Dynamic assessment of urban resilience to natural hazards

Abstract The current urbanization and increase of intensity and likelihood of natural hazard events underline that particular attention must be addressed to strengthening urban resilience to natural hazards. Indicator-based urban resilience assessment tools approach have certain disadvantages, which do not allow considering systemic interaction in terms of feedbacks effects among the urban system components selected for urban resilience assessment. This peculiarity can be provided by system dynamics modelling. This study aims to introduce a dynamic urban resilience to natural hazards assessment tool able to compare different urban resilience scenarios, considering the multi-dimensionality of urban systems and short and long term time reference. As a result of this study, the paper presents the structure of a novel tool and comparison of urban resilience scenarios performed for a local case study with the given tool. Specifically, the implementation of probabilistic simulation in system dynamics model with output inform of index score allows capturing all the possible outcomes of different urban resilience scenarios and compare them. The results of model validation and simulation show that the tool is suitable for different urban resilience scenario evaluation, thus is suitable for the development of urban resilience strategies within urban policy planning.