GIS‑based approach for evaluating a community intrinsic resilience index
This study aims to capture the information about resilience into a Community Intrinsic Resilience Index (CIRI), which embodies the resilience level of four critical sectors: transportation, energy, health and socio-economic. Current indices evaluating community resilience have the shortcoming that they compare between political entities, such as counties. Therefore, one cannot ascertain that a county is truly resilient. In addition, natural disasters depend on the landscape and thus have no relation to the political boundaries. As a case study, the CIRI is computed for the counties within New Jersey (NJ).
The study finds that that within NJ, CIRI ranged from 63 to 80%. Typically, counties that include cities have large health scores (number of beds, doctors, etc.) but low socio-economic scores. Post-disaster CIRI values for coastal counties, meanwhile, showed that CIRI of one county dropped to 30%. The main contribution of CIRI within the field of resilience application is that the quantification is based on geographic information systems (GIS), considering that disasters are cross-regional, and assessing resilience should go beyond political boundaries. Moreover, having a GIS solution to compute resilience is crucial, as it would enable officials to efficiently examine and assess community preparedness to disasters, which would lead to a better disaster risk management. The use of GIS for resilience quantification can make a significant contribution toward filling the gap between the research and the practice part of community resilience.