Dynamic Change in Regional Resilience Indicators After a Disaster: A Comprehensive Assessment of Sichuan After the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake

Abstract

Regional resilience after a disaster is a process that encompasses resistance, recovery and redevelopment. However, there have been few longitudinal dynamic analyses using resilience indicators after a disaster. This research proposes an ordination and clustering-based method for regional resilience evaluations focused on short-term disaster-resistance and long-term disaster-recovery capacities in the affected counties. This method was proven to be effective on data from 55 counties before and after the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake (2005-2016) in Sichuan Province, China. It was found that: (i) economic related indicators were often negatively affected by the disaster over the short term, especially in the severely affected counties; (ii) the degree of economic development and the devastation extent significantly affected the recovery trends of two macro-economic indicators: the primary industry and the private economy; and (iii) the recovery trends in most counties for some economic and social indicators were initially stagnant or had a slow recovery for 1-3 years, after which there was a rapid recovery process. The intuitive and informative results from this evaluation provide a better understanding of the dynamic regional resilience process after a disaster.