Risk-based resilience concentration assessment of community to seismic hazards

Abstract

Risk and resilience assessments have been both widely, but separately, used as tools for guiding policymakers to formulate disaster-risk reduction policies. On the one hand, risk assessment is utilized to estimate the risk associated with disasters in terms of operational metrics such as monetary or casualties’ loss; on the other hand, most resilience analysis assesses and represent community resilience as an index, without a specific unit metric, to gauge levels of disparity in community’s post-disaster recovery capability among the areas of interest. Although disaster-risk reduction policies should be best informed by both risk and resilience assessments, an informative integrated assessment approach accounting for both seems to be lacked in current research, insofar as the difficulty in properly integrating their distinct measurement metrics. This paper commences with a literature review of risk assessment and community resilience. It then proposes an integrated framework that can comprehensively assess both seismic risk and resilience, by taking into account the casualties and economic losses associated with earthquakes resulted from a risk assessment, and the infrastructure-system resilience and community socioeconomic–demographic resilience resulted from a resilience assessment. More specifically, an integrated tool, risk-based resilience-concentration curve, is proposed for assessing the inequality of given types of risk in the community’s infrastructure-system resilience, and socioeconomic–demographic resilience, respectively. A case study is presented using the data from a city in Israel: the first phase of the case study focused on the concentration of casualties’ risk in community’s infrastructure-system resilience, and the second on the concentration of economic risk in community’s socioeconomic–demographic resilience. The results show that unevenly distributed risk and community resilience can cause inequality of risk in resilience capacity in certain administrative tracts of the city. Based on these findings, the paper recommends a range of risk-reduction strategies for different administrative tracts based on their risk-based resilience concentration curves.