A review of resilience variables in the context of disasters

Abstract

The increasing impacts of disasters, caused by more frequent extreme events coupled with the growth of adverse anthropogenic activities, has raised the importance of fostering more resilient communities. Measuring resilience is a vital step in the process of building and strengthening a community’s resilience as it helps with identifying the priorities and monitoring the progress. The objective of the current research is to catalog variables proposed in the literature as measures of households’ resilience to disasters. Searching the literature through content analysis and applying three selection criteria resulted in a list of 149 variables. These criteria required the variables to be influential on disaster resilience of households, to be quantitatively measurable, and to be obtainable from publicly available data sources. Additionally, a selection of resilience and vulnerability assessment models suggested in the literature were reviewed to highlight the importance of resilience variables in addressing their planned objectives. The variables were classified into five categories titled demographic, socioeconomic, infrastructural, environmental, and institutional. Further analysis of the variables led to identification of the most prevalent variables and commonalities among the categories, aimed to provide a more integrated approach toward resilience planning. This research can serve as an initial yet relatively extensive inventory for selecting variables that are deemed to be influential on households’ resilience to extreme events. Further, quantifying a community’s resilience using resilience variables can help with identifying and prioritizing the resilience needs, monitoring the progress, and justifying the costs of resilience programs.