Panel:
Measuring Community Resilience through Adaptive Decision-Making Infrastructure Against Coastal Disaster Risk
(Science and Technology)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
The steadily increasing number of hazards over the past decade led to a staggering number of escalating events, causing widespread damage to the environment and heavy losses in lives and property. The risk of disaster is particularly acute in Indonesia, which experienced four earthquakes above 7.0 Magnitude Richter scale in 2009, and reports severe earthquakes every year. Warning that risk is increasing, the National Academies’ report on resilience (2012) emphasized that building resilience to hazards is a long-term effort that would engage the ‘whole nation’ including scientists, governmental agencies at all levels of jurisdiction, private and nonprofit organizations, and communities. Unlike linear models of a disaster response system, responders need to adapt not only to dynamically changing situations, but also to decisions by other responders to mobilize collective action in response to extreme events. To meet this urgent need, dynamic processes are needed to transform societal understanding of risk and enable self-organized, collective action to manage resilience of hazards at all levels. In this context, decision making in disaster environments can be guided by a sociotechnical approach that integrates the science of the natural physical environment with analysis of interdependent conditions among technical, organizational, cultural, and socioeconomic sub-systems in communities at risk.
This panel applies three different approaches to document adaptation in complex disaster response systems. First, through a network analysis, we show dynamic changes in the disaster response system that emerged following the 2004 earthquake and tsunami disaster in Indonesia. This response network captures dynamic collective action by multiple diverse organizations. The analysis highlights the significance of an adaptive information flow among responders to enable collective action. These findings demonstrate the need for a novel sociotechnical information technology (IT) network that supports timely, informed decision making and action by organizational networks in communities exposed to tsunami risk. The second paper presents a novel information infrastructure designed to support real-time communication among participating organizations by enabling data dissemination and exchange among local neighborhood residents. As a result, the residents can adapt their interactions to rapidly changing events during a crisis, enabling them to make informed decisions under limited time and resources. By testing this infrastructure in coastal residential areas, we present results to measure the sustainability and interoperability of technical information functions, as well as community resilience through organizational collective action. The third paper measures change in community behavior in response to a simulated tsunami preparedness exercise. Data are collected from a survey of participating residents and response managers, and assesses actual time spent to achieve successful evacuation to allocated shelters. This panel presents an initial model of multi-disciplinary research to build a community resilience for disaster risk.
