Capturing Disaster Context: The Measurement of Business Resilience to Hurricane Hazards along the Mississippi-Alabama Gulf Coast, USA

Keywords: Disaster Resilience, Hurricanes, Natural Hazards, Indicators
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

How communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from the impacts of natural hazards and disasters is conceptualized in terms of their resilience. Communities that can increase their resilience are in a better position to absorb damage impacts, for instance, and recover from them when they occur. As a result, there is strong interest in the ability to measure resilience. Metrics aimed at measuring resilience suffer from a number of key limitations, however. For instance, hazard and community context are often ignored and most indicator-based methods represent a broad-brushed approach that might neglect the true underlying drivers (or lack thereof) of resilience within communities.

The purpose of this presentation is to present an integrated measurement framework to better understand drivers of resilience to hurricanes using “top-down” quantitative and “bottom-up”, stakeholder-led approaches. The methodology includes the identification of context-specific characteristics that drive the resilience of businesses along Mississippi and Alabama's working waterfront. With improved resilience metrics, our vision is to provide governments, risk managers, community and business leaders, and researchers new opportunities to create local initiatives and equitable public policy programs to increase the capacity of communities to mitigate, respond, and recover effectively and efficiently from damaging climate-related events.