Diagnosing Disaster Resilience of Communities as Complex Socioecological Systems

Global environmental change, growing anthropogenic influence, and increasing globalization of society have made it clear that disaster vulnerability and resilience of communities cannot be understood without knowledge of the broader social-ecological system in which they are embedded. Inspired by iterative multiscale analysis employed by the Resilience Alliance, the related Social-Ecological Systems Framework initially designed by Elinor Ostrom, and the Sustainable Livelihood Framework, we developed a multi-tier framework for conceptualizing communities as multiscale social-ecological systems. We use the framework to diagnose and analyze community resilience to disasters, as a form of disturbance to social-ecological systems, with feedbacks from the local to the global scale. We highlight the cross-scale influences and feedback on communities that exist from lower (e.g., household) to higher (e.g., regional, national) scales. The framework is then applied to real-world community resilience assessment in Nepal and China, to illustrate how key components of socio-ecological systems, including natural hazards, natural and man-made environment, and community capacities can be delineated and analyzed.