environmental

8.17

8.17

8.17

8.178.17

8.17

Unequal

Equal

Disaster resilience index (BRIC) for the contiguous United States, 2010

Cutter, S. L., K. D. Ash, and C. T. Emrich, 2014. The geographies of disaster resilience. Global Environmental Change 29: 65-77.

Community Disaster Resilience

Composite of six broad categories influencing community disaster resilience

A. Social B. EconomicC. Community CapitalD. InstitutionalE. Housing/InfrastructureF. Environmental

Not the resilience of each of category but how these characteristics contribute to overall community resilience

A single, one-size metric for all facets of resilience may not work at the bottom-up community scale.

Lots of tools out there, few are used (too complex, too simple, not known…..)

Communities have potential to develop or adapt simple measurement systems/tools to gauge their own baselines.

Measurement tools are helpful in identifying disaster risk, taking steps toward reducing it, assessing how they are doing, and getting stakeholders to work together.

Why Resilience Measurement?

A resilience measurement tool can help by Assessing/prioritizing needs and goals Establishing baselines for monitoring progress and recognizing

success Understanding costs (investments) and benefits (results) Evaluating the effects of different policies/approaches

Measurement tools cannot create a resilient community, but they can help show the path towards becoming safer, stronger, and more vibrant in the face of unanticipated events.

BUT

Muchas Gracias!

REFERENCES

Cutter et al. 2003. “Social vulnerability to environmental hazards,” Social Science Quarterly 84 (1): 242-261.

Cutter, S. L., K. D. Ash, and C. T. Emrich, 2014. “The geographies of disaster resilience,” Global Environmental Change 29: 65-77.

Cutter, S.L., 2015. “The landscape of disaster resilience indicators in the United States,” Natural Hazards, 80:741-758.

Heinz Center, 2002. Human Links to Coastal Disasters. Washington D.C.: The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment.

Hummell, B. M. de L., S. L. Cutter, and C. T. Emrich, 2016. “Social vulnerability to natural hazards in Brazil,” Intl. J. Disaster Risk Science 7:111-122.

National Research Council, 2012. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative. Washington DC: National Academies Press.