Analysing community needs and skills for enhancing disaster resilience in the built environment

Abstract

Purpose -A better cooperation among all the stakeholders working towards enhancing the disaster resilience of societies can only be achieved if the expectations or the needs of each stakeholder are understood. This study attempts to outline the needs of communities affected by disasters for the purpose of aligning the needs and skill requirements with the abilities of built environment professionals serving these communities. Therefore, the study aims to identify and describe community needs and skill requirements for enhancing disaster resilience.Design/methodology/approach -The study adopted literature review and semi-structured interviews. The semi-structured interviews were conducted with key members of some communities affected by disasters as well as some of the professionals that participated in the restoration/reconstruction of those communities. Data obtained were analysed using Nvivo 10. Findings -The study revealed the current and emerging needs and skills of communities related to the built environment professionals towards enhancing disaster resilience. Thus, twenty nine classifications of skill and needs were derived and classified under five major disaster resilience dimensions to include social, economic, technological, environmental and institutional.Research limitations/implications-This study focuses only of the needs and skills of the 'community', which is the major stakeholder that are basically the receiver of all what other stakeholders in disaster resilience have to offer.Practical implications -This study would be beneficial to the built environment professionals involved in disaster resilience to be aware of the specific needs and skills of the communities affected by disasters for the purpose of developing their competences.Originality/value -The study findings would be useful for both the built environment professionals and higher education institutions (HEIs). Since it is important for professionals to update and upgrade their knowledge towards enhancing their capabilities and meeting the expectations of stakeholders towards enhancing societal resilience to disasters across all domains of resilience.

A systematic literature review of community disaster resilience: main and related research areas and agendas

“…This type of approach was in line with case studies and field studies such as observation, documentation and categorization of the phenomena. These data was elicited from interview (Perera et al, 2017;Pollock et al, 2019;Rahman and Kausel, 2012;Drolet et al, 2015;O'Neill et al, 2016), semi-structured interviews (Houston et al, 2019), group interview (Alaedini et al, 2011;Arneson et al, 2017;Comes et al, 2019), in-depth interviews (Gultom and Joyce, 2014;Cretney, 2016), focus group (Golding et al, 2020;Mosley et al, 2012), field work (Murphy et al, 2014), forum design (Wells et al, 2013;Berke et al, 2011;Dufty, 2017), content analysis (Firdhous and Karuratane, 2018;Herath et al, 2020;Hong et al, 2018), participatory action research (Miles, 2018), document analysis (Sulaiman and Fernando, 2019), ethnographic research (McIlvaine-Newsad et al, 2020), constructivist research (Bacud, 2018), meeting through ergonomics framework (da Silva et al, 2015) and critical review of the literature (Satria et al, 2012). A SLR of community disaster resilience One-third of the studies were quantitative.…”

“…This also includes risk management (Firdhous and Karuratane, 2018), communication (Liu, 2020; Spialek and Houston, 2019), crisis communication (Gultom and Joyce, 2014), information deficits (Arneson et al , 2017), information system (Muto and Kohtake, 2017) and information asymmetries (Comes et al , 2019). Novel approaches were designed for fostering citizen and disaster mitigation; preparedness, response, recovery and resilience such as environmental disasters (Rifat and Liu, 2020); industry-related needs and skills for enhancing disaster resilience in stakeholder perspectives (Perera et al , 2017); disaster journalism (Houston et al , 2019); postdisaster projects (Tōhoku Dionisio and Pawson, 2016); barriers to disaster risk reduction and resilience (Imperiale and Vanclay, 2020) and protect, accommodate, retreat or avoid (PARA) for flood disaster risk reduction and resilience (Doberstein et al , 2019).…”

Mapping built environment professionals’ educational needs to international policy frameworks for disaster risk reduction – community stakeholder perspective

“…Eventually, 29 educational needs (i.e. knowledge gaps) were identified (listed earlier); this aspect of the study is reported in more details in Perera et al (2017) (part of Collaborative Action towards Disaster Resilience Education [CADRE] research outputs). This research progressed with a comprehensive desk review involving four researchers and academics in the built environment.…”

A Scientometric Review of Urban Disaster Resilience Research

“…Both researchers and practitioner groups agree that it is necessary to maximize community resilience benefits. The community skill requirements for enhancing disaster resilience were considered to relate to building environment professionals and five disaster resilience dimensions, which include society, economy, technology, environment, and institutions [ 107 ]. Several resilience enhancement strategies, including innovative models and methods, have been proposed.…”