Measuring Community Resilience to Natural Disasters: Implications for Disaster Management and Reduction in Korea

Building a resilient community to disasters has become one of the main goals of disaster management to absorb and mitigate negative disaster impacts. More disaster resilient community often experiences less disaster impact and reduces long recovery periods after a disaster. In this paper, we present the methodology that we constructed a set of indicators to measure community’s disaster resilience (CDRI) in terms of human, social, economic, environmental, and physical factors. Moreover, this study develops a methodology to aggregate constructed disaster resilience index of local communities in Korea. 229 local municipalities are examined to measure the degree of community’s resilience to natural disasters. Geographic Information System (GIS) is used to analyze and visualize spatial distribution of disaster resilience. Moreover, this study examined a relationship between the aggregated community disaster resilience index (CDRI) and disaster losses using a geographically weighted regression (GWR) method. Identifying the extent of community resilience to natural disasters would provide disaster management officials or decision-makers with strategic directions how to improve local communities’ resilience to natural disasters and to reduce the negative disaster impacts.