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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the article titled Measuring community disaster resilience in the Latvian context: an apply case using a composite indicator approach from 2016 by Maksism Feofilovs and Fancesco Romagnoli presented at the International Scientific Conference “Environmental and Climate Technologies” in Riga, Latvia. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to investigate resilience from the community perspective. This article investigates community resilience to man-made and natural disasters based on a previously developed framework in the case of Latvia.

The authors started with the acknowledgement of increasing disasters globally which creates important debates and questions within research and policy areas. The disasters include technological ones, the climate change and its effects, or earthquakes, among others. These catastrophes are said to be more and more frequent and severe. Therefore, it is crucial to increase society’s resilience, but future research is needed to increase number of innovations in this field.

Based on the previous casualties or disasters, communities are not resilient enough to natural disaster. This means that there is a lack of capacity to withstand disasters that require an in-sight effort from different key actors, including research, policy and disaster risk reduction fields.

The general definition of resilience can be identified as a system’s ability to

1. Withstand external and unexpected conditions within the minimum sustainable level performance
2. Further actively respond to those conditions
3. And recover after them.

Based on these aspects, methods to assess disaster resilience have been developed both in quantitative and qualitative terms. However, using the recovery or bounce-back to an initial level is not always applicable, as the recovery might reach a lower level but stable state.

Resilient assessments are an important preventive tool oriented towards: the minimization of the total effect of a disaster, mitigation of the economic losses, minimization of recovery time after a disaster, and thus speeding up the rate at which a community or system can regain its functionality. Unfortunately, these assessments and the scientific field behind disaster resilience is still in development and it lacks applied practical studies and holistic comparative approaches.

The disaster resilient assessment needs to be indicator based to be properly measurable. However, due to the time factor as the situations change over time this is not an easy task. There are two aspects which need attention by any set of indicators: the large diversity and multi- and inter-dimensions of the community system, such as societal, human, economic, technical and environmental, affected by the disaster. Rarely do disaster resilient assessments work with the human and community factor.

To bridge this gap, the authors proposed to use a specific method from Mayunga adopted to the Latvian situation. The Mayunga method is oriented to providing a holistic composite index score for the measure of a community’s disaster resilience, taking into account both the different phases of a disaster, like mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, and the potential dimensions of resources that can be mobilized, such as the social, human, economic, physical, and environmental capitals. Therefore, the final Community Disaster Resilience Index, CDRI is the result of a conceptual model based on the theory of composite indicators and involving the definition of the main capital domains and its sub-indicators with proper standardisation and weighting and assessing the results validity and reliability.

There are five main domains by Mayunga. The first is the social capital indicating the social cooperation and links and networks within the community with nine indicators. The economic capital includes the financial resources and the level of their mobilizability throughout the disaster phases with six indicators. Physical capital is devoted to the built environment as the key resource for enhancing resilience due to infrastructures helping evacuation or safety of minimum functioning with 35 indicators. Human capital addressed mostly the support of economic production, meaning the capabilities of people working together and sharing other forms of capitals, while also reinforcing the knowledge capacity on risk assessment and risk reduction strategies with 25 indicators. Finally, the environment capital refers to the natural resources, such as water, minerals and oil, and their ecosystem for maintaining clear water and air, for example. In total, 75 indicators were selected. Afterwards, the standardisation and weighting took place, also understanding the different phases of a disaster – the mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.

With these methods, the authors proposed to comparatively evaluate the community resilience to natural hazards of six macro regions of Latvia: the Riga region, Around Riga region, Kurzeme, Vidzeme, Latgale, and Zemgale regions. The whole Latvian territory represents a good case study since it provides a scheme for planners and emergency managers toward enhancing local community coping capacities and promotes disaster resilience evaluation methods.

The results were addressed to show and analyse the spatial distribution of the Community Disaster Resilience Index or CDRI scores and their components by mapping community resilience across the investigated Latvian regions. Through the reliability assessment and internal consistency agreements, 55 of the original 75 were applied for these regions. This paper only focuses on the referenced CDRI scores where all the five capital dimensions, social, economic, physical, human and environmental, were selected among the four disaster phases – mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.

According to the findings, there are relevant correlations among specific capitals, namely, economic and physical capitals, and human and social capitals. This is almost “a priori” predictable and expected, as we can assume that areas with more developed infrastructure in the physical capital and high population with bigger human capital tend to have higher CDRI scores. Thus, Riga region has a higher CDRI score than others due to its higher density population and economic activity that follow and relied on more developed infrastructures and more important social capitals that can be mobilized. The Around Riga region enjoys the second place due to its connection to the Riga region. For the other regions, the resilience level remains relatively low compared to these two. This situation is relied mainly on the different levels of urbanisation across the country.

However, there are differences in the details. By social and economic capital, the Riga region is the most resilient due to the economic development of Latvia, while other parts show low scores in these capitals. The physical capital is better divided between Riga and its around region, but low scores were present in Zemgale and Latgale. Human capital was also strongest in Riga and almost mirrored the physical capital CDRI results, confirming the strong connection among physical and human capital. The environmental capital showed a different picture, however, mainly due to the lower amounts of natural resources of the urbanised regions. Vidzeme and Latgale regions obtained the highest environmental capital scores due to their large forests and farm lands, lakes and animals.

This study represents a promising valuable tool to provide information to planners, emergency managers and infrastructure managers on how and where to potentially implement measure for enhancing resilience. Nevertheless, the authors advocated for further research to better evaluate potential feedback effects among the considered set of indicators as well as conducting further in-depth validation of the measures provided.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Disasters are becoming more and more frequent and sever, and resilience against them can be a crucial attribute to a community.
2. Disasters have four phases through which the resilience can be increased: mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.
3. Disaster resilience can be approached from the five main capitals: economic, social, physical, human and environmental, and their sub-indicators, and based on these, preparation and planning can be done accordingly for disasters.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. Have we become better at disaster resilience? Have our policy makers and our urban managers and planners become better at disaster resilience? How can we increase urban resilience?
2. What do you think about your own area – how resilient are you and your community?
3. What can you do to be more resilient to disasters?

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