Authors : Chethika Abenayake, Mikami Yoshiki and Matsuda Yoko
Abstract: Community resilience assessment methodologies play a vital role in decision-making for building community’s resilience to disasters. Established resilience indicators can gain decision-maker’s confidence on assessment methods. Hence, this study attempts to assess the validity and adequacy of a set of geospatial indicators extracted from existing methodologies. First, the study extracts 29 geospatial indicators to assess community resilience to floods and applies them for 23 divisions in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Second, this study plots the affected population data by division into system performance curves concerning the flood occurred in May, 2016. Third, the study develops system performance curve-based measures to quantify the three capacities of community resilience: transformative capacity, absorptive capacity and recovery capacity. Then the study statistically tests the association of geospatial indicators with each of the system-performance measures. The study has obtained spatial data for mapping geospatial indicators from national databases and the affected community data from the records of disaster management officers. Findings revealed 16 indicators having significant association with system-performance measures and the results discuss the ambiguities and cohesive nature of indicators regarding different capacities. This study has established a pilot initiative to validate a set of geospatial indicators where many of the practicing community assessment tools have little or no geospatial indicators. Furthermore, this study applies a set of system performance curve-based measures to externally validate the community resilience capacities. Therefore, the study contributes with comprehensions to make community resilience assessments tools more powerful in guiding communities towards resilience.
Chethika Abenayake, Mikami Yoshiki and Matsuda Yoko, 2018. Validate Geospatial Indicators for Assessing Community Resilience Capacities to Floods; A System-Performance-Based Approach. Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 13: 4949-4960.