A Social Vulnerability Index for Disaster Management

Abstract

Regulatory agencies have long adopted a three-tier framework for risk assessment. We build on this structure to propose a tiered approach for resilience assessment that can be integrated into the existing regulatory processes. Comprehensive approaches to assessing resilience at appropriate and operational scales, reconciling analytical complexity as needed with stakeholder needs and resources available, and ultimately creating actionable recommendations to enhance resilience are still lacking. Our proposed framework consists of tiers by which analysts can select resilience assessment and decision support tools to inform associated management actions relative to the scope and urgency of the risk and the capacity of resource managers to improve system resilience. The resilience management framework proposed is not intended to supplant either risk management or the many existing efforts of resilience quantification method development, but instead provide a guide to selecting tools that are appropriate for the given analytic need. The goal of this tiered approach is to intentionally parallel the tiered approach used in regulatory contexts so that resilience assessment might be more easily and quickly integrated into existing structures and with existing policies.

Mapping Social Vulnerability to Air Pollution: A Case Study of the Yangtze River Delta Region, China

“…For older people, comorbidity, physical fragility and less appropriate immune responses decrease their coping capacity. Source: [10,29,[53][54][55][56].…”

Measuring Social Vulnerability to Flood Disasters in China

“…Female percentage % Adger [17]; Cutter et al [4] China Population and Employment Statistics Yearbook [44] Proportion of population over 60 years old % Cutter et al [4] Proportion of children under 14 years old % Cutter et al [4] Demographic density population per km 2 Cutter and Finch [3] The number of mining workers out of a population of 10,000 Cutter et al [4] The number of workers in the primary industry out of a population of 10,000 Cutter and Finch [3] Unemployment rate % Cutter et al [4] Ethnic minority population % Cutter et al [4] Number of people receiving minimum income assistance Flanagan et al [42] Sustainability 2018, 10, 2676 12 of 14 Table A1. Cont.…”

“…Divorce rate % Holand et al [41] Illiteracy rate % Brooks et al [43] The number of people with tertiary level education or above out of a population of 1000 Flanagan et al [42] Number of college students out of a population of 1000 Flanagan et al [42] Number of disasters per year Gallopin [9] China Meteorological Disaster Yearbook [45] Appendix B…”

Assessing Social and Territorial Vulnerability on Real Estate Submarkets

“…In particular, we focused our attention on the concept of social vulnerability, which is widely studied in literature in order to identify the particularly socially fragile sectors of the population which are usually more heavily impacted by environmental hazards [22][23][24][25][26][27].…”