Measuring Household Resilience to Floods: a Case Study in the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The flood is a well-known phenomenon in the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta (MRD). Although people have experienced the impact of floods for years, some adapt well, but others are vulnerable to floods. Resilience to floods is a useful concept to study the capacity of rural households to cope with, adapt to, and benefit from floods. Knowledge of the resilience of households to floods can help disaster risk managers to design policies for living with floods. Most researchers attempt to define the concept of resilience; very little research operationalizes it in the real context of "living with floods". We employ a subjective well-being approach to measure households' resilience to floods. Items that related to households' capacity to cope with, adapt to, and benefit from floods were developed using both a five-point Likert scale and dichotomous responses. A factor analysis using a standardized form of data was employed to identify underlying factors that explain different properties of households' resilience to floods. Three properties of households' resilience to floods were found: (1) households' confidence in securing food, income, health, and evacuation during floods and recovery after floods; (2) households' confidence in securing their homes not being affected by a large flood event such as the 2000 flood; (3) households' interests in learning and practicing new flood-based farming practices that are fully adapted to floods for improving household income during the flood season. The findings assist in designing adaptive measures to cope with future flooding in the MRD.

‘Subjective resilience’: using perceptions to quantify household resilience to climate extremes and disasters

“…Factor loadings are then applied to each of the five dimensions and used to calculate an overall score. This differs markedly from the more subjective approach taken by Nguyen and James (2013) that calculates household resilience to flood risk by assessing individual responses to ten questions marked on a five-point likert scale. Questions include: 'I am confident that my household has enough rice to eat during the flood season'; 'I am confident that my household can find a safe place to evacuate to if there is an extreme flood event in the future'; and 'I am confident that my house will not collapse or be swept away by the highest floods in the last 20 years' (Nguyen and James 2013:17).…”

“…Perhaps the most important factor is that it recognises that people have a good understanding of their capabilities and capacities to deal with disturbance and change (Nguyen and James 2013). They are also often aware of many of the factors that enable or constrain the resilience of their livelihoods (Marshall 2010).…”

“…Although references to resilience can be found across the arts, literature, law, psychology and engineering (Alexander 2013), the use of the term within the ecological sciences has been particularly influential, where 'resilience' is used to understand and explain the different trajectories of ecological systems as they seek equilibrium (Walker et al 1969;Odum 1985;Alexander 2013). Ecological conceptualisations of resilience largely focus on the capacity of a system to absorb changes but still maintain its core function (Nguyen and James 2013). Holling (1973:14) describes resilience as 'a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables.…”

“…A number of climate change adaptation studies have explored subjective elements at the individual and household-levels (Adger et al 2009;Brown and Westaway 2011;O'Brien 2009;Nguyen and James 2013). For example, Grothmann and Patt's (2005) conceptual framework seeks to understand 'perceived adaptive capacity' based on sub-components of perceived adaptation efficacy, perceived self-efficacy and perceived adaptation costs.…”

“…A useful way to illustrate the differences between subjective and objective methods of resilience assessment is to compare the approaches taken by Nguyen and James (2013) and FAO (2014). Under FAO's objective Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis (RIMA) tool, household resilience is broken down into five key dimension of productive assets, access to basic services, social safety nets, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, each with a large number of associated variables.…”