Towards measuring resilience of flood-prone communities: a conceptual framework

ECU Author/Contributor (non-ECU co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)

Victor O.,Montz,Burrell E. Oladokun (Creator)

Institution

East Carolina University (ECU )

Web Site: http://www.ecu.edu/lib/

Abstract: Community resilience has become an importantpolicy and research concept for understanding and addressing the challenges associated with the interplay of climatechange, urbanization, population growth, land use, sustainability, vulnerability and increased frequency of extremeflooding. Although measuring resilience has been identifiedas a fundamental step toward its understanding and effective management, there is, however, lack of an operationalmeasurement framework due to the difficulty of systematically integrating socioeconomic and techno-ecological factors. The study examines the challenges, constraints andconstruct ramifications that have complicated the development of an operational framework for measuring resilienceof flood-prone communities. Among others, the study highlights the issues of proliferation of definitions and conceptual frameworks of resilience, challenges of data availability, data variability and data compatibility. Adopting the National Academies" definition of resilience, a conceptual andmathematical model was developed using the dimensions,quantities and relationships established by the definition. Afuzzy logic equivalent of the model was implemented to generate resilience indices for three flood-prone communitiesin the United States. The results indicate that the proposedframework offers a viable approach for measuring community flood resilience, even when there is a limitation on dataavailability and compatibility.

Additional Information

Publication

Other

Language: English

Date: 2019

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