Resilience assessment at the state level

This paper presents an analytical approach to evaluate the level of post-disaster adaptation (Bounce-Back) of communities based on their resilience. While resilience is the intrinsic characteristics of a system, adaptation considers external agents in its assessment. The presented work is to some extent a parallelism to the risk assessment concept. Generally, risk is a function of vulnerability, exposure, and hazard, whereas adaptation considers resilience instead of vulnerability in its estimation. This leads to the evaluation of a system’s ability to cope with after-shock consequences and to return back to a functional state rather than the likelihood of a system to experience damage. The paper also proposes a quantitative framework for assessing resilience at the state level based on the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), a work done by the UN. HFA has succeeded in assessing the resilience of every state in a quantifiable fashion. HFA estimates the resilience of countries based on a number of indicators that are weighted equally. Those indicators, however, do not contribute equally to the resilience output; therefore, it is necessary to weigh those indicators according to their contribution towards resilience. To do so, we are introducing the Dependence Tree Analysis (DTA), which identifies the strength of relationships between the indicators and the resilience, giving weights to the indicators accordingly. A full case study composed of 37 countries is presented in this paper, where the resilience and the Bounce Back indices of each country are evaluated.