Developing a holistic understanding of social, cultural, and economic impacts of disasters can help in building disaster risk knowledge for policy making and planning. Many methods can help in developing an understanding of the impacts of a disaster, including interviews and surveys with people who have experienced disaster, which may be invasive at times and create stress for the participants to relive their experiences. In the past decade, social media, blog posts, video blogs (i.e. “vlogs”), and crowdsourcing mechanisms such as Humanitarian OpenStreetMap and Ushahidi, have become prominent platforms for people to share their experiences and impacts of an event from the ground. These platforms allow for the discovery of a range of impact information, from physical impacts, to social, cultural, and psychological impacts. It can also reveal interesting behavioural information such as their decision to heed a warning or not, as people tend to share their experiences and their reactions online. This information can help researchers and authorities understand both the impacts as well as behavioural responses to hazards, which can then shape how early warning systems are designed and delivered. It can also help to identify gaps in desired behavioural responses. This poster presents a selection of cases identified from the literature and grey literature, such as the Haiti earthquake, the Christchurch earthquake, Hurricane Sandy, and Hurricane Harvey, where online platforms were widely used during and after a disaster to document impacts, experiences, and behavioural responses. A summary of key learnings and areas for future research is provided.
The supply of water following disasters has always been of significant concern to communities. Failure of water systems not only causes difficulties for residents and critical users but may also affect other hard and soft infrastructure and services. The dependency of communities and other infrastructure on the availability of safe and reliable water places even more emphasis on the resilience of water supply systems. This thesis makes two major contributions. First, it proposes a framework for measuring the multifaceted resilience of water systems, focusing on the significance of the characteristics of different communities for the resilience of water supply systems. The proposed framework, known as the CARE framework, consists of eight principal activities: (1) developing a conceptual framework; (2) selecting appropriate indicators; (3) refining the indicators based on data availability; (4) correlation analysis; (5) scaling the indicators; (6) weighting the variables; (7) measuring the indicators; and (8) aggregating the indicators. This framework allows researchers to develop appropriate indicators in each dimension of resilience (i.e., technical, organisational, social, and economic), and enables decision makers to more easily participate in the process and follow the procedure for composite indicator development. Second, it identifies the significant technical, social, organisational and economic factors, and the relevant indicators for measuring these factors. The factors and indicators were gathered through a comprehensive literature review. They were then verified and ranked through a series of interviews with water supply and resilience specialists, social scientists and economists. Vulnerability, redundancy and criticality were identified as the most significant technical factors affecting water supply system robustness, and consequently resilience. These factors were tested for a scenario earthquake of Mw 7.6 in Pukerua Bay in New Zealand. Four social factors and seven indicators were identified in this study. The social factors are individual demands and capacities, individual involvement in the community, violence level in the community, and trust. The indicators are the Giving Index, homicide rate, assault rate, inverse trust in army, inverse trust in police, mean years of school, and perception of crime. These indicators were tested in Chile and New Zealand, which experienced earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 respectively. The social factors were also tested in Vanuatu following TC Pam, which hit the country in March 2015. Interestingly, the organisational dimension contributed the largest number of factors and indicators for measuring water supply resilience to disasters. The study identified six organisational factors and 17 indicators that can affect water supply resilience to disasters. The factors are: disaster precaution; predisaster planning; data availability, data accessibility and information sharing; staff, parts, and equipment availability; pre-disaster maintenance; and governance. The identified factors and their indicators were tested for the case of Christchurch, New Zealand, to understand how organisational capacity affected water supply resilience following the earthquake in February 2011. Governance and availability of critical staff following the earthquake were the strongest organisational factors for the Christchurch City Council, while the lack of early warning systems and emergency response planning were identified as areas that needed to be addressed. Economic capacity and quick access to finance were found to be the main economic factors influencing the resilience of water systems. Quick access to finance is most important in the early stages following a disaster for response and restoration, but its importance declines over time. In contrast, the economic capacity of the disaster struck area and the water sector play a vital role in the subsequent reconstruction phase rather than in the response and restoration period. Indicators for these factors were tested for the case of the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. Finally, a new approach to measuring water supply resilience is proposed. This approach measures the resilience of the water supply system based on actual water demand following an earthquake. The demand-based method calculates resilience based on the difference between water demand and system capacity by measuring actual water shortage (i.e., the difference between water availability and demand) following an earthquake.
Research indicates that aside from the disaster itself, the next major source of adverse outcomes during such events, is from errors by either the response leader or organisation. Yet, despite their frequency, challenge, complexity, and the risks involved; situations of extreme context remain one of the least researched areas in the leadership field. This is perhaps surprising. In the 2010 and 2011 (Christchurch) earthquakes alone, 185 people died and rebuild costs are estimated to have been $40b. Add to this the damage and losses annually around the globe arising from natural disasters, major business catastrophes, and military conflict; there is certainly a lot at stake (lives, way of life, and our well-being). While over the years, much has been written on leadership, there is a much smaller subset of articles on leadership in extreme contexts, with the majority of these focusing on the event rather than leadership itself. Where leadership has been the focus, the spotlight has shone on the actions and capabilities of one person - the leader. Leadership, however, is not simply one person, it is a chain or network of people, delivering outcomes with the support of others, guided by a governance structure, contextualised by the environment, and operating on a continuum across time (before, during, and after an event). This particular research is intended to examine the following: • What are the leadership capabilities and systems necessary to deliver more successful outcomes during situations of extreme context; • How does leadership in these circumstances differ from leadership during business as usual conditions; • Lastly, through effective leadership, can we leverage these unfortunate events to thrive, rather than merely survive?
Natural hazards continue to have adverse effects on communities and households worldwide, accelerating research on proactively identifying and enhancing characteristics associated with resilience. Although resilience is often characterized as a return to normal, recent studies of postdisaster recovery have highlighted the ways in which new opportunities can emerge following disruption, challenging the status quo. Conversely, recovery and reconstruction may serve to reinforce preexisting social, institutional, and development pathways. Our understanding of these dynamics is limited however by the small number of practice examples, particularly for rural communities in developed nations. This study uses a social–ecological inventory to document the drivers, pathways, and mechanisms of resilience following a large-magnitude earthquake in Kaikōura, a coastal community in Aotearoa New Zealand. As part of the planning and implementation phase of a multiyear project, we used the tool as the basis for indepth and contextually sensitive analysis of rural resilience. Moreover, the deliberate application of social–ecological inventory was the first step in the research team reengaging with the community following the event. The inventory process provided an opportunity for research partners to share their stories and experiences and develop a shared understanding of changes that had taken place in the community. Results provide empirical insight into reactions to disruptive change associated with disasters. The inventory also informed the design of targeted research collaborations, established a platform for longer-term community engagement, and provides a baseline for assessing longitudinal changes in key resilience-related characteristics and community capacities. Findings suggest the utility of social–ecological inventory goes beyond natural resource management, and that it may be appropriate in a range of contexts where institutional, social, and economic restructuring have developed out of necessity in response to felt or anticipated external stressors.
