New Concept of Societal Resilience Against Natural Hazards


Abstract eng:
It can be found in the past numerous literatures that there are many natural disasters where societal resilience is a key issue for describing the recovery process from damage state such as earthquake disaster, heavy rainfall, volcanic eruption, etc. Many relevant researches on "resilience" against natural hazards have been conducted with variety of definitions of “resilience”. “Resilience” has often been treated in a time axis as a resilience rate, degree of recovery per unit time from the damage state. In most of them, “resilience” is described as degree of capability of recovery from the damage of systems in a specified time. If a target system has no interaction with and no dependency from its external supplying systems during the recovery process, it would be valid to evaluate the resilience of the system alone. Considering the recovery mechanism within the system, the system must possess capability of self-recovery which can rarely be realized in most of systems such as societal systems, physical systems, engineering systems, even biological systems. Most of modern recovery mechanism depend heavily on physical supply, human support from the external systems or external environment, all of which must still have extra capability of supporting the system in damage. How high the resilience of a societal system is depends upon not only how high the self-recovery capability is, but also upon how much support can be obtained from its surroundings. In light of the above thoughts, the present paper proposes new concept of the societal resilience of societal system or a target region, which can take account of its self-recovering capability and dependence of support from external systems. The new concept will be applied to several typical natural disasters such as earthquakes, tornados, etc. Degradation of societal resilience in case of earthquakes is significant since most of earthquakes can affect wider regions and damage them simultaneously. In case of local disasters such as tornados, landslides, however, societal resilience of the target region could be kept because of support of external regions. These different damage characteristics of natural disasters can be taken into consideration when the societal resilience is estimated. In this paper, theoretical formulation of societal resilience as stated in the above will be shown and is applied to some recent actual disasters in Japan to examine its effectiveness of the concept of the societal resilience which is proposed herein.

Contributors:
Conference Title:
Conference Title:
16th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering
Conference Venue:
Santiago (CL)
Conference Dates:
2017-01-09 / 2017-01-13
Rights:
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 Record created 2017-01-18, last modified 2017-01-18


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