Enhancing quantitative approaches for assessing community resilience

Enhancing urban ecological resilience through integrated green technology progress: evidence from Chinese cities

The effective resolution of environmental pollution caused by carbon haze through coordinated progress in green technology and urban ecological resilience is a crucial approach towards promoting sustainable development in Chinese cities. In this study, panel data from 281 cities in China from 2007 to 2019 were analyzed using the entropy method and the coupling coordination degree model to determine the coupling coordination degree between green technology progress and urban ecological resilience. The coordinated influence model and threshold model were applied to investigate coupled coordination types and influencing factors. Results indicate that green technology progress levels have shown an upward trend with increasing volatility from east to west and decreasing volatility with urban scale expansion. Ecological resilience levels have also steadily increased, albeit at a reduced rate. The coupling coordination degree of green technology progress and urban ecological resilience has evolved overall from low to high levels; however, the coupling coordination type has regressed to some extent, with most regions exhibiting lagging green technological progress. Pressure resilience has a positive impact on the coupling coordination degree, while state resilience and response resilience have a negative impact. Green technology progress has a dual threshold effect on the coupling coordination degree. By exploring the coupling and coordination mechanism between green technology progress and urban ecological resilience, this study not only facilitates collaborative management of pollutants and greenhouse gases in cities but also provides a comprehensive reference for the construction of an institutional system for collaborative carbon and haze management.

Comprehensive evaluation of community human settlement resilience and spatial characteristics based on the supply-demand mismatch between health activities and environment: a case study of downtown Shanghai, China

INTRODUCTION

Under globalization, human settlement has become a major risk factor affecting life. The relationship between humans and the environment is crucial for improving community resilience and coping with globalization. This study focuses on the key contradictions of community development under globalization, exploring community resilience by analyzing the mismatch between residents' health activities and the environment.

METHODS

Using data from Shanghai downtown, including land use, Sports app, geospatial and urban statistics, this paper constructs a comprehensive community resilience index (CRI) model based on the DPSIR model. This model enables quantitative analysis of the spatial and temporal distribution of Community Human Settlement Resilience (CR). Additionally, the paper uses geodetector and Origin software to analyze the coupling relationship between drivers and human settlement resilience.

RESULTS

i) The scores of CR showed a "slide-shaped" fluctuation difference situation; ii) The spatial pattern of CR showed a "pole-core agglomeration and radiation" type and a "ring-like agglomeration and radiation" type. iii) Distance to bus stops, average annual temperature, CO2 emissions, building density and number of jogging trajectories are the dominant factors affecting the resilience level of community human settlement.

CONCLUSION

This paper contributes to the compilation of human settlement evaluation systems globally, offering insights into healthy community and city assessments worldwide. The findings can guide the creation of similar evaluation systems and provide valuable references for building healthy communities worldwide.

Resilience analysis of the local communities from a political economy perspective in Zanjan, Iran

Local community resilience has been a solution to reduce human and natural origin damages for several decades in global studies. Various studies have addressed different aspects of resilience. However, using the results of this research to create local community resilience has always faced limitations. In fact, the neglected role of political economy in these studies has caused the application of policies and strategies resulting from these studies to face challenge to create local communities' resilience. Therefore, the aim of this research is to evaluate how political economy affects the resilience of local communities. The research method is mixed and qualitative analysis was used to analyze the impact of political economy on resilience and quantitative analysis was used to measure the extent of resilience. The research has investigated the impact of political economy on the aspects of resilience and measured the extent of resilience from economic, social, institutional, environmental, and physical aspects by selecting the central part of Zanjan. The results of the research show that political economy has caused the lack of role-playing of local communities in resilience creation. In fact, policy-making influenced by political economy has led to the formation of a rent economy, a top-down and centralized management system, and this was the main obstacle in creating resilient local communities directly and indirectly through the reduction of the role of local institutions, spatial segregation, housing rent, reduction of social capital, increasing greenhouse gases and poverty. Therefore, we need a transition from the current institutional environment take steps towards evolution, dynamism, and institutional transformation to create local communities' resilience in order to create a resilient local society.

An Adlerian-Based Narrative Inquiry of Temporal Awareness, Resilience, and Patient-Centeredness Among Emergency Physicians-The Gyroscope Model

INTRODUCTION

Although extensive research examined time perceptions among patients in the emergency department (ED), studies on temporal awareness among emergency physicians is scant. Salutogenics is the theoretical anchor.

METHODS

The sample comprised ten emergency resident physicians from an Israeli public tertiary hospital. Narrative interviews were conducted. To determine the theme of the study, Adlerian narrative analysis was performed. To identify categories, semantic and content analyses were performed.

RESULTS

Adlerian narrative analysis highlighted temporal awareness as a strong theme across interviews. Semantic and content analyses identified categories within temporal awareness. Analyses revealed a movement among three subcategories: A clinical task in which physicians rapidly shift along seven distinct times, temporal awareness shaping their work experience, and temporal awareness as inhibiting or enabling relationships with patients. Data-analyses identified two groups of physicians, one group driven by the need to control the time to avoid errors, experiencing anxiety and poor wellbeing, and the other, shifting from clinical tasks to patient-centeredness while removing the time factor from their considerations and experiencing resilience through manageability and meaningfulness. We introduce the "gyroscope model" for physicians to illustrate these findings and propose recommendations for practice.

DISCUSSION

Understanding the complexity of the temporal continuum and the influence of shifting from the clinical task to relationships with patients may contribute to resilience of resident physician in the ED and to their self-efficacy, enriching their professional skills and capacity to cope and grow while facing the complexity of the ED.

A Comparative Study of the Resilience of Urban and Rural Areas under Climate Change

The impact of climate change in recent years has caused considerable risks to both urban and rural systems. How to mitigate the damage caused by extreme weather events has attracted much attention from countries in recent years. However, most of the previous studies on resilience focused on either urban areas or rural areas, and failed to clearly identify the difference between urban and rural resilience. In fact, the exploration of the difference between the resilience characteristics of cities and villages under climate change can help to improve the planning strategy and the allocation of resources. In this study, the indicators of resilience were firstly built through a literature review, and then a Principal Component Analysis was conducted to construct an evaluation system involving indicators such as “greenland resilience”, “community age structure resilience”, “traditional knowledge resilience”, “infrastructure resilience” and “residents economic independence resilience”. Then the analysis of Local Indicators of Spatial Association showed some resilience abilities are concentrated in either urban or rural. Binary logistic regression was performed, and the results showed urban areas have more prominent abilities in infrastructure resilience (the coefficient value is 1.339), community age structure resilience (0.694), and greenland resilience (0.3), while rural areas are more prominent in terms of the residents economic independence resilience (−0.398) and traditional knowledge resilience (−0.422). It can be seen that urban areas rely more on the resilience of the socio-economic structure, while rural areas are more dependent on their own knowledge and economic independence. This result can be used as a reference for developing strategies to improve urban and rural resilience.

Social vulnerability, social-ecological resilience and coastal governance

Non-technical summary

Our analysis shows that the framing of social vulnerability is shaped by a narrow definition of resilience, focusing on post-disaster return and recovery responses. This perspective does not account for the dynamism and non-stationarity of social-ecological systems (SES) which is becoming increasingly important in the face of accelerating environmental change. Incorporating social-ecological resilience into social vulnerability analysis can improve coastal governance by accounting for adaptation and transformation, as well as scale and cross-scale interactions.

Technical summary

Social vulnerability analysis has been unable to deliver outcomes that reflect the reality of vulnerability and its consequences in an era characterised by accelerating environmental change. In this work, we used critical discourse analysis and key informant interviews to understand different framings of social vulnerability in coastal governance and management, globally and in New Zealand. We found that the framing of system vulnerability could vary depending on the definition of resilience adopted, which has critical ramifications for coastal governance of linked systems of humans and nature. We found that the framing of social vulnerability in coastal governance is mainly influenced by engineering, community and disaster resilience, focusing on return and recovery governance responses to environmental change (e.g. hurricanes, wildfires). Instead, we suggest a novel perspective based on social-ecological resilience, which more accurately reflects the dynamics of linked systems of humans and nature (SES). This revised perspective, general vulnerability, accounts for the dynamics of Earth's systems across various spatial and temporal scales in the face of accelerating environmental change. Accounting for social-ecological resilience and its core aspects (i.e. panarchy, adaptation and transformation) is essential for informing coastal governance of SES (Do we adapt? or Do we transform the SES?).

Social media summary

Social-ecological resilience is essential for social vulnerability analysis in the face of accelerating environmental change.

Rethinking the design of resilience and adaptation indicators supporting coastal communities

As resilience and adaptation considerations become mainstreamed into public policy, there is an overarching desire to measure and quantify metrics and indicators that seek to evaluate the efficiency, effectiveness, and justness associated with outcomes of such processes. While much research has sought to develop specific indicators that may serve as proxies for these considerations, less research has focused on those normative aspects of indicator design that support a variety of goals associated with the accuracy, reproducibility, proxy value and multi-stakeholder translation of indicators, among various other goals and values. This perspective article sets forth a range of potential considerations that may be useful for those who seek to design and develop novel resilience and adaptation indicators ("RAIs"). These considerations are explored through a range of hypothetical examples that may be applicable to coastal communities that seek to address the practical challenges facing the design, execution, management and modification of RAIs.

Indicators for the assessment of social resilience in flood-affected communities - A text mining-based methodology

This work turns the social resilience concept into a practical and tangible set of dimensions and indicators for social resilience assessment. It further provides an analysis of the social resilience concept in the context of flood risk governance. Floods are a worldwide recurring phenomenon that causes severe social, economic and environmental losses. In the context of global change, it is very difficult to accurately predict extreme events that may increase disaster frequency; hence the implementation of social resilience is essential to lessen the losses. Indeed, the right balance between natural and social factors and indicators is yet to be found. Social resilience has been debated extensively for decades, both in scientific and political contexts. It has been a concern in disaster risk reduction and risk governance fields, both of which have strived to implement it. The enlarged conceptual discussion regarding this topic has resulted in some indicator-based assessments that hardly reflect the conceptual discussion developed so far. These indicator-based approaches still lack accurate inclusion of social dynamics and the capacity to learn from experience. In order to contribute to a comprehensive approach (concept and methods) for assessing social resilience to floods, the evolutionary resilience concept (Davoudi, Simin; Shaw, Keith; Haider, L. Jamila; Quilnlan, Allyson E; Petterson, Garry D.; Wilkinson, Cathy; Fünfgeld, Hartmut; McEvoy, Darryn; Porter, 2012) was considered as a reference in this work, as it can include dimensions that are difficult to evaluate (non-static time and learning-capacity in multi-dimensional systems). This work addresses the challenge of a conceptual overview of social resilience to include key factors and indicators. Our methodology uses text mining, experts' surveys and bibliography reviews to generate an indicators database. The contribution of this article to the scientific debate on social resilience assessment is twofold. First, the key-concepts, words and expressions in this field are identified, which provides the basis to build a comprehensive and coherent analytical framework. Secondly, an original indicators database is proposed in line with that framework. The results of a text mining-based methodology and an online survey, involving experts from different countries, show that four of the six dimensions of the indicators database refer to social aspects of risks (Individuals, Society, Governance, and Built Environment), while the remaining two refer to the Environment and Disaster. The results obtained so far suggest the need for a next step aiming to validate the dimensions and the indicators of this database through its application to real case studies.

A review of social-ecological system resilience: Mechanism, assessment and management

Social-ecological system (SES) resilience involves the large information and complex relationships of nature, society and economy. To promote multi-disciplinary integration to jointly balance current well-being and long-term sustainability, it is necessary to sort resilience studies on different perspectives into a comprehensive framework to establish interdisciplinary consensus. Based on literature analysis and review, this paper presents an analytical framework for resilience in regional management, and gives a review of SES resilience studies in terms of mechanism, assessment, and management. We outline the current state of resilience research, identify the remaining challenges, and make key recommendations for future research. Our recommendations include promoting interdisciplinary consensus, emphasising dynamic adaptation processes, synthesizing multiple systems and scales, building comprehensive databases, and using mixed methods approach. The paper offers a framework for researchers, practitioners and policy makers to have a more comprehensive understanding of resilience as a whole, and thus helps navigate more fully the challenge of adapting complex resource and environmental problems.

Work, resilience and sustainable futures

Purpose

This paper examines the relationship between work, resilience and sustainable futures for organisations and communities by considering the nature of work-related problems (WRPs) and the work-based research designed to investigate them. The authors explore the axis of work environment > work-related problem > resilience > sustainable futures as it might be impacted by work-based research.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper introduces two current real-world examples, one in Australia and one in Asia, of work-based research projects associated with higher education aimed at promoting resilience and sustainability, and discusses the research problems, questions, designs, methods, resilience markers and sustainability markers used by these projects.

Findings

Work-based research, when conducted rigorously using mixed methods, may contribute to increased resilience of organisations and communities and thereby seeks to promote more sustainable organisational and social futures.

Practical implications

Work-based research conducted in higher education seeks to investigate, address and solve WRP, even when such problems occur in unstable, changing, complex and messy environments.

Social implications

Resilience and sustainable futures are ambiguous and disputed terms, but if work-based research can be brought to bear on them, organisations and communities might better adapt and recover from challenging situations, thus reducing their susceptibility to shock and adversity.

Originality/value

While resilience and sustainability are commonly referred to in the research literature, their association to work, and specifically problems associated with work, have yet to be examined. This paper goes some of the way to addressing this need.

A Framework to Evaluate Community Resilience to Urban Floods: A Case Study in Three Communities

Community resilience is a key index for describing the response of human habitat systems to hazards. Evaluating and enhancing the community resilience requires indicators, identification, and quantitative measurements, especially for urban flooding management. In this study, an advanced index framework for measuring community resilience to urban flooding is proposed, integrating the fuzzy Delphi method (FDM) and the analytic network process (ANP). Seven indicators (public facilities, spatial structure of land use, flood management organizations, rescue capability, accuracy of weather forecasts, vulnerable population, and individual capability) of community resilience are identified using the fuzzy Delphi method. The indicators are classified into four dimensions, and the weights are determined by the analytic network process. This approach is applied to three different types of communities, namely, a newly built neighborhood, an ancient college, and a flood-prone village in the city of Nanning, China, using data collected from questionnaires, interviews, and field investigations. The neighborhood (with a total averaged score of 2.13) has the largest community resilience to urban flooding, followed by the college (1.8), and finally the village (0.91). Flooding management organizations play a leading role in the urban flooding resilience of the neighborhood and college, while the vulnerable population has a great impact on the community resilience of the village. Results of the strategy analysis suggest that science and technology improvement (0.543) is more important than social–economic status improvement (0.325) and built-environment improvement (0.132) for mitigating urban hazards in Nanning. The proposed framework in this study contributes to the interdisciplinary understanding of community resilience for urban flooding and is expected to be applied to sustain urban planning and flood evacuations.

Selecting Indicators for Assessing Community Sustainable Resilience

Communities are complex systems subject to a variety of hazards that can result in significant disruption to critical functions. Community resilience assessment is rapidly gaining popularity as a means to help communities better prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruption. Sustainable resilience, a recently developed concept, requires communities to assess system-wide capability to maintain desired performance levels while simultaneously evaluating impacts to resilience due to changes in hazards and vulnerability over extended periods of time. To enable assessment of community sustainable resilience, we review current literature, consolidate available indicators and metrics, and develop a classification scheme and organizational structure to aid in identification, selection, and application of indicators within a dynamic assessment framework. A nonduplicative set of community sustainable resilience indicators and metrics is provided that can be tailored to a community's needs, thereby enhancing the ability to operationalize the assessment process.

The Role of Social-Ecological Resilience in Coastal Zone Management: A Comparative Law Approach to Three Coastal Nations

Around the globe, coastal communities are increasingly coping with changing environmental conditions as a result of climate change and ocean acidification, including sea level rise, more severe storms, and decreasing natural resources and ecosystem services. A natural adaptation response is to engineer the coast in a perilous and often doomed attempt to preserve the status quo. In the long term, however, most coastal nations will need to transition to approaches based on ecological resilience—that is, to coastal zone management that allows coastal communities to absorb and adapt to change rather than to resist it—and the law will be critical in facilitating this transition. Researchers are increasingly illuminating law’s ability to promote social-ecological resilience to a changing world, but this scholarship—mostly focused on U.S. law—has not yet embraced its potential role in helping to create new international norms for social-ecological resilience. Through its comparison of coastal zone management in Australia, Finland, and the Netherlands, this article demonstrates that a comparative law approach offers a fruitful expansion of law-and-resilience research, both by extending this research to other countries and, more importantly, by allowing scholars to identify critical variables, or variable constellations associated with countries’ decisions to adopt laws designed to promote social-ecological resilience and to identify mechanisms that allow for a smoother transition to this approach. For example, our comparison demonstrates, among other things, that countries can adopt coastal zone management techniques that integrate social-ecological resilience without fully abandoning more traditional engineering approaches to adapt to environmental change and its impacts.

Impact of Hurricane Katrina on the coastal systems of southern Louisiana

Natural disasters, such as hurricanes and forest fires, could trigger collapse and reorganization of social-ecological systems. In the face of external perturbations, a resilient system would have capacity to absorb impacts, adapt to change, learn, and if needed, reorganize within the same regime. Within this context, we asked how human and natural systems in Louisiana responded to Hurricane Katrina, and how the natural disaster altered the status of these systems. This paper discusses community resilience to natural hazards and addresses the limitations for assessing disaster resilience. Furthermore, we assessed social and environmental change in New Orleans and southern Louisiana through both a spatial and temporal lens (i.e., pre- and post-Katrina). By analyzing changes in system condition using social, economic and environmental factors, we identified some of the characteristics of the system's reorganization trajectories. Our results suggest that although the ongoing population recovery may be a sign of revitalization, the city and metropolitan area continue to face socioeconomic inequalities and environmental vulnerability to natural disasters. Further, the spatial distribution of social-ecological condition over time reveals certain levels of change and reorganization after Katrina, but the reorganization did not translate into greater equity. This effort presents an enhanced approach to assessing social-ecological change pre and post disturbance and provides a way forward for characterizing pertinent aspects of disaster resilience.

Investigation of non-community stakeholders regarding community engagement and environmental malodour

Research into industry-community relationships have focused almost exclusively on the ways in which communities responds to actions from industries. This has led to a paucity of understanding with regards to how community engagement and malodour amelioration practices have been adopted by industry personnel, as well as the attitudes and beliefs of non-community stakeholders in general. In this study, a survey to water industry personnel was distributed to three Australian water utilities in South-Eastern Australia and a semi-structured interview process was carried out with plant managers at six wastewater treatment plants. It was observed that best practice has not yet been established with regards to community engagement and odour amelioration, and that water industry personnel in general had a poor understanding of these concepts. Recommendations for how this situation could be improved, and how non-community stakeholders investigated, are discussed.

A Social Ecological Modeled Explanation of the Resilience Processes of a Sample of Black Sesotho-Speaking Adolescents

The primary aim of the study that this article reports was to model and test a social ecological explanation of resilience as explained by Ungar. Its secondary aim was to investigate resilience-promoting supports in school-going Black South African adolescents. School attendance was specified as a culturally appropriate, functional outcome of resilience. The Pathways to Resilience Research Project gathered data through the Pathways to Resilience Youth Measure. Seven hundred and thirty school-going adolescents (age 12-19 years, 388 female, 341 male, one unspecified) from Thabo Mofutsanyana District, in South Africa's Free State province, participated in this cross-sectional study. Latent variable modeling was used to test measurement models of adolescents' self-reported perceptions of social ecological contributions (resources and risks) to their resilience. A complex model based on a social ecological explanation of resilience fitted the data best. The structural model showed that the resilience process predicted 32% of the variance in school attendance. Social skills, cultural, and spiritual resources were most supportive of adolescents' resilience. The results confirmed that the complex model explained resilience in Black South African adolescents as a person-context relational process and prompt principals, parents, teachers, and governmental departments to encourage school attendance.