Community resilience factors to disaster in Saudi Arabia: the case of Makkah Province

Abstract

Purpose: Saudi Arabia has recently experienced a number of natural disasters, including floods, epidemics and dust storms. Preparing a community to overcome disasters enhances its capacity to recover from potentially induced negative impacts. Therefore, building community resilience to disaster is a fundamental necessity for disaster management. The objective of this study is to identify the factors that can be used to improve readiness in Saudi Arabia in relation to disasters.Methodology: This study is based on a questionnaire survey across 13 regions in Saudi Arabia and focuses on Jeddah city in Makkah Province as a case study given its experience with flooding, in particular ones that occurred in 2009 and 2010. The questionnaire was conducted in March for two months in 2012 and resulted in 267 responses.Findings: The results show that a number of factors such as willingness and faith are essential to building community resilience to disaster. However, some factors which would assist in building community resilience, such as personal experience of disasters, are overlooked.Research limitations: This research was conducted amongst people who have access to email, consequently not allowing access to those who do not.

Social Capital and Disaster Resilience Nexus: A Study of Flash Flood Recovery in Jeddah City

“…However, the intensity of rainfall and lack of appropriate drainage systems have triggered the significant impacts during the events in 2009 and 2011. Moreover, several critical factors are so far noticed through literature that the impacts have highly been felt in Jeddah during 2009 and 2011 because of: (i) a lack of preparation at an advanced time to avoid such risks [15]; (ii) appropriate knowledge of vulnerability and reflex time to avert such risks [12]; (iii) public perceptions and attitudes to disaster risk mitigation [19]; (iv) an inadequate response from the relevant authorities and lack of community involvement [20]; and (v) a lack of emergency management and contingency planning [21,22]. As a result, improving citizen's resilience at an earlier stage may lead a better preparedness and quick post-recovery from such events, which are commonly observed nowadays in the face of climate change.…”

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

“…All papers are present in googlescholar.com and in one or some among the following 132 sources which can be classified into three groups. The first group includes 3–50 papers, including: researchgate.net (Murphy, 2020), search.proquest.com (Doberstein et al , 2019), ebscohost.com (Deshmukh and Hastak, 2012), europepmc.org (da Silva et al , 2015), pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov and safetylit.org (Cui et al , 2018), academia.edu (Comes et al , 2019), econpapers.repec.org (Chandra et al , 2013), semanticscholar.org (Cha et al , 2016), core.ac.uk and Elsevier (Carlile and Christensen, 2004), Taylor & Francis (Canyon et al , 2015), mdpi.com, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov and Springer (Berke et al , 2011), cabdirect.org (Barameda and Barameda, 2011), ingentaconnect.com (Bacud, 2018), cambridge.org (Alshehri et al , 2013) and Wiley Online Library (Alaedini et al , 2011). The second one comprises 21 sources, namely: search.informit.org, knowledge.aidr.org.au, Citeseer, American Public Health Association, ascelibrary.org, cphd.ph.ucla.edu, cyberleninka.org, Eric, espace.library.uq.edu.au, etc.…”

“…nih.gov and safetylit.org (Cui et al, 2018); academia.edu (Comes et al, 2019), econpapers.repec.org (Chandra et al, 2013), semanticscholar. org (Cha et al, 2016), core.ac.uk and Elsevier (Carlile & Christensen, 2004), Taylor & Francis (Canyon et al, 2015); mdpi.com, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov and Springer (Berke et al, 2011), cabdirect.org (Barameda & Barameda , 2011) , ingentaconnect.com (Bacud, 2018), cambridge.org (Alshehri et al, 2013), and Wiley Online Library (Alaedini et al, 2011). The second one comprises 21 sources, namely: search.informit.org, knowledge.aidr.org.au, Citeseer, American Public Health Association, ascelibrary.…”

“…3.1.2.3 Collaboration. This research area focuses on the role of community welfare to enhance social cohesion and disaster resilience (Patel and Gleason, 2018); social capital; factors to disaster (Alshehri et al, 2013), particularly natural disaster awareness, preparedness and recovery (Min et al, 2020); incorporation of business sectors to empower community for resilience, entrepreneurship and partnership (Pratikto, 2015); collaboration (Wilkin et al, 2019); disaster policy and governance (Villagra and Quintana, 2017) and depression collaborative care and planning to disaster recovery (Keegan et al, 2018).…”

“…Numerous prior research studies (e.g. Deshmukh and Hastak, 2012; Canyon et al , 2015; Alshehri et al , 2013; Alaedini et al , 2011; Murphy, 2020; Doberstein et al , 2019; Berke et al , 2011) have been conducted in its major area as well as in relation to related areas. This wide range of scientific information therefore calls into a review of this subject in order to broadly understand how the concept of disaster resilience is applied at the community level, how it is related to other areas and how the future research agendas for community disaster resilience should be structured.…”